Call for Participants to Attend the SPRITE+ Virtual Sandpit on Digital Vulnerabilities

Call for ECR Advisory Board Members
(2 positions)

SPRITE+ Member Spotlight – Soteris Demetriou

A Year of Career Journeys

New Career and Funding Opportunities

Call for Expert Fellows from Academia and Professional Practice

Call for Events and Activities

News and Publications from the SPRITE+ Community

Postdoctoral Research Assistant – Discribe Hub+

African Conservation Challenge: digital identity to foster trusted community engagement

REPHRAIN Strategic Funding Call

Develop digital economy research communities with NetworkPlus

Call for Papers: 3rd Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations

Call for Papers: IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence

Special Issue: Machine Learning and Blockchain for Cognitive Internet of Things

Webinar: The Smart Energy Research Lab – a new energy data resource

The Cybersecurity Revolution Event

The office of the future: What has remote working taught us about people and security?

The IEEE Trusted Data & Artificial Intelligence Systems (AIS) Playbook for Finance Initiative

PETRAS/UCL have published Consumer IoT Emerging Risks Report

Career Pathways with Dr. Barney Craggs

Call for Abstracts – IMPACT2021 Conference

Journal Issue Alerts

Contact Details

Subscription Details

Our related organisation Discribe Hub+ are seeking candidates with a relevant PhD, that have designed and carried STS studies in a relevant area and with an interest in digital security technology design and practice.

Our project partner Yoti has launched a challenge open to individuals and organisations based anywhere in Africa, with a prize of $15,000.

The total funding for this call is £500,000 (at 100% fEC), of which 80% will be funded by REPHRAIN. All funded projects must be completed by 30 June 2022.

Call closes: 21 May 2021.

Apply for funding to build digital economy and manufacturing research communities with NetworkPlus. You can apply for up to £2.6 million. EPSRC will fund this at 80% full economic cost.

WACCO 2021 calls for all contributions aiming at providing methods, measures, metrics, and technologies or tools to quantitatively or qualitatively evaluate cyber-offenders and attackers from technical and non-technical angles.

The workshop invites contributions from, but not limited to, the fields of computer science and computer security, criminology, psychology, law, and economics addressing this issue.

Paper submission due: 7 May 2021.

The IEEE Transactions on artificial intelligence (TAI) is a multidisciplinary journal publishing papers on theories and methodologies of Artificial Intelligence. Applications of Artificial Intelligence are also considered.

This special issue aims to publish high quality research papers that focus on the power of machine learning and blockchain for cognitive IoT. These technologies can be used together for automation, resource optimizations, sustainable systems and better security of data.

SPRITE+ Expert Fellow Xiaochun Cheng is a guest editor on this issue.

Submission deadline: 15 May 2021.

Find out about the EPSRC-funded Smart Energy Research Lab project which has made available half-hourly electric and gas SMETS2 smart meter data – together with contextual data from a participant survey, EPC and weather data – from over 10,000 GB homes to accredited UK researchers (subject to successful project application via the UK Data Archive).

Date and time: 12 May 2021 14:00 BST.

The Cybersecurity Revolution (SECREV), organised by our Canadian sister network, SERENE RiSC, is an online event that brings together the cybersecurity research community for a single revolution of the planet. It aims to provide a free and open conference to build collaboration and break down barriers to research.

The 21st of May 2021 will be the 4th year of the event.

Co-organised by our Project Partner CybSafe, SPRITE+, and CyberSmart, you will be hearing from two academic projects from the UK’s leading research networks (SPRITE+ - one of our sandpit 2020 projects, and RISCS) looking at the cyber security challenges that have arisen from COVID-19.

The recording of the event is now available on demand.

The Playbook incorporates IEEE’s Ethically Aligned Design (first edition), IEEE 7000 series of standards, and ECPAIS certifications to provide a theoretical framework for implementing responsible data and AIS in financial institutions while outlining the global regulatory landscape with its impacts on the future development of AIS and ethics.

The UK government is planning to change the law to make ‘smart’ products - like televisions, cameras and household appliances which connect to the internet - more secure for people to use.

To support this, the government held a call for views on proposals for regulating the cyber security of consumer ‘smart’ products from 16 July to 6 September 2020.

The results are now published, including the UK code of practice for consumer IoT security - PETRAS/UCL research report.

PETRAS is organising an event for early career researchers. Dr. Barney Craggs (Chief Security Officer, Bristol University) will be talking about his career path in cybersecurity research and his current role. Discuss potential routes to a career in this area, and explore how your skills and expertise can be of value to different organisations.

Date and time: 4 May 2021, 15:00 BST.

To register: email Claire Coulton

Organised by our project partner CybSafe, IMPACT connects cyber security researchers with industry insiders to skyrocket human cyber risk management. Last year, we had over 400 delegates from industry and Government join us to hear from the academic community.

