"**Bristol City Council** (**BCC**) is a leader in the use of modern methods of construction (MMC)-based housing solutions; an exemplar for the wider UK.
Bristol has a range of social and community-led housing developments planned for 2020-21, including **c.458 homes to** be delivered using innovative MMCs provided by a range of manufacturers.
BCC views these developments as a unique opportunity for a step-changing '**demonstrator**' project, assembling a unique supply and demand-side collaboration. It will deliver a major programme of integrated innovation in product and manufacturing processes, data capture, testing and assessment across a spectrum of MMC-based solutions, with providers ranging from local start-ups to national companies. Construction costs, whilst essential enabler, are excluded from eligible costs for Innovate UK.
The 'momentum resourcing' provided by Innovate UK funding will enable BCC to integrate inter-departmental expertise, addressing council-level barriers to the delivery of new homes in a coordinated manner. It will enable us to create a nationally replicable delivery model that encourages the use of MMC-based solutions in balancing the supply of new homes with growing demand.
Building on CLC metrics we will define '**key performance indicators' (KPIs**), benchmarked against existing housing delivery models. KPIs will include social impacts, public perception and occupant experience as well as supply chain efficacy **(respective savings of 50% and 33% in time and cost targeted in line with ISCF targets),** whole-life performance, quality and environmental impact. These KPIs will inform a major programme of data/information capture from participating MMC supply chains.
* The main outcome will be a '**council change model**' supported by a **decision-support 'toolbox'**, enabling local authorities across the UK to address development challenges using MMCs and taking account of local issues (social value, procurement, demographics, skills, location, supply chain capacity, economic, technical and environmental), specific development needs, and supply chain capacity.
* Project learning and supply chain collaboration will enable suppliers to deliver effective product, process and supply chain innovations; collaboration with BCC will increase confidence in future demand, facilitating capacity planning and investment.
Whilst BCC is key to project delivery, the lead partner will be YTKO (a Bristol-based company working closely with BCC) supported by BRE in project administration and coordination. 9 MMC-based housing solution providers are participating. Stakeholders including other councils, the CIH (data shared with the 'Whole life performance' workstream) and other public-sector and commercial bodies."
"The Prelude study aims to use human centred research and design to address the issue of delivering good target user understanding of complex issues around network latency - with particular emphasis on the impact this can have on end user quality of experience (QoE) for advanced highly interactive visual environments such as VR, AR, MR and 360 video (HIVEs). The typical 'user' targeted by this study will be implementers of HIVEs, managers of enterprises active in developing or sponsoring HIVEs and investors in the sector, ie those impacted by poor QoE delivered to ultimate end consumer.
Purdue University (Y Charlie Hu 2017 ACM) has done detailed research to show that the QoE achievable for high quality VR applications on today's mobile hardware and wireless networks via local rendering or offloading is about 10X away from the acceptable QoE, yet waiting for future mobile hardware or next-generation wireless networks (e.g., 5G) is unlikely to help.
OMM is developing a regression testing platform which permits developers of such applications to test them against a simulated delivery infrastructure based on actual measured network performance thereby identifying areas of QoE concern early in the development cycle and thus permitting early mitigation, reducing costs and risks. At the moment conceivable highly interactive visual environments far exceed the ability to deliver to untethered devices such as tablets and smartphones and the commercial risks are high due to this delivery and performance gap.
Earlier studies and ongoing work have shown it to be hard to present this issue and the targeted solution we have developed to most potential users who might benefit. This study addresses this presentation / understanding gap."
Distributed Learning and Ledgers (DLL) is a short, 3 month, feasibility study which aims to establish the system design and preliminary proof of market for the use of distributed ledgers (aka blockchains) and xAPI to deliver an efficient and trustworthy mechanism for recording learning experiences at a level of detail far greater than end of course certificates or daily learning profiles.
Experience API (xAPI), is an e-learning software specification that allows learning content and learning systems to speak to each other in a manner that records and tracks all types of learning experiences.
Blockchains are familiar for their use in financial transactions (eg BitCoins) and generalised distributed ledgers are a secure, trustworthy, mechanism for recording transaction, such as those generated by the use of xAPI in learning materials.
The DLL study will evaluate the technical issues relevant to delivering a synthesis of distributed ledgers and xAPI in an e-learning context and study the impacts this will have on selected use cases in order to build a strong foundation for further development.
DLL will promote distributed learning by facilitating decomposition of existing, lengthy, educational (and training) courses into many shorter ones which can garnered across a variety of activities and over flexible timescales.
This will, in turn, underpin the provision of learning outside of the existing formal educational paths for all aspects of education, in work training and lifestyle/interests.
