MediaFutures will set up a virtual, European data innovation hub, including funding, mentoring and support for entrepreneurial and creative projects to reshape the media value chain through responsible, innovative uses of data. We will: • explore the critical factors that impact how people engage with bottom-up quality journalism, science education and digital citizenship; • define a participatory, inclusive innovation programme, leveraging impulses from multiple disciplines, as well as synergies between entrepreneurs and creatives; • organise a competition addressing pressing technical, economic and societal challenges in the media value chain to identify promising digital entrepreneurs, creatives and data-empowered solutions; • provide data and experimentation facilities for the winners of this competition to test and nurture their ideas; • support 51 businesses and 43 artists by solving common concerns around funding and access to mentoring in technical, legal, business, media and sustainability matters; and • create toolkits and best practices for innovators, creatives, and other stakeholders to achieve greater traction for their citizen-centric initiatives, and empower them to communicate through data in inspiring, informative and engaging ways. Drawing on the experience of the consortium - ZABALA, ODI and SOTON (instrumental to delivering several flagship Horizon 2020 data incubators); IRCAM (leading the way in publicly funded art-tech-science residencies programmes); EUT and LUH (2 accomplished DIHs and BDVA i-Spaces); NMA (Europe’s largest media accelerator); LUISS (renowned school of journalism and digital startup accelerator); KU Leuven (legal and ethical expert) and DEN (one of Europe’s social innovation pioneers) - we will establish a Europe-wide, virtual data-driven innovation ecosystem, supported and promoted by an international network of 28 organisations that have confirmed their intention to join MediaFutures as members of our stakeholder cluster.

We will train a cohort of 65 PhD students to tackle the challenge of Data Creativity for the 21st century digital economy. In partnership with over 40 industry and academic partners, our students will establish the technologies and methods to enable producers and consumers to co-create smarter products in smarter ways and so establish trust in the use of personal data. Data is widely recognised by industry as being the 'fuel' that powers the economy. However, the highly personal nature of much data has raised concerns about privacy and ownership that threaten to undermine consumers' trust. Unlocking the economic potential of personal data while tackling societal concerns demands a new approach that balances the ability to innovate new products with building trust and ensuring compliance with a complex regulatory framework. This requires PhD students with a deep appreciation of the capabilities of emerging technology, the ability to innovate new products, but also an understanding of how this can be done in a responsible way. Our approach to this challenge is one of Data Creativity - enabling people to take control of their data and exercise greater agency by becoming creative consumers who actively co-create more trusted products. Driven by the needs of industry, public sector and third sector partners who have so far committed £1.6M of direct and £2.8M of in kind funding, we will explore multiple sectors including Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Food; Creative Industries; Health and Wellbeing; Personal Finance; and Smart Mobility and how it can unlock synergies between these. Our partners also represent interests in enabling technologies and the cross cutting concerns of privacy and security. Each student will work with industry, public, third sector or international partners to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, maximising its impact while also enhancing their future employability. External partners will be involved in PhD co-design, supervision, training, providing resources, hosting placements, setting industry-led challenge projects and steering. Addressing the challenges of Data Creativity demands a multi-disciplinary approach that combines expertise in technology development and human-centred methods with domain expertise across key sectors of the economy. Our students will be situated within Horizon, a leading centre for Digital Economy research and a vibrant environment that draws together a national research Hub, CDT and a network of over 100 industry, academic and international partners. We currently provide access to a network of >80 potential supervisors, ranging from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. This extends to academic partners at other Universities who will be involved in co-hosting and supervising our students, including the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features: a bespoke core covering key topics in Future Products, Enabling Technologies, Innovation and Responsibility; optional advanced specialist modules; internship and international exchanges; industry-led challenge projects; training in research methods and professional skills; modules dedicated to the PhD proposal, planning and write up; and many opportunities for cross-cohort collaboration including our annual industry conference, retreat and summer schools. Our Impact Fund supports students in deepening the impact of their research. Horizon has EDI considerations embedded throughout, from consideration of equal opportunities in recruitment to ensuring that we deliver an inclusive environment which supports diversity of needs and backgrounds in the student experience.

UK Cities face wide-ranging challenges including: inequality, crime, housing shortages, infrastructure congestion, carbon dependency, environmental degradation, and low skills. Local governments are working to address these against a background of prolonged financial austerity, electoral disengagement, misalignments in priorities between central and other tiers of government, rigid funding cycles, organisational silos and low levels of information, all of which contribute to sub-optimal decisions that can intensify persistent problems and degrade public confidence. Given this context, this project is committed to transformation based on enhancing capacity to better manage urban complexity in ways that promote co-production and collaborative working practices, civic enterprise, retain local value and develop new types of institutions. This project mobilises a multi-sector consortium called TRUE (Transformational Routemapping for Urban Environments) to collaboratively diagnose interrelated urban challenges. TRUE represents meaningful commitment from the university, public, private and civil society sectors to collaborative working in Leeds. TRUE recognises that a step-change is required in the ways that current urban systems are arranged, and that producing this change entails first understanding the integrated nature of the complexities in current and future urban living systems and the factors (including capacity/capability) that anchor the effective delivery of city-wide solutions. Once this understanding is gained, it is then necessary to establish the capabilities required to deliver them. Finally, steps can be taken to achieve effective outcomes. Key to this is the ability to align stakeholder capability to the complexity of the undertaking at city scales. Failure to do so can result in cost and time overruns, political damage, undelivered objectives and outcomes and other unintended consequences. The aim of TRUE is to adopt a socio-technical systems approach to diagnosing complexity and aligning capability embodied in a tested approach called Project Initiation Routemap (Routemap). By drawing on Routemap and adapting it, TRUE is positioned to rethink how local authorities deliver integrated city-wide solutions. The Routemap brings together learning from the public and private sector ranging from Crossrail to NHS England into a framework that allows users to better align complexity with the capabilities required to manage a complex environments, thus increasing the likelihood of successful outcomes. By first applying and then radically adapting the Routemap, TRUE creates a diagnostic cycle in which transferrable guidance can be developed in a collaborative manner. TRUE has joined up with Routemap consultants to ensure that urban pilot developments will incorporate the full learning of the existing Routemap portfolio and have traction at a national government level. For this urban pilot, TRUE will apply this approach to a selection of priority outcome areas (called Breakthrough Projects) identified by Leeds City Council (LCC). Each of these Breakthrough Projects encompasses a multitude of interrelated challenges and these projects will be used to collaboratively develop TRUE as a novel, highly applicable and transferable holistic diagnostic tool. This tool will have direct potential benefits in terms of assessing systemic complexity and integrated challenges to enhance capacity amongst city actors to support the delivery of citywide solutions that can meet future challenges. It will be presented through an open license digital platform and training guidance delivered by quality assured TRUE partners available to city officials across the UK and internationally. TRUE will be launched at a major city based Launch conference. Through these, TRUE will be uniquely placed to enhance capacity of city teams to support the delivery of integrated city-wide solutions that meet identified objectives.

