Call for participants: Third Annual SPRITE+ Sandpit

Call for participants: Third Annual SPRITE+ Sandpit

SPRITE+ is pleased to invite Members and Expert Fellows to apply to attend a hybrid sandpit on Future Digital Identity. Up to £160k of SPRITE+ funding will be made available to fund interdisciplinary projects arising from this sandpit.

Applications are invited from SPRITE+ Members and Expert Fellows to join our online Sandpit on Future Digital Identity in January 2023. Up to £160k of SPRITE+ funding will be made available to fund interdisciplinary projects arising from this sandpit.

Background

SPRITE+ is the EPSRC-funded (grant reference EP/S035869/1) NetworkPlus for Trust, Identity, Privacy, and Security (TIPS). We work with academic and non-academic stakeholders to build and strengthen the TIPS community and identify requirements and promising new directions for research. We have a ‘pump-priming’ budget to fund activities that explore and test new ideas, and that create new collaborations between academic disciplines, and between academic and non-academic partners.

The research challenge

The topic of this year’s sandpit is Digital identity: Created, Remembered, Forgotten - the future of digital identity, defined broadly. Sandpit participants will explore and develop interdisciplinary projects from scratch that tackle issues relating to future opportunities and challenges in:

Establishing identity (broadly defined) in digital contexts
Verifying identity across digital systems and contexts
Understanding how identities can be forgotten or disappear

Some of the questions we might explore include (but are not limited to):

How will new and emerging technologies create, exacerbate, or mitigate challenges to identity creation, verification, or erasure?
What are the social, legal, cultural, political, environmental, and behavioural implications of evolving approaches to digital identity and the development of new biometrics?
What makes up an individual’s identity online and who controls an individual’s identity?
What roles do identity creation, verification and erasure play in the delivery of future government or commercial (etc) services?
How do organisations ensure trustworthy operations in users’ identity lifecycle management?
How do digital identity management systems tackle user acceptance and adoption?

We expect participants at this sandpit to approach the topic of identity from many different perspectives. We welcome applications from researchers across STEM, Arts and Humanities, and Social and Behavioural Sciences, including from those who have not previously worked on digital identity as well as those with an established track record in TIPS topics. We warmly welcome applications from industry, NGOs, government, and the police. Non-academic participants will play a central role in the development of proposals and in the successful projects.