The Navimed 3 study follows, and expands upon, the Navimed 1 study. The aim of both studies being to clearly establish, via clinical and other trials, the potential benefits of delivering interactive digital media to patients in hospitals. Working in an NHS context, with UCLH, the team aims to demonstrate and confirm the potential for patient interaction with structured and unstructured digital content to deliver efficiency benefits by assisting the reduction in patient length of stay. This will bring financial and managerial benefits to hospital trusts as well as increasing patient satisfaction via accelerated recovery and a more personalised delivery of care. The delivery platform and technology will open up new opportunities for augmenting patient - care staff interactions and a potential for increasing quality and efficiency of ward services and patient interactions.
The underlying technology will have applications in other areas of consumer engagement with important personally relevant/significant information services - where quality and trust are important issues.
MeshDex is a new and innovative way of locating content online, which tackles limitations of
current search technologies, by the process being treated as essentially a social rather than
individual activity. As such MeshDex overcomes issues with the ever increasing wealth of
information for any given subject or area of interest via a passive crowd sourcing approach
that globally shares the effort spent by users in locating, reviewing and qualifying sources. In
essence becoming a “found once found for all” (FOFFA) system. At its heart is a web based
Collaborative Discovery Environment (CDE) through which users can locate and organise
sources of information around one or more areas of interest whether they appear on the web or
not. With all sources being connected via an inventive cloud based indexing/tagging process,
which overcomes terminology and language differences, users can discover or be alerted to
relevant content found and registered into MeshDex by others (even across subject, area of
interest or language boundaries). Through its inherent collaborative capabilities MeshDex will
be able to deliver benefits to many kinds and groups of web users, including researchers and
practitioners in many fields such as health and medicine.
The FinePoint Proof of Market study aims to test the feasibility of using physical optical
correlation as a means of providing high precision localization and camera tracking
information from live video feeds.
This will enable high quality, highly localized, augmented reality, with a particular focus on
two potential commercial opportunities, augmented reality delivered to smartphones and
camera tracking systems for mixed reality media production.
Whilst both target areas exist already the approach adopted by the Finepoint team will deliver
significant performance advantages and additional capabilities compared with existing
solutions. Existing techniques rely on relatively imprecise GPS / compass localization, or a
static array of markers and/or intensive computation. Physical optical correlation, applied to
video feeds from cameras, offers the opportunity to provide enhanced performance without
similar constraints, thereby making it very appropriate for services targeting unstructured
environments.
Finepoint can be considered as the exact inverse of Google Street View, where you give a
known location and can then view geolocated image data sets. Finepoint takes an image and
delivers an exact location.
The pervasive use of smartphones and Wifi/mobile data services now makes this concept very
appropriate.
The study is a collaborative venture amongst a small group of SMEs with a range of relevant
skills, IP and market positioning using an innovative hardware platform recently developed in
the UK. The study will determine the technical issues, development roadmap and costs
together with market research and competitor analysis in targeted opportunities. This will
establish the basic commercial proposition and underpin subsequent development through
proof of concept and development of prototype.
Finepoint will demonstrate the potential to create new, immersive, media deliverables in areas
ranging from tourism, media production, advertising and entertainment.
This project
The Project aims to explore the opportunity for deploying universal & continuous real time
user feedback, thereby enabling quality of service improvements, in healthcare services via a
‘control loop’ between patients & clinicians.
The specific focus is hospital care but the concept is generally applicable in other areas where
users are divorced from control & implementation of service delivery (care of
elderly/disabled, local GP services, education etc.).
Enabled by constant improvements in communications infrastructure & user devices, Proof of
Concept trials are now technically realistic, within limited patient groups & locations.
The Project will address the value chain for the delivery of information, interaction &
engagement with end users (patients); earlier studies clearly identified the issue of platform
fragmentation as an obstacle to guaranteed universal delivery of information & services (TSB
Feasibility Study 2009/10: Gateway Navigator). Patients are well disposed towards
engagement, being a captive audience with a normal desire to ‘get well asap’. This will be
augmented by using the same platform to deliver focused patient information media targeting
their specific conditions, lifestyle & other relevant issues (age, culture, language etc.).
Evidence shows that feedback & information have significant value, improving both short &
long term health outcomes, thereby reducing costs &/or improving efficiency.
Moving from feasibility to Proof of Concept trials, this Project represents a whole new
innovative ecology for the creation, distribution & use of information & services. The Project
will focus on trialling the concepts in the area of health, approaching the ultimate target from
top down (using existing multimedia devices) & bottom up (low cost custom devices for
longer-term cost reduction). User/practitioner engagement models, service platform needs &
commercial metrics for further & wider deployment over the next few years will be explored.