Challenge Themes
SPRITE+ activities are centred around our four broad Challenge Themes (CTs), and exploring these Themes via Challenge Working Groups, pilot projects and events. These Themes were identified by online consultation and a meeting of over 90 SPRITE+ Expert Fellows from academia, business, law enforcement and government.
Our CTs relate to security, privacy, identity, and trust and are relevant to a wide range of societal and industrial concerns. Each Theme has technical and non-technical aspects, where an interdisciplinary approach is essential to fully addressing the Challenge.
Digital Vulnerabilities

- How should we conceptualise, identify and assess susceptibility to future digital harm?
- How might we protect networks, hardware, individuals and organisations from increasingly complex harms and/or make them resilient in the face of harm?
- What roles will technology, people, organisations, governments, and societies play both in enabling and reducing digital risks and harms?
Digital Technologies and Change

- How will digital technologies develop and become socially embedded over time?
- What choices will people, organisations and societies have in developing, selecting and using future digital technologies and how could they exercise that choice?
- How can ethics, regulation, policy, education etc. keep up with the pace of technological change?
- How can legacy, present, and future technologies come together to form a digital ecosystem that works for everyone?
- How might the concept of ‘identity’ change, and what will that mean at all levels, from individuals to communities to nation states?
Accountability and Ethics in a Digital Ecosystem

- What new issues of trust and accountability could arise in the future digital ecosystem, and how might existing issues evolve?
- What will be the roles of regulation, legislation and ‘self-policing’?
- How could privacy, fairness and accountability be built into new technology (‘by design’)?
- How will individuals and organisations verify identities?
- What will influence future stakeholder perceptions of what is ‘good’ technology and ‘good’ technology use?
Digital Technologies, Power and Control

- How do we create empowered, informed communities with the knowledge and ability to make fair choices about the impact of future technologies?
- What could prevent future technologies deepening the digital divide, worsening existing power asymmetries, and creating new ones?
- How can we develop enabling, useable technology?
- How do we balance individual needs with the needs of a community, a corporation, or a state?
- Who will have a say in how technology is used to inform decisions, and how will marginalised voices be heard?