The volume and assortment of available data for research in the social sciences has dramatically increased in recent years- a trend that shows no sign of stopping. For the first time researchers can obtain large amounts of population data free of charge (so-called "open data") thanks to government websites such as data.gov.uk. When these data are combined with the computing power to perform complex calculations it creates an unprecedented opportunity for social science researchers. We are now in an era of big data and this is fundamentally changing the research environment for investigations across social science. The purpose of this project is to develop some of the new perspectives required to adapt to these changes in the practice of data modeling and synthesis. These new perspectives include the need to account for the increased uncertainty in data provenance and less thorough metadata, as the data provision philosophy has shifted away from careful collection and dissemination to an emphasis on expediency. Researchers increasingly have to temper gains in data volume against losses in data quality when they embark on a study. Extra caution is also required when combining datasets, especially if they contain geographic information, as it is not always case that the spatial scales are compatible. The proposed project will develop a web-based tool to help social scientists minimise or eradicate these issues by enabling the synthesis, mining and visualisation of open datasets in a more informed way. The project will also use the newly combined data to undertake more complex analyses of population processes using supercomputers to gain unprecedented insights into phenomena such as commuter flows. In addition the project is focused facilitating my personal ambition to become a Future Research Leader. A comprehensive list of world-leading collaborators (ESRI (UK), the Open Data Institute, University of Illinois and University of Zurich) each have a specialism of interest to me and that is integral to the project. Activities with these organisations and my mentor, Professor Michael Batty, form part of a comprehensive plan for knowledge transfer and personal development. I have the full support of my host department, the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, which ensures that the project activities are not confined to the time formally costed to it. As the proposal demonstrates, the proposed project is both ambitious and extremely timely and will strive for high impact social science.

To realise the transformational impact of digital technologies on aspects of community life, cultural experiences, future society, and the economy, the RCA proposes to host a DE Network+ focused on digital interventions that would create 'the conditions to make change' towards a sustainable post-industrial society - where the 'product' is the experience, where experiences promote human wellbeing and personal resilience, where the digital interventions are sustainable and promote societal resilience. To achieve a sustainable society, citizens require agency to control the impact they have on the natural environment. Therefore, an Ecological Citizens (EC) Network+ sustainable digital society would use digital technology to: Decouple the use of materials resources from economic development; add value to products through experiences and services; give citizens agency to take care of their environment (relating to waste reduction and reuse, energy generation); give citizens agency to design their own experiences involving products, which promote wellbeing, learning, self-advancement; enable experiences that empower citizens to do, to make, to repair, to learn, to create, to connect, to communicate, to interact, to understand, to share, to enjoy. This Network+ foresees the next move in technological interventions is in creating and implementing "the conditions to make change", i.e. the experiences and interactions, and digitally networked societal actors that enable sustainable transitions for societies and communities. To enact this vision, this proposal focuses on a model of 'distributed everything' - knowledge and know-how, design, materials flows, fabrication and hacking, energy generation - as the fundamental societal transformations that are needed to achieve sustainability require a re-examination of how knowledge is produced and used. Co-production of research is a key mechanism for improving the knowledge required for the fundamental societal transformations needed to achieve sustainability [1], and is central to the approach of the EC Network+. With leading partners, we will inform a truly sustainable 'digital society', built within communities, ensuring legacies through ambassadors, and setting agendas for future transdisciplinary research teams. The EC Network+ will provide a scaffolding to spawn new projects about sustainability at a range of scales (Village, Town, City). This collaborative trans-disciplinary approach is essential for tackling our unprecedented environmental challenges. The network will be built through activities including pump priming, collaborative residentials, learning webinars, strategic roundtables, media and communications, reports, podcasts, and a micro funding scheme. The academic consortium covers the core areas of computer science, sustainable engineering, human-centred design and citizen science. Led by the Royal College of Art (RCA), this proposal builds on Dr Phillips' My Naturewatch, a DIY wildlife camera project that engaged 3 million+ people with UK based wildlife, the circular economy work of the RCA's Materials Science Centre (Prof Baurley), the sustainable engineering and physical computing expertise of the Faculty of Arts, Science and Technology at Wrexham Glyndwr University (Prof Shepley), and expertise in citizen science and policy of the Stockholm Environment Institute at The University of York (Dr West).