British society, economy and government are becoming digital at staggering speeds. Individuals use the Internet to shop for books, houses and employment, search for information, share resources and group into social networks. Government wants to provide better and faster services to citizens and companies, cut costs and identify tax evaders. Much of business has moved online in the form of digital stores, service portals and targeted advertisements, breaking the physical barrier of distance between parties interested in a particular kind of interchange. Entering a future digital era provides many opportunities which, if seized properly, have a strong potential to boost economic growth and improve the quality of life. Researchers are facing the challenge of developing the tools necessary to make the best use of these opportunities. In this project we will develop new methodologies addressing the challenges and utilizing the opportunities arising from increasing vastness -in size and accessibility -of digital resources . We will analyze mathematical properties of these problems, design novel techniques to exploit their structure, implement them into efficient algorithms, and collaborate with industrial partners and digital economy hubs to ensure impact. Size: Technological breakthroughs in mankind's ability to produce and store huge amounts of data create an unprecedented challenge: a new science is needed for organizing, optimizing and interpreting data coming from new sources like the Internet, commercial databases, scientific experiments and government records. Hospitals, research labs, transportation companies, retailers and businesses produce more raw data than current technology is able to utilize effectively. Moreover, it seems that this trend will continue at an exponential rate. For the problems in this category we will develop new ground-breaking operational research techniques requiring us to reach the depths of several disciplines, merging insights from numerical optimization, machine learning and software development.Accessibility: Due to the vast accessibility of digital resources, portals connecting suppliers of a certain service with potential customers are becoming extremely popular. There are websites specializing in employment (Jobs.ac.uk), housing (Lettingweb.com), as well as contact points facilitating general exchange (Gumtree.com, Craigslist.org). The need to manage the customer portfolios of these portals for optimal user experience uncovers many fundamental mathematical challenges. Since the existing literature does not address these new problems appropriately, a careful study of these systems has the potential to improve user experience substantially. We will construct and analyze mathematical models of such systems using techniques at the interface of modern queueing theory and optimization.In summary, we will develop new operational research techniques which: (i) are capable of dealing with the unprecedented scale of modern digital resources, and (ii) will upgrade the access management to these new resources. Our goal is to gain new mathematical insights into the underlying problems in digital economy and provide the industry and the society with new tools to address these problems appropriately to meet public's expectations over the next decade.

Symmetric cryptosystems are widely used because they are the only ones that can achieve some major functionalities such as high-speed or low-cost encryption, fast message authentication, and efficient hashing. Today, symmetric algorithms are used in mobile phones, in credit cards, in WLAN connections, and symmetric cryptology is a very active research area. These cryptosystems rely on the use of cryptographic primitives, such as block ciphers, stream ciphers and hash functions. The design of secure and efficient block ciphers is partly believed to be well understood: ciphers designed more than a decade ago still withstand any cryptanalytic attempt in traditional security settings. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which is the most widely deployed symmetric primitive, is a good example of such a cipher. Its resistance to well-known statistical attacks has been proved, and it can be implemented efficiently enough for a wide variety of use cases. However, the design of block ciphers is limited to the definition of a keyed permutation. In traditional security settings, the security of such a primitive can be informally defined as the impossibility to distinguish the outputs of such a function from random strings. This leaves several problems open when it comes to building a full cryptosystem. In many new applications, cryptography is used in a context where adversaries have access to so-called side-channel information, which is not covered by traditional security analyses. For instance, an implementation of a pay-per-view TV system must be secure against an adversary with physical access to the device. She can measure some physical quantities during the cryptographic computation and use this information to recover the key (side-channel attack). If she has full access to the device, she might even be able to read the memory and extract any secret keys. In such a context, it appears that many implementations of block ciphers are vulnerable to practical attacks: for example, a cache-timing attack has been shown against the OpenSSL table-based AES implementation. Another property of block ciphers is that their scope is limited to the mathematical definition of a keyed permutation. They are often used to protect the confidentiality or the integrity of data, but they have to be composed with an appropriate mode of operation. Nowadays, most applications that require data confidentiality also have to ensure its authenticity, leading to a strong need for a mode of operation combining these two properties. However, it appears that the most widely used mechanism for authenticated encryption, AES-GCM, is not very efficient for high speed networks. Also, the security of the GCM mode collapses when an IV is reused, or when it is used to encrypt too long messages. An international competition named CAESAR, partly supported by the NIST, has been launched in order to define some new authenticated encryption schemes. It has led to the definition of innovative mechanism, which security still needs to be assessed. The Brutus project aims at investigating the security of authenticated encryption systems. We aim to evaluate carefully the security of the most promising candidates, by trying to attack the underlying primitives or to build security proofs of modes of operation. We target the traditional black-box setting, but also more "hostile" environments, including the hardware platforms where some side-channel information is available. We also aim at quantifying the impact of not respecting implementation hypotheses such as not reusing a nonce. Finally, a more constructive goal of the Brutus project will be to advise solutions in each of these scenarios, including the choice of a cryptosystem and implementation aspects. This constructive task will be extended to the field of white box cryptography, which aims at hiding the key even if the full implementation is available, including any secret data.

