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Government Office for Science

Government Office for Science

15 Projects, page 1 of 3
  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/W020408/1
    Funder Contribution: 3,115,830 GBP

    Digital technologies and services are shaping our lives. Work, education, finance, health, politics and society are all affected. They also raise concomitant and complex challenges relating to the security of and trust in systems and data. TIPS (Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security) issues thus lie at the heart of our adoption of new technologies and are critical to our economic prosperity and the well-being of our citizens. Identifying and addressing such issues requires a coherent, coordinated, multi-disciplinary approach, with strong stakeholder relationships at the centre. SPRITE+ is a vehicle for communication, engagement, and collaboration for people involved in research, practice, and policy relevant to TIPS in digital contexts. Since launching in 2019, we have established ourselves as the go-to point of contact to engage with the broadest UK network of interdisciplinary, cross-sector digital TIPS experts. The second phase of SPRITE+ ('SPRITE+2') will continue to build our membership, whilst expanding the breadth and depth of our innovation, and deepen our impact through proactive engagement. SPRITE+2 will have the following objectives: 1. Expand our TIPS community, harnessing the expertise and collaborative potential of the national and international TIPS communities 2. Identify and prioritise future TIPS research challenges 3. Explore and develop priority research areas to enhance our collective understanding of future global TIPS challenges 4. Stimulate innovative research through sandpits, industry led calls, and horizon scanning 5. Deepen engagement with TIPS research end users across sectors to accelerate knowledge Exchange 6. Understand, inform, and influence policy making and practice at regional, national and international level These will be delivered through four work packages and two cross cutting activities. All work packages will be led by the PI (Elliot) to ensure that connections are made and synergies exploited. Each sub-work package will be led by a member of the Management Team and supported by our Expert Fellows and Project Partners. WP1 Develop the Network We will deliver a set of activities designed to expand, broaden, and engage the network, from expert meetings and workshops to student bootcamps and international conferences. WP2 Engage stakeholders to enhance knowledge exchange and deliver impact. We will be greatly enhancing our purposive engagement activity in SPRITE+2. This activity will include a new business intelligence function and PP engagement grants, designed to enhance mutual understanding between researchers and stakeholders. WP3 Identify, prioritise, and explore future TIPS challenges We will select and then investigate priority areas of future TIPS. Two areas are pre-scoped based on the work we have done so far in SPRITE+ (TIPS in digital cities; trustworthy digital identities) with a further two be identified during the lead up to SPRITE+2. WP4 Drive innovation in research This WP concerns the initiation and production of high-quality impactful research. Through horizon scanning, sandpits and industry-led calls, we will steer ideas through an innovation pipeline ensuring SPRITE+2 is future focused. Cross cutting activities The first cross-cutting activity will accelerate the translation of TIPS research into policy and practice for public and private sector end uses. The second focuses on mechanisms to facilitate communication within our community. The experiences of SPRITE+ and the other DE Network+s demonstrate that it takes years of consistent and considerable effort for a new network to grow membership and develop productive relationships with stakeholders. In SPRITE+2 grant we would hit the ground running and maximise the impact of four additional years of funding. A successful track record, a well-established team, and a raft of ambitious new plans provide a solid foundation for strong delivery in 2023-27.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/S027424/1
    Funder Contribution: 203,940 GBP

    The way in which individuals interact with technology is rapidly evolving, as users increasingly expect fast, reliable and accurate information. In order to deliver systems capable of meeting these expectation both businesses and government departments alike are turning to conversational agents (or chatbots). These conversational agents are capable of interacting and engaging with users, answering user queries and even providing advice and guidance as required. This research considers how this technology can be optimised to provide a more effective method of communication, while also focusing on the implicit trust that a user has with a conversational agent. As part of this research we will investigate the nature of sensitive information and how the context of the information can play a role in its perceived sensitivity. This will be achieved using a range of experiments to better understand the public's perceptions of personal information, and how those perceptions relate to the classification of the information. In order to fully understand the use of conversational agents it is essential to properly understand the nature of personal, sensitive information and also their perceived trustworthiness. We will examine how different facets of a conversational agent's humanity, personality and appearance can be used to affect an individual's perceptions and trust in that agent. We will focus on the use of conversational agents across three key sectors: healthcare, defence and security and technology. These three areas have been selected as they are significant users of conversational agents and all deal with potentially sensitive and personal information, as well as being areas of significant public spending. Our research will understand how these interactions between humans and computers can be optimised to deliver a bespoke conversational agent tailored to meet the expectations and needs of the individual. This in turn will increase the trust and confidence in these digital services.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/M01326X/1
    Funder Contribution: 23,061,200 GBP

