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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/C525841/1
Title: Trendsetting Accessibility Research Group in Engineering and Transport
Principal Investigator: Tyler, Professor N
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Civil Environmental and Geomatic Eng
Organisation: UCL
Scheme: Platform Grants (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 May 2005 Ends: 31 October 2010 Value (£): 430,856
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Transport Ops & Management
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Transport Systems and Vehicles
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
A major element of the TARGET Platform Grant is to enable key researchers to support other members of the Accessibility Research Group by making their knowledge, experience and skills available to them. This will happen in two ways. First, they will be able to involve themselves in other projects being carried out by other members of the group and secondly, they will be able to develop their own skills through research funded primarily in the first instance by the Platform Grant. The existence of the TARGET grant means that all researchers will be able to tap into its resources to check out new ideas that might be too futuristic or adventurous for conventional funding, but which might be able to attract funders with evidence gathered as a subproject within the TARGET Grant. A key element of this is that these sub projects would be defined explicitly by the researchers in the Group. In this way, the project will help to develop their research and management skills and to stimulate their creativity. The key researchers who are being funded primarily by the TARGET Grant will develop their expertise in areas of use to the development of other researchers as well as to the world at large. Areas proposed to cover in this way include: counselling skills qualitative interview techniques using analysis of body language and the way people use language to describe things to help qualify and weight statements - very important when attempting to obtain data from people with different communication abilities - the investigation of the way in which people apply their own logic to the way in which they make decisions ('Bounded Rationality) so that we can understand better why they act in the way they do and to study the way in which people feel about the information they are giving. TARGET will enable us to develop our knowledge and skills in each of these areas thus providing us with more secure ways to obtain and understand better data from the end-user community for which ARG is working. This process will start with a development of the work we have been doing under the present Platform Grant (ARROW) to understand how people with learning difficulties understand their environment and thus how they can learn to use it better (or just enjoy it a little more). We will develop the games approach to both the research and the delivery of information so that we can discover how much we can deliver in this way. Currently we know we can help significantly with use of buses, planning journeys and understanding how transport fits into other activities they want to do and with road safety practice. This means of communication with a group of people who are conventionally thought of as difficult in terms of receiving information will be disseminated to other members of the ARG so that they can use them as appropriate in their own projects. While that is being done, we will expand the work we have been doing in cognition so that we can sharpen the focus of these games and also to ensure that all members of the ARG are aware of the way in which people understand and use knowledge and information. Later, we will develop the bounded rationality techniques and present them in a form that will be useful to other members of the ARG and following an initial study into the use of verbal and body language as qualifiers of information we will be working with the other projects to see how they can help this research and how this research will help them. Finally, ARG members will continue their work overseas, both in projects and by attending international conferences and other international events to disseminate the results of the group's work.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Summary
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