Recently the media has been awash with reports on the downloading and sharing of music files, a crisis which strikes at the economic viability of the entire global music industry. This is a startling reminder of the security challenges posed, in both the civil and criminal domains, as we move relentlessly to a world in which all Information Technology is fully connected, facilitated by the development and rapid uptake of Web 2.0. This, and its successors, will radically transform society in a way unimaginable a decade ago. However, with the accrued benefits come major threats in terms of privacy, security of information and vulnerability to external attack. Threats range, in the criminal domain, from the petty criminal stealing credit card details, through trouble making hacktivists, who attack organisations to further political aims, to the sinister cyber-terrorists, who attack strategic targets in the same way that terrorists would bomb and destroy national infrastructure. At the heart of the CSIT project is the perennial challenge of making all of the IT solutions, of today and tomorrow, secure. CSIT will be a world-class Research and Innovation centre coupling major research breakthroughs in Secure Information Technology with exciting developments in innovation and commercialisation.Information Technology in the widest sense deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, analyze, transmit, and retrieve information. So, the IT field covers every aspect of data processing from the banking using one's home PC with its (increasingly wireless) broadband connection, through to the complex systems which control and manage the world's aviation, maritime and telecommunications systems. As anyone who has had a virus, worm, Trojan or spyware on their home PC can readily testify, security is an essential requirement for any IT systems in order to retain privacy, integrity and trust. When electronic sensor devices and CCTV cameras are networked and combined with computer processing, IT then becomes a power enabling tool in the field of physical infrastructure protection, which includes fire monitoring, asset tracking and intrusion detection. Thus while IT security itself is often a matter of defending against automated attack by viral programs, IT for asset protection is a tool to assist the human operator. The IT systems used for infrastructure systems must themselves be secure not least because personal biometric data is increasingly being rolled out as a part of the solution.IT systems are analysed into a stack of independent layers along lines defined in international standards. CSIT staff are world leaders in academic research in these layers, an attribute which is reflected in the four initial fields of academic research: data systems, networks, wireless and intelligent surveillance. However a key distinguishing feature of CSIT is the fact that it understands, because of its history, the necessity to ultimately take a the holistic, or systems engineering, perspective in order to research and develop the creation of complete secure IT systems, which undoubtedly are greater than the sum of their layers. The involvement of many industrial partners in CSIT bears witness to this.The driving goal for CSIT is to strategically position U.K. industry at the forefront of the field of secure IT because this field is a critical, emerging and rapidly growing sector with its wider benefits for the safety and security of society. Embedded within Queen's University, with its very successful record of industrial collaboration and spin-out company formation, CSIT therefore lends itself well to a strong business and academic partnership, creating a continuous flow of knowledge transfer opportunities, with realizable shorter term milestones for transfer of the research, coupled with exciting opportunities for major breakthroughs and ensuing commercial opportunities for UK industry.

Today's secure-systems --with hyper-connected devices-- span arbitrarily-many concurrent executions. So, we need reliable verification techniques that can capture their unbounded sizes. Such powerful methods have been perfected to verify security properties. But these well-established methods (e.g., based on process-algebra) fall short of robustly checking rich privacy properties, such as anonymity and un-linkability of users to actions, in arbitrarily-large systems. As privacy concerns escalate around us, this problem becomes more acute and it is felt by industry. For instance, in the automotive domain, private authentication of connected cars and well-founded tools to check its robustness is paramount. Our industrial advisor, Vector GB Ltd, in their support letter, states: "A formal methods-based approach addressing these [...] has the possibility to be a "game changer" for our customers." To deliver its step-change in privacy-analysis, AutoPaSS "thinks outside the box". AutoPaSS will create