It is recognised that global communication systems are rapidly approaching the fundamental information capacity of current transmission technologies. Saturation of the capacity of the communication systems might have detrimental impact on the economy and social progress and public, business and government activities. The aim of the proposed research is to develop, through theory and experiment, disruptive approaches to unlocking the capacity of future information systems that go beyond the limits of current optical communications systems. The research will combine techniques from information theory, coding, study of advanced modulation formats, digital signal processing and advanced photonic concepts to make possible breakthrough developments to ensure a robust communications infrastructure beyond tomorrow. Increasing the total capacity of communication systems requires a multitude of coordinated efforts: new materials and device bases, new fibres, amplifiers and network paradigms, new ways to generate, transmit, detect and process optical signals and information itself - all must be addressed. In particular, the role of fibre communications, providing the capacity for a lion share of the total information traffic, is vital. One of the important directions to avoid the so-called "capacity crunch", the exhaust in fibre capacity - is to develop completely new transmission fibres and amplifiers. However, there is also a growing need for complimentary actions - innovative and radically novel approaches to coding, transmission and processing of information. Our vision is focused on the need to quantify the fundamental limits to the nonlinear channels carried over optical fibres and to develop techniques to approach those limits so as to maximise the achievable channel capacity. The information capacity of a linear channel with white Gaussian noise is well known and is defined by the Shannon limit. Wireless systems can approach this limit very closely - to within fractions of a dB. However, the optical channel is nonlinear. Fibre nonlinearity mixes noise with signal. Therefore, results of the linear theories on capacity can be applied in fibre channels only in the limit of very small nonlinear effects. Optical communication systems are undergoing another revolution with the development of techniques of coherent detection, the ability to detect both the amplitude and the phase of a transmitted signal and use of digital signal processing techniques to reconstruct the original signal. Use of the optical phase in emerging coherent transmission schemes opens up fundamentally new theoretical and technical possibilities most as yet unexplored. The challenge is to understand to what degree optical nonlinearity can also be compensated or, indeed, used to unlock the fibre capacity, maximise both the information transmission rate and the total bandwidth, to determine the fundamental Shannon limit for nonlinear channels and to develop methods to approach this capacity. We propose to explore fundamentally new nonlinear information technologies and to develop a practical design framework based on integration of DSP techniques, novel modulation formats, and novel source and line coding approaches tailored to the nonlinear optical channels. We believe this to be the key to designing the intelligent information infrastructure of the future.

