Any system used for a safety-critical task, like a pollution-monitoring unmanned aerial vehicle, a robot inspecting a nuclear plant or a human assistive nursebot in a hospital or at home, must have enough evidence to demonstrate its safety before we can use it. Gathering such evidence involves verification, the process of demonstrating that the implementation of a system meets the requirements laid down in its specification. Much work has been done to develop tools and methods for verification of microelectronic designs and software. When we try to verify an autonomous, intelligent system (AIS), with existing methods, two problems arise: First, traditional verification techniques rely on a specification that fully defines the functional behaviour of the system to be verified. But, we want to use an intelligent system - one that can adapt to circumstances, deciding what to do without being told exactly how - precisely so we can avoid having to specify a response for every possible scenario. There are usually far too many possible scenarios for this to be practical. Instead, we need flexible specifications expressed in terms of acceptable and required behaviour with associated precise limits for critical properties complemented by more vague indications of desired actions. Second, the control software to achieve dynamic adaptation is very complex, using iterative optimization algorithms to combine discrete and continuous decision-making. Although there has been much research on how to design these algorithms, their verification is still an open research question. The RIVERAS project aims to tackle both of these problems. First, we will develop a way of verifying a system with a flexible specification. This will require a formal way to write a specification, using a modelling language that can capture these flexible requirements. Then, fuzzy concepts will be used to analyse how well we meet the specification. Fuzzy concepts are graded and properties or statements involving them are true (or false) to some degree. This means that specifications may only be partialy satisfied which introduces new challenges when verifying them. Second, we will also develop ways of verifying control software that uses optimization, which is a general approach for making decisions. Given a cost model and a set of constraints that define permitted limits, an optimizer finds the best set of decisions to maximize or minimize the cost while staying within permitted limits. Most planning problems for intelligent systems can be expressed in the form of optimization and research on control theory proves properties that help us understand how well it should work. We will use the properties established with control theory as a specification to demonstrate that the optimizer software does what it should. Moreover, we will integrate these properties into the software. This allows us to detect, contain and correct failures should they occur. Finally, we will integrate all these developments into an innovative "Design for Verification" (DFV) method. Engineers who use our DFV methods when specifying and designing an intelligent system, and when producing its optimization-based control software, will immediately be able to use our verification methods to determine if they have done it right. This will be far easier and a lot more efficient than designing it first, without thinking about verification, and then figuring out how to verify afterwards. To help refine our methods and to evaluate them afterwards, RIVERAS will try them out on real robots. For example, we will design an intelligent exploration system for a Mars rover, implement it on a robot on Earth, and produce all the verification evidence to demonstrate it works as intended.

'A [Socially Isolated] Room of One's Own: Women Writing Lockdown' will offer a multi-disciplinary, qualitative overview of women's autobiographical writing produced during the first 3 months of the UK lockdown (March - June 2020), imposed in response to the COVID pandemic. A multi-disciplinary project, it seeks to investigate women's articulation of their experience of the first phase of lockdown through four key varieties of auto/biographical writings: 1) Published work by professional women writers, including fiction, poetry and writing for children; op-ed newspaper columns and periodical literature; 2) newly deposited archival testimonies in collections such as Mass Observation and the British Library Sound Archive; 3) online narratives by bloggers and influencers; 4) creative writing produced during the lifetime of the project via a dedicated workshop series. 100 years ago, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One's Own; written when partial parliamentary suffrage and the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act were giving women a new form of public voice, Woolf emphasized two factors intrinsic to countering women's social silence through writing: 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write' (Woolf). A century on, COVID has re-ignited questions about the differential relationships women and men continue to have with domestic and open spaces as working arenas, as the enforced confinement of all who were able to work from home (and many who were made unemployed) meant this new 'Home Front' was re-purposed as a workspace, home school, and a social hub. Strikingly, a clear statistical majority of the early published works of fiction and poetry responding to the pandemic were female-authored. Other women took advantage of the twenty-first-century expansion of publishing platforms to communicate their experiences via blogs and personal websites. At the same time a number of national initiatives sprang up inviting new writing to capture the 'ordinary' experience of a pandemic. These included established fora like Mass Observation, already a key source for social historians, and newer initiatives such as the 400-word pieces for 'Covid Chronicles' (BBC Radio 4/British Library). Our project uses this rich dataset to reveal the gendered dimensions of life during the pandemic from literary critical, oral and feminist history, and social media analytical perspectives. Our project partner, Liv Torc, will run live creative writing workshops (in-person COVID permitting, otherwise via Zoom) as part of our methodology and make an 'in kind' contribution by permitting exclusive access to female-authored haiku written for her previous 'Project Haiflu', 'Mothers Who Make' and 'Cape Farwell's Siren Poets' initiatives and producing workshop-based content for the project exhibition. Our major collective output will be an online, free-to-access exhibition: 'Rooms of Our Own: The Lockdown House'. Formulated as a 'House and Garden' virtual space, each room will represent a key aspect of women's experience of lockdown (e.g. the home schoolroom/office, the 'new domesticity' space of the kitchen; the lockdown garden). The exhibition will be hosted via our purpose-designed project website. To ensure outputs reach the needs of our audience, the exhibition will invite the public to enter its spaces virtually, and once 'there', to reflect on the role women's words have played in articulating this unique moment of change. Additional public-facing impacts of the research will be realized through the creative writing workshops, producing individual and group outputs. With prior permission, a selection of this material will be shown at the exhibition. A film from the workshop series may also be shared via social media to lever greater response from other women, contributing further to the future sustainability of the project and its outcomes. Our final outputs will comprise 4 co-authored articles for appropriate academic journals.