new techniques for verifying secure-systems, by levering logics which are traditional in AI and in the analysis autonomous systems. Moreover, these AI-inspired logics have recently shown promise in security/privacy verification as well. So, our new methodologies will hinge upon these logics' expressivity and allow us to check rich privacy requirements such as anonymity and non-traceability during the automatic verification of unbounded-size secure systems. In brief, AutoPaSS will investigate and develop new, robust foundational methodologies and software-tools for the automatic, formal analysis of security and, especially, privacy in modern computer and communication systems of arbitrary size. And, AutoPaSS will be a game-changer in these, in that it will: (I) be able to automatically check richer, "real-life" expressions of privacy properties; (II) do this in unbounded-size systems; (III) formalise and use enhanced threat models, that go beyond the normally-used, system-level attacks and account faithfully for network/communications' specifics, all these in ways less restrictive than currently possible. AutoPaSS will build on well-established system-verification methodologies and, as foundations, it will use applied, non-classical logics. Let us address some more questions relevant to AutoPaSS. -- The UK's strategies underline significant support for the 5G development. But, do the different 5G communication-primitives or the changing 5G-network topologies impact the security and privacy of 5G systems, or their analysis? Current approaches to security-verification generally abstract away the networking aspects, using models that only consider application-layer attackers who hijack abstract connections. In contrast, by leveraging techniques from logic-based analysis (i.e, parameterised model checking), AutoPaSS will develop models of adversaries which faithfully account not just for application threats, but also for varied communication settings, including the new, emerging ones in 5G. This would deliver transformational methodologies for the tool-assisted analysis of security and privacy requirements in modern communication systems, notably in 5G, IoT and V2X (vehicle-to-vehicle + vehicle-to-infrastructure communication) systems, in which AutoPaSS has its industry-backed use-cases. -- Finally, how can AutoPaSS implement the necessary security changes as soon as possible? We formed strategic, multi-disciplinary partnerships. AutoPaSS unites GCHQ-recognised Surrey Centre for Cyber Security and Surrey's 5G Innovation Centre, and it is actively advised by senior academics in the UK and abroad, as well as two engineering giants, Thales and Vector GB. Our partners also provide and support our real-life use-cases in 5G, IoT and V2X. AutoPass will make recommendations to our advisors' affiliates and relevant standardisation bodies: 3GPP for 5G, LoraAlliance for IoT, and ISO groups for V

The proposal describes the fundamental development and response quantification of sensitive, lightweight optical sensors for ultrasonic monitoring applications. The principal research components centre on providing a comprehensive theoretical and experimental understanding of the basic interactions between ultrasonic strain fields and optical fibre bragg grating (FBG) sensors. Two potential exploitation examples of the technology provide the background and application context for this research: ultrasonic beamforming in sonar arrays, and acoustic emission detection in structural health monitoring. These areas were carefully selected as they encompass the typical amplitude range of ultrasonic signals commonly encountered in engineering applications (in transmit sonar arrays the displacement fields are of high amplitude, often many 10's of nanometres, whereas in acoustic emission applications, the displacement field amplitudes may be lower than 100 picometres). Letters of support from THALES Underwater Systems (Sonar systems) and AIRBUS UK (Structural Health Monitoring) are included to help demonstrate the value of this work. Of course the opportunities for ultrasonic array monitoring are not confined to sonar systems. The increasing use of complex coded sequence actuation for ultrasonic arrays demonstrates a growing demand for improved ranging accuracy and resolution in sonar, non destructive testing and medical ultrasound fields. The potential for a lightweight, non-intrusive ultrasound field monitoring capability in such arrays provides a unique capability to provide absolute (calibrated against optical wavelength) measurement of the amplitude and phase characteristics at the output of these arrays. Such measurements facilitate calibration, optimisation of beamforming algorithms, and the capability to continuously monitor real-time changes under operational conditions. If successful the research will enable a step change for both areas of application in addition to related fields.

