The project is going to investigate how internationally operating small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) see linguistic and intercultural barriers affecting their ability to trade abroad or with international clients. The team of researchers, from the University of Surrey, the University of the West of England, Bristol and the University of Wales, Newport, will work in collaboration with the Surrey and Bristol and South Wales Chambers of Commerce and a sample of SMEs in southern England and South Wales. The project will also explore how businesses and universities can collaborate to apply academic research into practice and meet the needs of SMEs in relation to intercultural trade. Previous investigations on language skills and intercultural competence for businesses have shown that businesses loose trade because they lack language expertise or do not have the necessary intercultural competence and awareness. This has a marked impact on economic growth: it has been estimated that as much as 21 billion pounds annually are lost annually because UK SMEs are unable to engage fully in foreign markets, and that adopting a corporate policy emphasizing these skills could result in businesses achieving 44.5% higher export sales. A survey and interviews with SME managers will be carried out to explore in detail the barriers to international trade UK SMEs feel they face in relation to language and intercultural communication skills, what existing corporate strategies they have in place to deal with them and what support they need to meet training needs. Moreover, we will also attempt to differentiate markets in which English poses a barrier to trade from those in which it does not. The findings of this research will be used to identify areas in which SMEs need support and ways in which universities can collaborate with SMEs. The research team with their empirical expertise in the study of intercultural communication and languages are uniquely suited to offer that support. The results of this survey will be fed back to the public and the business community through a dedicated website, a twitter feed and a networking event that will bring together SMEs, business intermediaries (e.g. Chambers of Commerce etc.) and researchers in business studies, language and intercultural studies. They will also feed into the development of the Export Communications Review (ECR) and the training programme for language consultants working with UK export SMEs. Moreover, we will engage with the media and with schools to ensure that the public is made aware of the personal, economic and societal value of intercultural awareness and language learning.

The aim of TAPESTRY is to investigate, develop and demonstrate transformational new technologies to enable people, businesses and digital services to connect safely online, exploiting the complex "tapestry" of multi-modal signals woven by their everyday digital interactions; their Digital Personhood. In this way we will de-risk the Digital Economy, delivering completely new ways of determining or engendering trust online, and enabling users and businesses to make better decisions about who they trust online. Online fraud and scams cost the UK economy £670m each year; crimes often perpetrated through false identities. It is difficult to make good decisions about who to trust when the digital identities of people and services are presented through pseudonyms or addresses. How can we trust that the identity we are interacting with today wasn't created out of thin air yesterday to pull a scam? Or whether the service we are registering our personal data with is trustworthy? In an era of users curating multiple digital identities that evolve over their physical lifespan, and the coming ability to migrate identities between providers (most of whom reside outside the EU), there is an urgent need for decentralised technologies to enable proofs of trust between people and services wishing to interact safely within the Digital Economy. TAPESTRY will co-create and evaluate prototype services with end-users to determine how online behaviour and attitudes to trust could evolve in the presence of a trusted decentralised technology to prove the veracity of online identities. TAPESTRY proposes to collect, on an opt-in basis, digital trails of users' interactions (photos shared, comments left, posts 'liked', IoT devices interacted with) as encrypted trust evidence within a decentralised database (blockchain). Users grant third parties access to trust evidence for a given time period and at a given granularity, in order to prove trustworthiness of their identity via their digital personhood. For example, a crowd-funder might invite new backers to submit 2 years' history of regular social media interactions to guard against fraudulent pledging from transient identities. Community forums are becoming increasingly important for emotional support and well-being. A similar check could safeguard against trolling, or an identity posting advice could collect positive ratings within their blockchain, enabling vetting of their reputation. Deviations from behavioural norms could also be detectable within TAPESTRY to alert users to their digital identity being hacked. From a technological standpoint, the project will develop the decentralised infrastructure necessary to make sense of the vast number of digital interactions using multimodal signals aggregated via machine learning from social media and IoT interactions. Additionally, new cryptographic strategies will be needed to secure the privacy of trust evidence and to disseminate access on a granular basis. From a HCI and co-design perspective, the development of trust services and the shift to use of the digital personhood and interaction history as trust evidence will break new ground, fundamentally altering the way users think about identity and interaction online. To undertake this adventurous and ambitious project we have formed a strategic multi-disciplinary partnership uniting world-leading groups in multi-modal signal processing and machine learning (CVSSP), a BIS/GCHQ recognised centre of excellence for Cyber Security (SCCS), the UK's first and only 5G test-bed for next-gen mobile and IoT (ICS/5GIC), and reflecting the importance of co-designing and evaluating technology in tight integration with end-users, two leading UK groups for socio-digital interaction (DJCAD) and interaction design (UNN). End-user partners participating in the co-design and evaluation of TAPESTRY span the technology, legal, social reform, health and well-being and commercial sectors.