This Challenge Working Group is looking at how technology is and should be developed to lessen the digital divide attempting to balance power and control across communities. It will attempt to identify pressing challenges in how individual communities and stakeholders address concerns around security, identity, trust and privacy. Read more here.

This Challenge Working Group is investigating problems of accountability and ethics that arise in digital ecosystems including what the contexts of these problems are, and how these increase or mitigate the problems identified. Read more here.

What do we lose when we lose physical cash? Engaging with the economy is an essential and critically important part of citizen life. Payments represent a digital footprint of citizens’ online and offline behaviour. Covid-19, and the consequent lockdown, seem to be accelerating the adoption of digital payments. The Covid-19 pandemic presents a unique case study for the movement towards emerging ‘cashless’ economies.

This team presented their learnings from their engagement with UK regulators and responses to consultations from the UK and EU, as well as their understanding of the properties of cash that are most important for the future. They also presented a set of specific proposals for future research on future payment technologies and their regulatory context and the impact of system change in this area on society and business. Read more here.

The COVID crisis has highlighted the growing importance of ‘shadow infrastructure’ – ad-hoc and fragmented infrastructures that are tied together and enabled by digital systems. Shadow infrastructure has a bright-side and dark-side, it allows more fragmented technologies and systems to play critical roles in times of crisis, but leads to new vulnerabilities around trust, identity, privacy and security (TIPS). This team presented their preliminary findings from their recent research on shadow infrastructure examining highlighting a set of case studies from across different sectors. Read more here.

The research team analysed the Hygieia app (an app for Covid-safe workplaces) and conducted interviews with its developers. The team discussed their critical analysis of the app itself and shared some themes from the qualitative interviews. Read more here.

This project explores the sudden move to remote working as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the implications for trust, identity, privacy and security (TIPS). Through interviews with employees and managers of small and large organisations, the team investigated how blended home-work environments create and change the risks, tensions and challenges faced. Read more here.

This multidisciplinary project team are exploring how human dignity may be impacted by an AI-based decision support system for post-Covid health certification purposes. The project combines law, moral philosophy, algorithmic design, and simulation modelling. Read more here.