Across the UK political spectrum there is a consensus that communities need to play a greater role in local government, both in the decisions made that affect people's everyday lives, and in the design and delivery of services provided by local government to communities. With the enormous public uptake of digital technologies including broadband internet, mobile phones, laptop and tablet computers, there are opportunities to create more representative and sustainable forms of local democracy and service provision. Digital Civics is the endeavour of developing theories, technologies, design approaches and evaluation methods for digital technologies that support local communities, local service provision, and local democracy. However, this area poses new challenges for researchers across a range of disciplines. It requires researchers that are not only experts in local government and the services they provide (such as education, public health and social care), but also researchers that can: (i) understand the limitations of existing technologies and approaches to design and use; (ii) innovate in the design, delivery and evaluation of services; (iii) produce underpinning technologies that meet the real-world requirements of local service provision and local democracy. The primary goal of our Centre for Doctoral Training is therefore to train the next generation of researchers that can meet these challenges. The Centre has three distinctive features. Firstly, it brings together academics from 5 internationally leading centres of excellence already extensively engaged in Digital Civics research at Newcastle University: (i) experts in human-computer interaction and participatory media from Culture Lab; (ii) experts in security, privacy & trust from the Centre for Cyber Crime and Security; (iii) experts in public health and social care from the Institute of Health & Society; (iv) experts in education from the Centre for Learning and Teaching; and (iv) experts on planning and politics from the Global Urban Research Unit. Working together in a Centre for Digital Civics these academics will lead the training and supervision through a 1-year taught program in Digital Civics, and a carefully coordinated collection of 60 PhD 3-year research projects over the funded lifetime of the centre. Secondly, the research will be conducted in the context of real-world service provision and communities, through the engagement of three local councils (Newcastle, Gateshead & Northumberland) who will act a host partners to the research. The centre also has a significant number of deeply committed commercial, public sector and third sector partners who will actively engage in the design and delivery of the research training. These include many of the leading national and international organisations with a direct interest in building research capacity in Digital Civics. These include Philips Research, Microsoft Research, eBay Research Labs, Orange Labs, IBM Research, BBC R&D, Tunstall, BT Labs, Promethean and SMART Technologies. In addition to these partners, we also have a partnership of local and national social and commercial enterprises, and a network of international academics who will support academic exchanges placements which will provide an international profile to our students' portfolio. Only those collaborating partners who have demonstrated a real and substantial commitment to engage have been included in this proposal. The research training provided to students will be cross-disciplinary in nature and focused upon 3 challenging application domains for digital civics research. These are: local democracy, education, and public health & social care. There will also be 2 underpinning technology training programmes: human-computer interaction and security, privacy & trust. These 5 topics span the research expertise of our 5 international centres of excellence at Newcastle University.

The Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC) will theorise, design, develop, and evaluate new digitally mediated models of citizen participation that engage communities, the third sector, local government and (crucially) the commercial digital economy in developing the future of local service provision and local democracy. DERC will deliver a sustained program of multi- and cross- disciplinary research using research methods that are participatory, action-based, and embedded in the real world. The research approach will operate across multiple scales (e.g. individual, family, community, institution) and involve long-term embedded research activity at scale. The overarching challenges are significant: -- the development of new technologies and cloud-based platforms to provide access to open and citizen-generated data, big data analytics and software services at scale to support trusted communication, transactions, and co-production between coalitions of citizens, local government, the third and commercial sectors; -- the development of participatory methods to design digital services to support citizen prosumption at the scales of communities and beyond; -- the development of new cross-disciplinary insights into the role of digital technologies to support these service delivery contexts as well as understandings of the interdependency between contexts and their corresponding services. The backbone of this research agenda is a commitment to social inclusion and the utilisation of participatory processes for user engagement, consultation and representation in the design and adoption of new forms of digital services. The main research themes of DERC address the development of models of digitally enabled citizen participation in local democracy (planning), public health, social care and education, and the nature of new civic media to support these. The Centre's research will be conducted in the context of local government service provision in the Northeast of England, in close partnership with Newcastle City Council, Gateshead Council and Northumberland, and supported by a consortium of key commercial, third sector and professional body partners. DERC's extensive program of research, knowledge exchange and public engagement activities will involve over 20 postdoctoral researchers and 25 investigators from Computer Science (HCI, Social Computing, Cloud Computing, Security), Business & Economics, Behavioural Science, Planning, Education, Statistics, Social Gerontology, Public Health and Health Services Research.