SPRITE+ Community of Interest on TIPSS in the 'Metaverse'

Save the date: SPRITE+ Sandpit 2022/23

Save the date: SPRITE+1 End of Grant Conference

Annual leave over August/September

News and Publications from the SPRITE+ Community


Funding Opportunities

Upcoming Events

Job and PhD Opportunities

CDTS Anniversary Forum

Future of compute review - call for evidence

Anima People: call for expressions of interest to participate in ENISA study

CyberSmart are seeking to connect with researchers for collaboration

CSSF call for bids 2022 to 2023: gender-transformative interventions in cybersecurity programming

Call for Papers

Contact Details

Subscription Details

UKRI: Knowledge Transfer Partnership, closing date: open call. Read more here.

Horizon Europe: Civil Security for Society, closing date: open call, total fund: £1.6B. Read more here.

Internet Society Foundation: Research Grant Programme, closing date: open call, max. award: $200K. Read more here.

EPSRC: discipline-hopping in ICT, closing date: open call, total fund: £1.5M. Read more here.

UKRI: Pre-announcement - Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships: rounds two and three, details and closing date: TBC. Read more here.

ESRC: New investigator grant, closing date: open call. Read more here.

ESRC: Working with Luxembourg researchers, closing date: renewed on a rolling basis. Read more here.

ESRC: Secondary Data Analysis Initiative, closing date: open call. Read more here.

EPSRC: Digital health hub pilot scheme, closing date: 11 August 2022, 16.00 BST. Read more here.

AHRC: Digital research fellowships at US cultural institutions, closing date: 1 September 2022. Read more here.

EPSRC: Research aligned with cybersecurity research institutes, closing date: 11 October 2022 16:00 BST, total fund: £7.5m. Read more here.

SASIG: UK supply chains: Demanding higher security standards in supplier contracts, 11.00-12.00 BST, 29 July 2022, online. Register here.

SASIG: Edinburgh SASIG 2022, 9.30-15.00 BST, 27 September 2022, hybrid Edinburgh). Register here.

PhD in Financial Computing, University College London. Closing date: 31 August 2022. Read more here.

Research Associate, Trustworthy Digital Identity, The Alan Turing Institute. Closing date: 14 August 2022. Read more here.

Associate/Assistant Professor in Intelligent Sensing and Network Communication, University of Macau. Closing date: 15 August 2022. Read more here.

Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security, Aston University. Closing date: 15 August 2022. Read more here.

Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Cyber-Physical Systems Security, University of Bristol. Closing date: 21 August 2022. Read more here.

BT Professor, Chair of Digital Futures and Director of DigiTech Centre at Adastral Park, University of Suffolk. Closing date: 22 August 2022. Read more here.

PhD Studentship in User-Centred Systems Security/Privacy, Imperial College London. Closing date: 23 August 2022. Read more here.

International PhD Studentship: Education 4.0: Design of Cyber-Physical Social Systems for Advancing Personalized Learning, University of Lincoln. Closing date: 29 August 2022. Read more here.

PhD Studentship: Security & Privacy in Deep Learning, University of Birmingham. Closing date: 31 August 2022. Read more here.

PhD Studentship: Ensuring the Safety and Security of Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems, University of Southampton. Closing date: 31 August 2022. Read more here.

Privacy Scientist / Data Scientist, Mirador Analytics. Closing date: 10 September 2022. Read more here.

Assistant/Associate Professor of Human-Centric AI, University of Nottingham. Closing date: 25 September 2022. Read more here.

Biometrics Technical Specialist, Ingenium. Ongoing recruitment. Read more here. Applicants can submit their CV's to careers@ingeniumbiometrics.com. Start date is likely mid-September to early October.

The Centre for Digital Trust and Society held their anniversary forum on 6 July 2022, celebrating one year of the centre. Professor Nicholas Lord, the Centre Director, started the day by welcoming interdisciplinary attendees, policymakers and industry partners, and framing the event around the importance of approaching digital security as part of a set of broader issues of trustworthiness and resilience in society. This was followed by a fantastic Keynote Speaker, Beena Puri, Greater Manchester Digital Innovation and Partnerships Lead, giving an inspiring talk on Greater Manchester’s ambitions to empower citizens and build a resilient society. Participants engaged with three expert panels steered by steered by Professors Emma Barrett and Mark Elliot, and Dr Richard Allmendinger exploring issues around 'digital inclusion and identity', 'future technology and data' and 'cyber security in the workplace'. The event created an engaging and provocative space for re-thinking the current challenges and opportunities of trust in digital technologies.

In the past decade, compute has grown by orders of magnitude as a critical general purpose technology for productivity, prosperity, and innovation.The UK’s ability to compete and lead the global digital economy depends on businesses, researchers and innovators having access to trusted and efficient advanced capability. Advanced computing capability is fundamental to achieving our objectives in the Digital Strategy, National AI Strategy and the Data Strategy, amongst others, and delivering the ambition for the UK to be a science and technology superpower.

This review will consider what the UK’s advanced compute needs will be in the next decade across the entire economy, and how government should meet them. Find out more here.

Anima People are partnering with the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) in a critical project to evaluate cybersecurity awareness campaigns in behaviour change among employees. They are looking for organisations based in the EU that would like to take the opportunity to participate in this project and provide their employees with the knowledge to recognise and protect themselves from cybersecurity threats that have become more frequent. To find out more, contact hello@animapeople.com or visit their website.

