EPSRC grants will enable research from electrons to airports

The grants cover projects across the spectrum of science from fundamental particle physics to allocating resources at airports.

The capital grants include funding for ultra-bright lasers, electron microscopes and X-ray imaging.

‘Put simply, investment in world-class projects, equipment and people makes the UK the best place in the world to research, discover and innovate,’ said Prof Philip Nelson, EPSRC chief executive.  ‘This £70m package will fuel the UK’s technological progress, help address thechallenges of today and tomorrow, and contribute to a strong economy.’

New projects announced as part of the package include SeeBiByte, a £4.5m project at Oxford University to develop computer vision methods to analyse, describe and search images and video, with a particular emphasis on image analytics — extracting useful information from large amounts of image data. This, the team said, could have applications in medicine, environmental monitoring, and defence surveillance; elsewhere at Oxford, a £5m effort to develop mobile robotics as ‘a pervasive technology of the future’ is to begin. Lancaster University is launching a £2.3m maths project called Or-Master, which will develop new ways to allocate airport resources

At Cambridge, meanwhile, a £5.1m project is to look at control of sub-atomic particle behaviour in organic and hybrid organic/inorganic semiconductors, which could have implications for digital memory; a £6.4m project at Surrey University will look at methods for making and using new optical semiconductor devices.