    We are an interdisciplinary team of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists seeking to form a Hub in Quantum Enhanced Imaging. Our Hub will link world-leading quantum technologists with global industry leaders to transform imaging in alignment with industry priorities and national/international economic and societal needs. Together we will pioneer imaging and sensing systems with breakthrough functionality by developing a family of quantum-enhanced multidimensional cameras operating across a range of wavelengths, timescales and length-scales. Innovations will include: - imaging with the most minimal, or only infrared, illumination; - imaging even where line of sight is blocked; - imaging at wavelengths unachievable by any conventional camera technology;imaging gravity fields with unprecedented sensitivity; and - imaging the microscopic world using quantum light. Quantum Technologies applied to imaging will create cameras offering functionality that is currently not available, transforming a multitude of applications in defence, security, transport, energy, aerospace and the medical/life sciences. We are the only proposed Hub to address the imaging need, and we have over 30 industry partners firmly committed to the aims of the Hub. These partners range from SMEs such as M-Squared Lasers through to multinationals including Thales, e2V and Selex, and consortia including the CENSIS innovation centre, Fraunhofer UK, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre and government bodies including DSTL and NPL. We will support this industrial engagement and exploitation pipeline through a £4M Partnership Fund, managed by our business-led Opportunities Panel that will support jointly funded projects with industry. An additional £3M investment from the Scottish Funding Council will create innovation space within the Hub where companies can co-locate with the academic teams in refining demonstrator systems advancing their TRL to fully precompetitive prototypes. We will engage with the UK's Science Centre Network creating a quantum technology exhibition targeted to interested adults with appeal to wider family audiences and school groups. The exhibit will create space for dialogue about the impact of quantum technologies on the way we live, work and communicate, giving the public an opportunity to feed back their views to the research team. The key strength of this proposal is the combination of a broad-based, highly experienced university consortium with established industry relationships and the relevance of a programme concept shaped by the challenges facing our industry partners.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/R033889/1
    Funder Contribution: 338,038 GBP

    Cumulative Revelations in Personal Data takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating how small, apparently innocuous pieces of employees' personal information, which are generated through interactions with/in networked systems over time, collectively pose significant yet unanticipated risk to personal reputation and employers' operational security. Such cumulative revelations come from personal data that are shared intentionally by an individual, from data shared about an individual by others, from recognition software that identifies and tags people and places automatically, and from common cross-authentication practices that favour convenience over security (e.g. signing into AirBnB via Facebook). Brought together, these data can provide unintended insights to others into (for example) an individual's personal habits, work patterns, personality, emotion, and social influence. Collectively these data thus have the potential to create adverse consequences for that individual (e.g. through reputational damage), their employer (e.g. by creating opportunities for cybercrime), and even for national security. The research brings together multidisciplinary expertise in Socio-Digital Interaction, Co-design, Interactive Information Retrieval, and Computational Legal Theory, all working in collaboration with a key industry partner, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which employs more than 92,000 staff across 12 national, international and private banks and for which security concerns are paramount, as well as UK Government security agencies, via the Government Office for Science and the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats. The research will examine the potential adverse revelations delivered by an individual employee's holistic digital footprint through the development of a prototype software tool that maps out a portrait of a user's digital footprint and reflects it back to them. This tool will enable individuals to understand the cumulative nature of their personal data, and better comprehend the associated vulnerabilities and risks. Responding to employers' concerns over organisational security risks created by cumulative revelations of their employees' data, the research will also identify conflicts and ambiguities in security service design and implementation when the motivations and actions of individual employees are balanced against organisational security philosophy, enabling mitigation against the attendant risks, issues and consequences of cumulative revelations from organisational and individual perspectives.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/R033889/2
    Funder Contribution: 228,320 GBP

    Cumulative Revelations in Personal Data takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating how small, apparently innocuous pieces of employees' personal information, which are generated through interactions with/in networked systems over time, collectively pose significant yet unanticipated risk to personal reputation and employers' operational security. Such cumulative revelations come from personal data that are shared intentionally by an individual, from data shared about an individual by others, from recognition software that identifies and tags people and places automatically, and from common cross-authentication practices that favour convenience over security (e.g. signing into AirBnB via Facebook). Brought together, these data can provide unintended insights to others into (for example) an individual's personal habits, work patterns, personality, emotion, and social influence. Collectively these data thus have the potential to create adverse consequences for that individual (e.g. through reputational damage), their employer (e.g. by creating opportunities for cybercrime), and even for national security. The research brings together multidisciplinary expertise in Socio-Digital Interaction, Co-design, Interactive Information Retrieval, and Computational Legal Theory, all working in collaboration with a key industry partner, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which employs more than 92,000 staff across 12 national, international and private banks and for which security concerns are paramount, as well as UK Government security agencies, via the Government Office for Science and the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats. The research will examine the potential adverse revelations delivered by an individual employee's holistic digital footprint through the development of a prototype software tool that maps out a portrait of a user's digital footprint and reflects it back to them. This tool will enable individuals to understand the cumulative nature of their personal data, and better comprehend the associated vulnerabilities and risks. Responding to employers' concerns over organisational security risks created by cumulative revelations of their employees' data, the research will also identify conflicts and ambiguities in security service design and implementation when the motivations and actions of individual employees are balanced against organisational security philosophy, enabling mitigation against the attendant risks, issues and consequences of cumulative revelations from organisational and individual perspectives.

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