Mobility systems are on the brink of revolution as they suffer from an overloaded infrastructure causing users' dissatisfaction, pollution, increased inequality, health dangers. In London alone, exposure to NO2 accounts for 5900 fatalities/year, with healthcare costs of 1.4BGBP/year. For these reasons, the UK Government identified Future Mobility as one of the four Grand Challenges. At the same time, the advent of new forms of mobility and big data provides remarkable opportunities. In this context, Intermodal Mobility -- where different modes of transport provide complementary services -- is a promising paradigm, as it combines efficient long-distance transport with last-mile services. However, their operation has resulted in equally many challenges. Most notably, transportation authorities struggle to understand how new mobility solutions should be integrated within the existing infrastructure, how to orchestrate and regulate them in a cohesive way, and how to identify those that will ultimately improve equitability and reduce system-wide congestion. At its core, these challenges stems from the fact that privately-owned mobility providers often have objectives that are misaligned with those of the transportation authority (e.g., maximise profit vs minimise congestion/inequity), and result in competing with existing modes of transport as opposed to complementing them. To address these challenges, COSMO aims to develop mathematical models to describe the competition between mobility providers, to analyse these models, and to exploit them to design optimisation-based and cooperation-inducing subsidies to reconcile the providers interest with that of improving equitability, minimising congestion, or a combination thereof. More in details, the first component will deliver a threefold set of cohesive contributions: i) the development of a concise game-theoretic model for competition between different mobility providers, ii) the study of the resulting equilibria, and iii) the design of efficient equilibrium computing algorithms. Building atop the first, the second component will leverage recent breakthroughs in optimization and game theory to design optimization-based cross-subsidies that trade-off between maximising equitability and minimising congestion/emissions. These two components will culminate in the release of an open-access algorithmic suite, whose effectiveness will be tested on synthetic and real-world case studies on US cities and the Borough of Greenwich, shared and developed jointly with project partners. In the spirit of this call, the research will be carried out in close collaboration with leaders in smart mobility (Dr. Pavone, Stanford University & NVIDIA Research) and transportation (Dr. Osorio, HEC Montreal & Google Research), with whom a number of networking activities have been co-designed including an extended visit at Stanford University and HEC Montreal, daily visits and invited talks at NVIDIA Research and Google Research.

All population fluctuate in size from year to year. An understanding of the causes of these changes in size is helpful when managing and conserving populations and has interested biologists for more than three centuries. Until recently, understanding changes in population size, i.e. population dynamics, has concentrated on investigating the changes in numbers alone, ignoring differences between individuals. Over the last few years there has been an increasing realisation that differences between individuals in age but also in traits like body size or condition crucially affect the way populations respond to changes in the environment over time. In addition, biologists have realised that evolutionary change can happen much faster than had previously been appreciated and that ecological and evolutionary change can happen simultaneously. This means that an ability to understand population dynamics, necessary to predict and manage populations, may require understanding of the way traits change in response to ecological and evolutionary pressures. Understanding dynamics may therefore require insight into how ecological and evolutionary processes are linked. Because all ecological and evolutionary change is determined by differences in birth and death rates between groups of individuals, we can use data on the survival and fertility rates of individuals living within a population to marry changes in trait distributions to changes in population size. This is what we will do in this grant. What will the work we do deliver? Take a concrete example: harvesting large individuals from a population will affect more than just the numbers of adults: it will alter the way the animals compete for resources, allowing smaller individuals greater access, perhaps allowing them to grow or reproduce more; it is also likely to alter average reproductive rates as larger individuals may reproduce more, or give rise to higher quality offspring. Harvesting will also alter the selection pressure on individuals, making it more beneficial to mature earlier and at a smaller size. Thus harvesting's effects are more profound than simply the removal of some individuals leaving all others unchanged. We expect that our work will allow us to understand how (1) selectively removing specific individuals from a population is likely to impact the dynamics of the population, and (2) how different types environments lead to changes in the distribution of traits like body size. This will provide some information on how we might expect changes in the climate to influence both the evolution of traits like body size, as well as fluctuations in population size. The approach we will take has never been applied to animals. We will use data from four contrasting animal species / a monogamous bird, the silvereye; free-living Soay sheep; group-living meerkats; and laboratory populations of soil mites. These systems have been chosen because previous research has provided a good understanding of many aspects of their ecology, because detailed data exist and because they have very different life histories and ecologies. By investing a range of species simultaneously, we will also be able to get a feeling for the generality of our conclusions and the degree to which we need to develop joint understanding of the way numbers and traits vary.