CyberSmart is a compliance start-up working in cybersecurity that focuses on tackling the everyday needs of SMEs. They want to connect with researchers with relevant expertise on risk assessment. They are interested in risk from technological and behavioural perspectives, so are interested in the qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

They want to identify leading publications and are interested in potential opportunities to collaborate with researchers.
If you are interested, then please reach out to Ben Koppelman (Research and Innovation Lead at CyberSmart) ben@cybersmart.co.uk

The Conflict Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) is a unique cross-government fund that tackles conflict, stability and security challenges overseas, which pose the greatest threat to UK national security. The team are seeking bids that pilot gender-transformative interventions to cybersecurity programming to create a free, open, peaceful and secure cyberspace. Read more here.

Tech Science Press, Special Issue "Security, Privacy and Trust Management for IoT-based Blockchain". This Special Issue invites theoretical and applied cutting-edge research on standards, frameworks, models, and approaches for security, privacy, and trust management in the diverse and long list of Internet of Things applications. Deadline: 31 August 2022. Read more here.

Electronics, Special Issue "Security and Privacy in IoT Enabled Modern Applications Using Deep/Machine Learning and Blockchain Technology". This special issue invites authors to submit case studies based on categorizing various security and privacy threats reported in the past few years (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic) in the IoT domain, along with original research papers as well as survey papers. Deadline: 30 September 2022. Read more here.

We have launched a SPRITE+ Community of Interest on Trust, Identity, Privacy, Security, and Safety (TIPSS) in the 'Metaverse', open to all SPRITE+ members!

You can visit the COI page over on SPRITEHub now, where you will be able to see upcoming events, relevant publications and presentations, and a link to access a discussion board (members only), all to do with TIPSS in the 'Metaverse'.

For those within the community, we are running our second drop-in session on Tuesday 2 August, 10.00-10.30. This will be an opportunity to let us know what you would like from this community, and how we can cater to your interests.

If your work relates to privacy, security, safety, identity, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality or Virtual Reality we'd love you to join. If you are interested, please complete this form - it only takes a few minutes.

Our next sandpit will be focused on Digital Identity: Established, remembered, forgotten. It will be blended, with online and in-person sessions, held during January 2023. The in-person sessions will be 12/13 January at a residential venue in Cheshire.

We will have at least £135k to fund projects. A call will be released in September for those interested in participating. Save the dates!

We look forward to welcoming the SPRITE+ community on 28 and 29 June 2023 at the Titanic Belfast to celebrate the end of our first grant, and look forward to the next phase of SPRITE+.

We will reflect on the past few years, showcase some great work, and consider what the next few years of SPRITE+ has to offer. Save the dates!

We hope that you are all enjoying the summer period!

We will be short staffed in late August and early September due to annual leave. This may mean there will be a delay in response times to any enquiries/requests.

We will be back, fully staffed, in mid September. Thank you!

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

SPRITE+ member Jordan Shapiro recently had an article published titled 'We need to protect children’s data online — but let’s protect everyone’s data while we’re at it', as well as a report titled 'Why Digital Privacy is So Complicated'.

SPRITE+ member Ola Michalec recently published an article titled 'When the future meets the past: Can safety and cyber security coexist in modern critical infrastructures?'.

SPRITE+ Expert Fellow Karen Renaud recently co-authored two articles titled 'Accessible and Inclusive Cyber Security: A Nuanced and Complex Challenge' and 'Perceptions of beauty in security ceremonies'.

SPRITE+ member Kieran Hooper-Warren recently had an opinion piece published titled 'Security vs Innovation: The IoT Dilemma from a Business Perspective'.

SPRITE+ member Rosie Anderson has recently worked on the Manchester Summer Market Insights document, which includes highest salary increases since the beginning of the year and average salaries and rates for tech roles.

SPRITE+ Expert Fellow Mohmmad Tahaei has recently published a paper titled 'Charting App Developers’ Journey Through Privacy Regulation Features in Ad Networks'.

SPRITE+ member Mohammad Shojafar and colleagues have recently published 'OPERA: OPtional dimEnsional pRivacy-preserving data Aggregation for Smart Healthcare Systems'.

SPRITE+ Expert Fellow Nadine Michaelides recently presented at the EAWOP Counterproductive behaviour conference in Amsterdam, as well has having a blog published titled 'Wall of Defence'. Also, congratulations to Nadine and Anima People for being selected to work on a research study with ENISA on measuring the effectiveness of ECSM cybersecurity awareness campaigns.

SPRITE+ Expert Fellow Xiaochun Cheng recently co-authored on 'Intrusion detection and prevention system for an IoT environment', 'On Shielding Android’s Pending Intent from Malware Apps Using a Novel Ownership-Based Authentication', 'A Deep Convolutional Neural Network Stacked Ensemble for Malware Threat Classification in Internet of Things' and 'Fine-Grained Data Sharing With Enhanced Privacy Protection and Dynamic Users Group Service for the IoV'.

SPRITE+ Expert Fellow Marie Oldfield has been featured in the following magazines with opinion pieces: 'How Humans Can Positively Interact with Technology'; 'Black Mirror is already here. Should we be afraid?', as well as publishing the results of four clinical trials at SOSORT with Scoliosis SOS - see the report here.

SPRITE+ Expert Fellow Nicholas Lord and colleague Peter Duncan recently published a chapter titled 'Organized crime money laundering through online gambling businesses in Great Britain'.

SPRITE+ Director Emma Barrett and colleagues have published a report titled 'The Future of eXtended Reality Technologies, and
Implications for Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse'.