The proposal for this Network arises as a result of the outcome of an invited workshop, organized jointly by EPSRC and the Ministry of Defence Science Advisors (MOD SA) on the topic of IT Forensics and Data Analysis, reflecting the agreement of the participants to maintain the momentum to create solutions to the scientific and engineering needs identified in this context by the MOD. The event brought the Network founding membership together for the first time, coming as they do from range of disciplines and as a result reflecting a synergy of activity across a wide spectrum. This ranges from IT hardware and software, machine vision, pattern recognition and sensing to data storage, encryption and analysis and including the social science aspects of behaviour and its analysis relating to security issues. The Network plans capitalize upon the momentum of this Workshop.The very diversity discussed underpins the need for and timeliness of the Network / this new, interdisciplinary and broadly-based group would not naturally come together, yet at the meeting demonstrated a commitment to working together to solve key problems in the field. The academic participants at the workshop, responding to the initiatives of the security and law enforcement agencies, recognized the value and benefits of pooling and where appropriate, fusing their expertise across the range of the key skills needed to address the rapidly changing problems and topical and evolving issues facing these agencies today. As a result, they have developed a timely and responsive strategy exemplified in the creation of a Network that will represent a forum for the exchange of data and information, promoting mobility through the creation of new, adventurous and exciting project proposals and teams and thus facilitating of a better response to the rapidly changing requirements to help ensure the safety and security of the environment and public in the UK.

Defence is the single largest institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world. In the UK, the defence sector accounts for approximately 50% of central government greenhouse gas emissions. In 2021, responding to growing pressure from civil society and defence industry, both the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) and NATO recognised that the carbon cost of military operations needed to fall. However, academics and policymakers have yet to meaningfully address the implications of 'Net Zero' ambitions for the future character of military operations. NETZMIL aims to assess the actual and potential impact of the UK Government's Net Zero ambitions on military operations. The project has been co-designed through consultations with key stakeholders from across UK Defence and NATO. Using the UK as a case study, NETZMIL will illuminate key concerns, challenges and opportunities around how militaries in general can retain operational effectiveness whilst supporting the transition to a Net Zero world. To meet NETZMIL's overall aim, the project asks: (1) to what extent have the British Government's Net Zero targets already influenced UK defence policy, strategy and operations; (2) across UK Defence, what are the key concerns, opportunities and challenges for operational effectiveness arising from Net Zero military operations; and (3) how might adopting a Net Zero approach to military operations interact with other key trends shaping the future character of military operations? NETZMIL will make novel contributions to the scholarly fields of War Studies and Climate Security Studies by drawing attention to the ways in which the transition to Net Zero could impact the future character of military operations. Up to now, scholarly inquiry has tended to focus on whether climate change could be a cause of war or how it is likely to directly impact military operations. NETZMIL's findings will be communicated to academic audiences through 3 substantial journal articles, as well as presentations at 3 research seminars and 2 academic conferences. The findings will also inform a book proposal. To benefit non-academic users, NETZMIL will generate new knowledge regarding the opportunities and challenges of 'Net Zero' military operations. This knowledge will be disseminated across UK Defence, NATO and the wider international community through a series of 3 workshops, private briefings and short commentaries. NETZMIL will also facilitate the creation of an international community of practitioners (academic and non-academic) that will draw upon the findings and insights generated by the project to guide future decisions about policy, strategy and doctrine, nationally and internationally. The project adopts an innovative and exploratory qualitative methodological approach, drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants from UK Defence, as well as international experts and practitioners from organisations such as NATO.

This fellowship will pioneer interdisciplinary understanding of the impact of digital change on the cultural memory practices and the 'official' record of the British Army's unit operational reports ('war diaries') through comparative research over two archival sites: the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall and The National Archives (TNA). Military units document and record their activities in theatre (active combat) by keeping war diaries. War diaries are official records that (i) capture information to be used at a later time by the military to improve training and tactics, and (ii) establish a comprehensive record of a unit's activities to enable future historical research. The CMU's key work includes: improving operational record keeping (i.e. collecting, organising, and archiving active war diaries); developing and maintaining briefing documents to support current operations; working with treasury solicitors and others in compensation claims, and providing documents for public inquiries. TNA is the UK government's official archive. It contains over 1,000 years of history. Staff at the National Archives give detailed guidance to government departments and the public sector on information management and advise others about the care of historical archives. This work pioneers a a cultural memory studies' approach which sees memory as cultural and social practices which orient persons to possible versions of the past in such a way as to make them relevant to ongoing personal, institutional and political concerns. This approach will be applied to the first ever ethnography of the British Army's Corporate Memory Unit (CMU) in the MOD, Whitehall, London after securing unprecedented access. This crucially enables the project to uniquely interrogate the connections and disconnections across and between the often publicly accessible features of the new war ecology (public archives, TNA) and the relatively hidden military organizational knowledge production and management (MOD). This fellowship will examine how the advent of highly mobile digital images and recordings from the frontline presents an unprecedented challenge to the organizational memory of the Army constructed in the context of over a century of maintaining unit war diaries, and what this transformation could mean for changes in the forms of knowledge about war, for the military, archivists, historians and publics. The impetus for this fellowship is the 21st century Western-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being embedded in the 'connective turn' (Hoskins 2010, 2011). This is the massively increased scale, volume and complexity of digital/digitized information that shape a new knowledge base - an 'information infrastructure ' (Bowker and Star 2000) through which wars are planned, fought, historicised, and (de)legitimised. In this period, Government electronic record keeping systems have eclipsed previous paper-based systems, which 'has been accompanied both by a marked deterioration in record keeping practices and the use of record keeping to enable an audit culture' (Moss 2012: 860). Specifically, the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars mark the evolution of the MOD organizational memory system from paper to digital. Although the organization was using computers in 2001, it was still operating a paper system, i.e. printing out work and placing in paper files. This compares with the 300 million digital files from operations in Iraq it has to manage today.