Macrophages are a key type of immune cell that fights disease-causing microorganisms, such as bacteria. They act by 1) directly fighting the infection by forming a hostile environment to kill the pathogen and 2) producing molecules to alert other immune cells to the danger and ultimately create an inflammatory response. As well as adopting this "killing" state, macrophages can also adopt a "repairing" state, in which they initiate events to reduce inflammation, resolve infection and repair tissues damaged during the inflammatory response. The process by which macrophages adopt either state, known as macrophage polarisation, requires communication within a cell, which is referred to as cell signalling. Proteins are large molecules that carry out critical functions in our cells, from chemical reactions (enzymes) to the regulation of transcription. Transcription makes RNA from the hereditary material (DNA) contained within the cell and can be controlled by proteins called transcription factors. RNA is then the code to make new proteins. Every protein is made up by a unique string of smaller building blocks called amino acids. The sequence of amino acids determines the 3-dimensional structure and function of a protein. During cell signalling, protein modification by small chemical groups can increase, decrease or change their function. During phosphorylation, something called a phosphoryl group is added to specific amino acids of the protein. This reaction is carried out by enzymes called kinases. Some kinases only modify specific types of amino acids called serine and threonine amino acids whereas others can also modify the amino acid tyrosine. Disease-causing bacteria, like Salmonella, use their own proteins to interfere with host cell signalling and thereby host immunity. We have recently found that a protein called SteE, delivered from Salmonella into macrophages, binds a host kinase that normally only modifies serine and threonine amino acids. When together with SteE the kinase now modifies a tyrosine amino acid on a new target, which is a transcription factor. Ultimately, this prompts macrophages to inappropriately adopt the "repair" state rather than the "killing" state. This promotes Salmonella survival and long-term persistence inside the host. This project will 1) define the changes in macrophage DNA transcription mediated by SteE during Salmonella-infection and test whether additional host proteins are required to instruct the "Salmonella-friendly" state of macrophages. 2) Investigate host changes in small molecules (metabolites) during Salmonella infection. 3) Study how the 3D arrangement of SteE and the host kinase are altered in order to allow novel substrates to be modified. Collectively, these findings will reveal the mechanism of how the Salmonella protein SteE promotes disease and provide valuable insight into host immune processes. Salmonella is a major human health challenge; causing a wide range of diseases in humans, from self-limiting diarrhoeal disease, to typhoid fever, a life-threatening systemic disease. Our findings will enable us to gain profound understanding on the pathogenesis of a global, disease-causing bacterium. Ultimately, this may promote the development of novel ways to combat bacterial infections, something which is of vast importance with the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains.