Deadline: 21 May 2021.

Computers & Security Volume 105, June 2021. The issue covers a variety of topics from privacy and digital forensics of Industry 4.0 to malware injections in Android devices.

Network Security Volume 2021, Issue 4. The issue covers recent records leaks, DCMS: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2021, gamification, and more.

Up to £160k of SPRITE+ funding will be made available to fund interdisciplinary projects arising from this sandpit.

The theme of this Sandpit is “Future Digital Vulnerabilities”.

In our sandpit we will co-create innovative interdisciplinary projects to explore aspects of digital vulnerability from technical, social, and socio-technical perspectives.

Every academic discipline is or could be relevant to developing innovative ideas to explore this topic and we welcome applications from researchers across STEM, Arts and Humanities, and Social and Behavioural Sciences.

We welcome applications from scholars who have not previously worked on digital security as well as those with an established track record in TIPS topics.

Closing date: 19 May 2021.

SPRITE+ is looking to recruit two early career researchers (ECRs) to join its Advisory Board membership. At SPRITE+ we consider ECRs to include PhD students through to first time lecturers/professional practitioners (within the first 5 years).

This is an unpaid role, but offers excellent personal development and networking opportunities and allows members to contribute to the experience offered to ECRs through the SPRITE+ programme.

This role is suited to somebody who has:

> A passion for championing opportunities for ECRs
> An awareness of issues/needs affecting different groups of ECRs
> A commitment to working with SPRITE+ Management Team on ECR initiatives
> Networking skills

Closing date: 12:00 BST, 14 May 2021.

We continue to publish Career Journey interviews with SPRITE+ Project Partners, Experts, and Members.

The spotlight today is on Soteris Demetriou – Lecturer of Systems Security at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, Director of the Applications, Platforms, and Systems Security Research Lab, and a SPRITE+ member.

In April 2020 SPRITE+ launched an initiative to interview a sample of its participants about their careers, projects, and observations within and beyond the network.

A year on, the Career Journey interviews provide an insightful view into the variety of ways one may end up working in digital TIPS, together with an insider view of the field.

We have collated some of the advice the interviewees have shared about what they wish they knew when they started, their recommendations, and the obstacles they had to overcome on their way.

We regularly collate PhD studentships, academic positions, and other opportunities related to digital TIPS.

This month's round up includes PhD Studentships in Data and AI in Airport Security, Augmented Reality; Senior Lecturerships in Systems Security, Responsible & Interactive Artificial Intelligence, Computing & Communications (Microcredentials); Fellowships in Health NHS Trust, Explainable AI; professorships in AI & Society, and more!

We are seeking new Fellows to join a diverse group of experts, each bringing deep expertise and creative thinking to SPRITE+ activities, and together providing a broad, challenging and informed range of viewpoints on TIPS in digital contexts.

We are offering logistical support to help organise the activity and will make available up to £5,000 of funding per activity to cover associated costs (e.g., travel, materials, professional facilitation/online production costs, data access).

Every month we ask SPRITE+ members to share their news with the community. All previous publications from members are available on SPRITEHub.

Congratulations to Charles Weir who has recently had his paper accepted: A Passion for Security: Intervening to Help Software Developers. Charles also leads Developer Security Essentials, and has recently published a video on the topic.

Congratulations to Jacob Johanssen who has recently co-authored an article titled: Artificial Intuition in Tech Journalism on AI: Imagining the Human Subject.

Congratulations to Nobuko Yoshida who has recently published: Zooid: A DSL for Certified Multiparty Computation. Yoshida has also won funding for: Safe and Reliable Concurrent Robotics Programming with Choreographies.

Congratulations to Siamak Shahandashti whose papers have been recently accepted: Accept All: The Landscape of Cookie Banners in Greece and the UK; and Formal Modelling and Security Analysis of Bitcoin's Payment Protocol.

Congratulations to Xiaochun Cheng who has recently published: Multi-level Graph Neural Network for Text Sentiment Analysis; and A Mobile Malware Detection Method Based on Malicious Subgraphs Mining.

Congratulations to Marion Oswald who won 'European Journal of Law & Technology best paper' prize at the British & Irish Law, Education and Technology Association annual conference. The paper is titled: A Three-Pillar Approach to Achieving Trustworthy Use of AI and Emerging Technology in Policing in England and Wales: Lessons From the West Midlands Model.

Congratulations to Benoit Dupont who has recently published: Enhancing relationships between criminology and cybersecurity; and Countering distrust in illicit online networks: the dispute resolution strategies of cybercriminals.

Thank you to Nadine Michaelides who has shared her recent blogpost: A Story of Human Error and Revenge featured in Infosecurity Magazine.