Metamaterials are materials that are man-made and can have properties that no natural material could have, for instance light entering a metamaterial slab can be bent in the opposite manner to that which one would usually expect. This is not merely a scientific curiosity, it can have profound implications leading to sub-wavelength imaging, focusing, invisibility cloaks amongst other effects and this, in turn, can lead to materials with unexpected and novel properties. Much of the interest in metamaterials has thus far been in optics and electromagnetism, but it is clear that the underlying ideas should be applicable in other contexts such as elasticity, diffusion, structured materials, acoustics and even water waves. There is an abundance of important applications: designing thermal cloaks for keeping sensitive electronics cool, creating acoustic metamaterials for underwater stealth, wave by-pass systems for structural protection of buildings or key components, all of which are outside the optical context of metamaterials as they currently exist. A key issue in creating a metamaterial is its design, normally as a periodic medium with a precise micro-structured geometry, and the frequency at which it operates. As Metamaterials are beginning to achieve a certain maturity in optics the time is ripe to move this knowledge coherently into other fields, it is also timely to enrich Mathematics with the exciting conceptual problems created in Metamaterials and enrich the Metamaterials toolkit with sophisticated Mathematical techniques. This proposal aims to use the transformative tools and unifying ideas of Mathematics to move the physics of Metamaterials into research areas such as Elasticity, Acoustics, Structural Mechanics and Diffusion where Metamaterials have barely been investigated, but where there will undoubtedly be impact and applications. By working closely with Physicists it will enrich and empower the existing Metamaterials community by bringing sophisticated numerical and theoretical methods to the fore.

We will develop the "Changing Character of Conflict (CCC) Platform" that will transform current ways of thinking about conflict in three ways: first, the project will be the first of its kind to produce a comprehensive understanding of how, when and in which direction conflict changes. Second, drawing on this understanding, it will allow tracing and visualising dynamic change over time in five dimensions which shape armed conflict: the actors involved, the methods used, the environments in which conflict is embedded, the resources used to fuel conflict and the impact it has on civilians. Third, it will provide evidence-based guidance to forecast the directions and pace of change in conflict, necessary to adapt security policies to an evolving security landscape. This research will mainly focus on Strand 1 of the PaCCS conflict theme, "New Perspectives on the Changing Character and Mosaic of Conflict". Co-developed with our long-standing partners, the UK Ministry of Defence's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC), the Turin-based United Nations Staff System College (UNSSC) and the Washington-based New America Foundation, the project will have an enduring impact by revolutionising ineffective policy interventions. Changes in conflict remain under-researched. Security policies continue to adopt reactive approaches rather than anticipating new scenarios. Existing conflict, peace and stability indices facilitate tracing conflict over time, yet do not explicitly address dynamic change in past, contemporary and future conflict. Based on traditional measures such as battle deaths, most assume a state-centric approach despite the increasingly transnational nature of threats to human security. To disrupt these orthodoxies, we integrate various disciplinary perspectives and methods: archival research (history), multi-year ethnographic fieldwork and expert interviews (development studies/anthropology), analysis of visual representations of conflict (arts), quantitative data analysis (political sciences, economics) and mathematical modelling and software coding (STEM). Two factors make such an innovative and ambitious research approach possible: the project's embedment in the University of Oxford's highly interdisciplinary, independent Changing Character of War Programme and collaboration with top scholars from world-leading institutions such as MIT. We will conduct ten in-depth qualitative case studies which include accounting for local perceptions and cultural influences captured in visual artwork. We will compare and complement these studies with the analysis of global quantitative data and situate them in the larger historical context since the late middle ages. Based on this we will design an analytical tool to trace and visualise change in conflict for all years since 1945 in the five dimensions, with a particular focus on 1990 onwards, which roughly coincides with the onset of the so-called Information Age. Coupled with new technologies, we will develop a cutting-edge software application to identify the probability of future change in conflict. Even though the application will not capture all of the complexity of conflicts, it will allow time-constrained policymakers utilising detailed research through a heuristic summary tool. We will ensure the sustainability of the research. As we will identify knowledge gaps in the five dimensions of change across time, space and cultures, our research will proffer novel, interdisciplinary pathways to researching change in other conflicts and carrying out further in-depth studies in each of the dimensions. Similarly, it will be possible to tailor the analytical tool, which will be openly accessible online, and the software application to the newly emerging needs and specific contexts of diverse users. The project will help users prepare themselves for addressing and countering the most pressing security challenges beyond the grant period.