The long term vision of this proposed research is of statistical science enhanced by emerging geometries, driven by the needs of science, industry and government. Examples of ultimate impact include unique conspicuous benefits for experimental scientists, product development teams and policy-makers. The fundamental driver for this vision is that, given a statistical problem, an appropriate geometry can inform a novel, enhanced methodology for it. Colloquially: 'use the right tool for the job'. Statistics, with its procedures for reasoning under uncertainty, is deeply embedded across science, industry and government. A picture being worth a thousand words, while requiring invariance to irrelevant choices, many of its methods are based on geometry. The resulting invariant insights come at a price - that of finding a match between, on the one hand, underlying geometric axioms and, on the other, statistical conditions appropriate to a given applied context. Whereas global Euclidean geometry matches many contexts very well, increasingly, advances and challenges in science and elsewhere are throwing up important problems which demand that alternatives be used. A variety of geometries - affine, convex, differential, algebraic - have been emerging to meet these challenges. To ensure maximal impact and provide the appropriate context in which to focus the advances to be made in theoretical and methodological development, this project targets 3 generic statistical problems where such alternative geometries are required. These problems present some of the most exacting challenges to statistical methodology while offering vast potential in application: (1) dealing with model uncertainty, (2) estimating mixtures and (3) analysing high dimensional low sample size data. Each was central to a recent cutting-edge event hosted, respectively, by the Royal Society, the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences and the Isaac Newton Institute, their identified fields of application including: theoretical physics, cosmology, biology, economics, health, image analysis, microarray analysis, finance, document classification, astronomy and atmospheric science, as well as the media, government and business. Rooted in two new research areas - invariant coordinate selection and computational information geometry - this ambitious programme will bring together and extend emerging geometries for these important generic statistical problems. Developing the necessary underlying theory, it will provide novel, geometrically-enhanced, methodologies as tools for practical application. Pursuing potentially transformative blue sky lines of enquiry, it will enlarge both research areas leading to further new methodologies. In concert with cognate research communities, it will widely articulate the overall vision announced above. Ultimately, this work will have a very broad impact. The following specific pathways to this end have been identified, embedded statisticians facilitating pathways 2 to 4: 1. Cognate research communities will be stimulated by advances in mathematical and computational statistics, fundamental theory underpinning new methodologies. 2. Science can ultimately benefit from more efficient theory-practice iteration. 3. The economy can ultimately benefit from faster, better product development. 4. Society can ultimately benefit from more robust policy-making. 5. With their project-enhanced transferable skills, the 2 PDRAs will be ideal recruits to many areas of science, industry or government, as well as to higher posts in academia.

The reliance of military systems and armed forces on the EM spectrum creates vulnerabilities and opportunities for electronic warfare (EW) in support of military operations. EW is concerned with detecting, recognising then exploiting and countering the enemy's electronic order of battle, and calls for the development of innovative algorithmic solutions for information extraction and delivery of signals in contested electromagnetic environment. Traditionally, the subject of signal sensing/information extraction has been developed separately from the area of signal delivery. In contrast, this visionary project conducted at Imperial College London and University College London aims at leveraging the consortium complementary expertise in various areas of signal processing (sparsity, super-resolution and subspace methods, communications, radar, and machine learning) for civilian and defence applications to design and develop novel and innovative solutions for a cohesive treatment of information extraction and delivery of signals in contested electromagnetic environment. To put together this novel approach in a credible fashion, this project is organized in two major work packages. The first work package will analyze, separate and characterize signals across time, frequency, and space and extract useful information from those signals by developing and leveraging novel super-resolution, subspace and deep learning methods. The second work package will leverage progress made in the first work package and design signals and system responses for sensing and signaling in congested RF environments. Novel waveform design approaches will be derived for sensing using an extended ambiguity function-based framework, for precise spatiotemporal energy delivery using network-wide time-reversal and for joint sensing and signaling. Attention will also be drawn to the design of signals resilient to hardware and nonlinear channel responses. The project will be performed in partnership with academia/research institutes (University of Kansas, Fraunhofer) and industrial leaders in civilian and military equipment design and manufacturing (IBM, US Army Research Lab, Thales). The project demands a strong track record in a wide range of signal processing techniques and it is to be conducted by a unique research consortium with a right mix of theoretical and practical skills. With the above and given the novelty and originality of the topic, the research outcomes will be of considerable value to transform the future of electronic warfare and give the industry and defence a fresh and timely insight into the development of signal processing for contested electromagnetic environment, advancing UK's research profile in the world. Its success would radically change the design of electronic support measures, electronic coutermeasures and electronic counter-coutermeasures and have a tremendous impact on the defence sector and industry.