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Researchers in the Centre for the Mathematics of Human Behaviour at the University of Reading have developed a novel approach for the real-time monitoring of evolving social networks. These networks, in which connections between individuals change over time, are an important opportunity for online advertising. The research has been used in collaboration with Bloom Media Ltd to develop a new tool that gives their clients a better understanding of the impacts of social media campaigns. As a result Bloom are leading the field in this area, allowing them to attract major new clients and leading to significant growth of the business. The company now directly employs highly skilled mathematics graduates specifically to work in this area.
Researchers at Queen Mary have applied mathematical modelling techniques to understand how and when problems may arise in complex man-made infrastructure networks including electricity, gas, global shipping and haulage networks. Many of these networks have points of vulnerability where a local issue such as an earthquake, a terrorist attack or even a simple engineering problem can bring down widespread areas of the network. Our research and the associated modelling techniques have impacted on organisations including the UK Treasury Office and the European Commission's Joint Research Centres at both Petten and Ispra, where it has been used to inform UK and European policy guidelines and legislation for infrastructure projects.
Professor Malcolm Young and colleagues at Newcastle University developed new mathematical and computational tools with which they could analyse large amounts of data on connections in the brain and produce models of how the brain is organised. Young realised that those research tools could also be used to analyse networks of proteins involved in disease processes and predict their susceptibility to drugs and in 2003 he set up the medicines discovery company e-Therapeutics to exploit the technology. The company listed on the AIM of the London Stock Exchange in November 2007 and in May 2013 became the eighth largest company in the biotechnology/pharmaceutical sector listed on the index, with a market capitalisation of over £90 million.
As a key participant in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Dr Perkins has been instrumental in developing key protocol standards that underpin modern telecommunications. The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) acts as a transport layer distributing audio-visual data across the network, whilst the Session Description Protocol (SDP) describes the format and destination of streaming media. These standards are essential components of 3G and 4G mobile phone standards and form the infrastructure for many fixed telephone networks. They are implemented in Apple's Mac OS X and iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft Windows, and feature in billions of devices around the world.
This case study provides an account of work on a mathematical framework for the design and optimization of communication networks, and some examples of the framework's influence upon the development of the network congestion control schemes that underlie modern communication networks, notably the Internet.
The impact on protocol development and on network architectures has been significant; in particular on the development of congestion control algorithms and multipath routing algorithms that are stable and fair. Several of the insights on large scale system behaviour have been transferred to help understand cascading failures in other large scale systems, including transport infrastructures.
Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, with a cost to society estimated at €177 billion per annum across Europe, according to the European Collaboration on Dementia (EuroCoDe) project funded by Alzheimer Europe. Data-based modelling of network structures is a modern approach to study and understand many diseases including dementia. Research carried out at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at the University of Aberdeen has led to the development, implementation, and testing of novel mathematical algorithms to infer network structures by means of observations of their dynamics. The results of our research have been implemented as part of a software package now offered by the Netherlands-based company BrainMarker to researchers and practitioners across Europe in an online `pay-per-click' platform (section 5.c1 and 5.c4). As such our research generated impact on clinical practitioners in addition to commercial impact.
Lancaster University's pioneering research on Quality-of-Service (QoS) architecture has led to significant impact on the development of TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) — the digital radio standard used by emergency and public safety services globally. The route to impact was via UK projects on Mobile and Emergency Multimedia. It involved the transfer of QoS technology and know-how to HW Communications Ltd (HWC), a Lancaster-based SME. HWC became instrumental in developing the outcomes of our collaboration in TETRA's Multimedia Exchange Layer (MEX) standard and its specification for TETRA II (or TETRA Enhanced Data Services, TEDS) — a new version of TETRA that enables multimedia data services. MEX was adopted as a new clause in the TETRA II release in 2010. The impact is that vendors of TETRA equipment manufactured after 2010 can implement MEX in their products, thereby leveraging Lancaster's pioneering QoS research to enable applications to obtain the best possible level of service in a standardised way — which is absolutely crucial for the public-safety and related applications for which TETRA is being used.
Pioneering research at Bangor on the advanced communications technology termed Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OOFDM) has enabled industrial impact with global implications. OOFDM was a candidate technique for the ITU-T G989.1 NG-PON2 and the IEEE 802.3bm standards and is currently under consideration by the IEEE 802.3 400Gb/s Ethernet Study Group. Supported by 8 patent families and first-phase funding of £1.1M, in 2013, the pre-revenue Bangor University spin-off company Smarterlight Limited, was established. Smarterlight has deployed services to several international telecommunications companies to develop advanced solutions for access optical networks and data centres.
The results of research at the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering (DoEng) on global manufacturing networks were disseminated to industry through publications, events, training and consultancy. During 2008-13 more than 20 multinational corporations applied the findings to transform their global networks, determining the ideal location and roles of plants around the world, and achieving beneficial trade-offs of access to markets and resources, innovation and risk, while minimising cost. Corporations including Rolls-Royce, GSK, BAE Systems, and Caterpillar report impacts in terms of cost savings (measured in tens of millions GBP per annum), improved competitive differentiation and shifts in capital expenditure allocation (measured in hundreds of millions GBP per annum). GBP 2,158,181 revenue has also been directly generated in consultancy and training spin-offs.
Mobile technologies and in particular mobile applications have become key drivers of the economy in many countries especially those that lack established communications infrastructures. Since 2003, the research team led by Professor Al-Begain has created both significant infrastructure and know-how that became the base for the creation of the £6.4million Centre of Excellence in Mobile Applications and Services (CEMAS) that is providing research and development to SMEs in Wales to increase their competitiveness. In the first three years since its inception 28 projects have been completed and 66 companies have received services.