Hybrid Venue is an engagement project that builds on the research insights gained in the AHRC UK-US project, Hybrid Live. It is a collaboration between Goldsmiths and Iklectik Art Labs in London with CCRMA at Stanford University in California. The project will consolidate advanced network audio streaming technology, JackTrip developed at CCRMA with creative audiovisual interactions created at Goldsmiths to enable independent live music venues like Iklectik to expand their offer in a rapidly changing cultural sector. Multiple factors, including new technologies, the COVID pandemic, and eco-crisis have had an indelible impact on the dynamics of live music and electronic audiovisual arts. COVID has made some audience agoraphobic whilst commercial streaming platforms offer an endless catalogue to 'Netflix 'n chill' at home. Touring artists are increasingly conscious of their carbon footprint and are more and more reluctant to fly to gigs. Meanwhile disruptive technologies like NFT have infiltrated the visual arts world with speculation. How do these factors combine to reshape the dynamics of live music and electronic visual arts? Independent arts organizations need to continuously engage with, and expand their audiences. Whilst a physical venue enables local communities to come together, a network presence unlocks access to new audiences at a global scale. High quality streaming may alleviate air travel for international artists but also opens up new possibilities for multiple artists from different countries to perform together for an audience in a third location. The original Hybrid Live project carried out research configuring network audio and computer vision and graphics technologies to create new performance experiences for artist and audience alike. The new Hybrid Venue project will consolidate these advancements and explore a streaming, publication, and membership eco-system to create a prototype platform that can power the venue and label of the future. The Hybrid Venue platform will consist of three key components. High quality, low latency network audio will allow immersive audio to be streamed to remote audiences, replicating the spatial sensation of a physical venue. Realtime computer vision, 3D graphics and audio reactive visuals will make interactive visuals that can be engaging as audio/visual art and also be informative in the way that album cover artwork and gig flyers once were in the print era and material epoque. A membership subscription offer exploring the use of blockchain technology will facilitate an economic model where audience buy tickets, artists are paid, and venues earn revenue on a secure, transparent distributed ledger. These three components come together to enable Iklectik to be the test case for a hybrid venue of the future: a local gig space, an international streaming channel, and a new kind of 'record label' publishing interactive a/v works.

Our current understanding of the Earth's climate is largely based on the predictions of numerical models that simulate the behaviour of, and interaction between, the atmosphere and the ocean. These models are crucially limited in their resolution, however, such that processes within the ocean that have horizontal scales of less than approximately 10 km cannot be explicitly represented and need to be parameterised for their effects to be included within the models. The purpose of this project, Surface Mixed Evolution at Submesoscales (SMILES), is to identify the potentially crucial role played by one variety of these unresolved processes, referred to as submesoscales, in influencing the structure and properties of the upper ocean, and thereby the transformation of surface water masses, within the Southern Ocean. Submesoscales are flows with spatial scales of 1-10 km that occur within the upper ocean where communication and exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere occurs. Previously considered unimportant to climate-scale studies due to their small scale and the presumed insignificance of their dynamics, recent evidence from high resolution regional models and observational studies is now emerging which suggests that submesoscales are actually widespread throughout the upper ocean and play a key role within climate dynamics due to their ability to rapidly restratify the upper ocean and reduce buoyancy loss from the ocean to the atmosphere. The impact of such a process is particularly important to the surface transformation of water masses such as Subantarctic Mode Water (SAMW), which is an important component of the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) that redistributes heat, freshwater and tracers around the globe. Within the MOC, dense water masses such as SAMW are formed and transformed at high latitudes by surface processes before being subducted into the ocean interior. The properties of the subducted water masses and the tracers and dissolved gases such as carbon dioxide contained within them are vitally important to the global climate and geochemical cycles as these water masses remain out of contact with the surface over decennial to centennial timescales. In the light of the recent discoveries concerning the ability of submesoscales to substantially influence the properties of the upper ocean, we will directly study the impacts of submesoscales on SAMW properties within the Scotia Sea. Using an integrated approach, we will both observe and simulate submesoscales within the upper ocean at a range of spatial and temporal scales, spanning from turbulence up to mode water formation. The principal goal of the study is the diagnosis of the role played by submesoscales in water mass transformation so that we can accurately incorporate these effects into climate-scale models which cannot explicitly resolve them. Our methods will entail a cruise approximately 200 miles south of the Falklands Islands at the Subantarctic Front (SAF), to the north of which SAMW is transformed, and a concurrent modelling study using a state-of-the-art global circulation model. During the cruise, we will use towed instruments to measure the length scales of variability in the temperature, salinity and related fields throughout the upper 300 m of the ocean. The data will enable us to identify the intensity and distribution of submesoscales within the vicinity of the SAF, and to ascertain the forcing mechanisms that generate them. In conjunction with the modelling component of the project, which will include both high resolution and coarse-scale simulations with the MITgcm and large eddy simulations (LES), we will assess how submesoscales ultimately impact on the properties of SAMW within the region and the ultimate effect this has on the formation of SAMW.