Research grants and contracts May 2013
Monday, 15 July 2013
The total amount of money awarded to the University in research grants and contracts in May was £3,458,897. This money came from a number of national and international sources including the European Commission, UK Government, research councils, industry, other research institutions and charitable trusts.
Dr James Ferryman, School of Systems Engineering, received £588,625 from the European Commission for a project to develop a proactive surveillance system that will protect areas around critical infrastructure, for example power plants and transportation hubs.
Current systems are limited in their capability to robustly detect real threats (including from land, sea and air), cannot operate under a wide range of environmental variation and do not centrally address privacy aspects, amongst other issues.
The University of Reading will work as part of a cross-disciplinary team of 9 partners. The Computational Vision Group (CVG), within the School of Systems Engineering, are responsible for real-time analysis of video data from thermal and visual sensors. CVG will lead the work on development of associated privacy enhancing technologies and evaluation of the developed methodology. Critical evaluations of the perimeter surveillance system from a privacy point of view, investigations of social acceptability, and contributions to European legal frameworks will be integral parts of the project.
Dr Remi Tailleux and Dr Till Kuhlbrodt from the Department of Meteorology received £367,995 from the Natural Environment Research Council for a project to improve simple climate models.
Simple climate models are commonly used by policy makers to explore how various greenhouse reduction strategies may impact on climate change. For example those involved in ocean heat uptake, which controls how much the ocean is warming in response to increased greenhouse gases, and how this excess of heat is distributed throughout the oceans. In order to assess how reliable the simple climate models are relative to the more complex ones, it is crucial to understand the precise links between the implicit and explicit representation of such processes. This research will address this question by developing a number of innovative methods that will clarify this link, not only between the simple and more complex models, but also between models and the real world.
A comprehensive list of Research Awards from September 2011 to date is available to staff (you will need your University username and password to access this page) via the Research and Enterprise website.