Quadrature (or in higher dimensions cubature) is a classical method for calculating areas and historically related to the development of the integral calculus. In its modern form it goes back to the work of Gauss and refers to the approximation of the definite integral of a function by a weighted sum of function values at a finite number of carefully chosen points. The work of Lyons and Victoir has combined this fundamental idea with the machinery of modern stochastic analysis and applied it on infinite dimensional path spaces. This has resulted in a novel particle method that can be used to track the evolution of a large class of random systems. The approximation convergences rapidly and is robust as the particles evolve unlike in classical methods (Euler) along admissible trajectories. Moreover, while the underlying ideas are probabilistic the approximation is deterministic. In filtering problems, we aim to make reasonable inferences about the evolution of complex phenomena based on partial observations of the system. Such problems are natural and come in virtually all shapes and sizes: from the focus of a camera in a mobile tracking a moving object, via the imaging produced by a modern MRI scanner in hospital, to the prediction of next week's weather by means of a supercomputer. The aim of the proposed research is to help to transform cubature on Wiener space from a promising and novel approach to numerical integration "in the lab" to a powerful method that can easily be adopted by practitioners to help solve such problems that impact our lives. The proposed research will bring together ideas from probability, numerical analysis and algebra to gain a more systematic understanding of the construction of cubatures on path space. These cubatures result in highly efficient particle methods that combine rapid convergence with transparent bounds on the complexity of the particle descriptions of the evolving measures. As part of this project we want to lower the hurdle for other researchers working in academia and industry to adopt our ideas. Hence, we propose to develop efficient and accessible C++ implementations of the numerical methods and to contribute them to the existing open source computational rough path library.

Fishing, or angling, has for a long time been recognised by many people as an activity in which more than fish is caught. Already in 1653, Izaac Walton published 'The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation. Since then, fishing and reflection, contemplation, awareness have gone hand in hand. From a symbolic perspective, fishing combines an element of purposeful activity related to hunting, with attitudes such as waiting and patience, which are more related to passive comportment. Fishing is an activity that requires as much activity as passivity. Activity means that there is an element of success and failure; passivity means that there is an element in which another experience of time can emerge than the one we usually have, when we go about our daily activities. It has been acknowledged by many that fishing is a useful 'tool' in youth work. In this project we aim to investigate how fishing practices in youthwork, usually involving young people and older people, functions as a safe space in which people can communicate wisdom, can reflect on their attitudes, feelings and thoughts and can rediscover a sense of agency and creativity and even self-worth. We will do this by employing a range of methods: we will investigate the symbolic meaning of fishing in cultural history; we will develop a concept of wisdom that is suitable for our fast-changing society in which intergenerational learning and communication is often problematical; we will rewrite the Compleat Angler, in the form of a multi-medial platform, for use by anyone who is interested in the more spiritual dimensions of fishing and we will carry out ethnographic research together with fishing communities, to gain a better understanding of the significance of people's experiences in this area.

This project examines what makes a centenary commemoration different to any other. The timeliness and significance of this question is evidenced by the current and forthcoming centenaries which are the focus of the research. From the recent commemoration of suffrage, revolution and the sinking of the Titanic, to the world-wide events of the First World War, this project places contemporary centenary events in the context of historical celebrations and commemorations in order to interrogate exactly who is now remembering for whom, and how. Calls for centennial commemoration and celebration are often met by claims that the time for such activity has passed - particularly as there are no longer any living witnesses - and claims that it is more appropriate to focus on the present and future. Yet, these events continue to have significance for the families and communities involved. As those tasked with caring for the future, museums and heritage sites are at the centre of negotiating these controversial, and very public, issues. This timely, interdisciplinary, cross-sector project works to contextualise, compare and convey the significance of the centenary and to support museums and heritage sites to embed robust ways of negotiating these commemorations. The proposal will bring together academics, early career researchers, doctoral students, curators, and educators to work in a genuinely interdisciplinary way. The diversity of expertise within the network will facilitate a focus on different cultural conceptions and manifestations of centenary activity. The findings will be of significance for museum and heritage site professionals and educators across the sectors. The project will involve four workshops at the University of Birmingham, the University of Sheffield, the Historic Royal Palaces Tower of London, and Cardiff University. These meetings will be structured to promote dialogue, collaboration and progression of the fields. The project steering group will maintain a website and blog throughout its duration to strengthen the exchange of ideas, report back on the workshops, maintain the impetus beyond the life of the initial project, and attract interest more widely from the constituencies of the members. In addition to the website and blog, the steering group will disseminate results via a film, a conference paper, and a co-authored article.