The Horizon institute is a multidisciplinary centre of excellence for Digital Economy (DE) research. The core mission of Horizon has been to balance the opportunities arising from the capture, analysis and use of personal data with an awareness and understanding of human and social values. The focus on personal data in a wide range of contexts has required the development of a broad set of multidisciplinary competencies allowing us to build links from foundational algorithms and system to issues of society and policy. We follow a user-centred approach, undertaking research in the wild based on principles of open innovation. Horizon now encompasses over 50 researchers, spanning Computing, Engineering, Law, Psychology, Social Sciences, Business and the Humanities. It has grown a diverse network of over 200 external partners who are involved in ongoing collaborative research and impact with Horizon, ranging from major international corporations to SMEs, from a wide variety of sectors, alongside government and civil society groups. We have also established a CDT in the third wave of funding that will eventually deliver 150 PhDs. Our critical mass of researchers, partners, students and funding has already led to over 800 peer-reviewed publications, composed of: 277 journal articles, 51 books and book chapters, and 424 conference papers, in a total of 15 different disciplines. Over the years Horizon's focus has evolved from an emphasis on the collection and understanding of personal data to consider the user-centred design and development of data-driven products. This proposal builds on our established interdisciplinary competencies to deliver research and impact to ensure that future data-driven products can be both co-created and trusted by consumers. Core to our current vision is the idea that future products will be hybrids of both the digital and the physical. Physical products are increasingly augmented with digital capabilities, from data footprints that capture their provenance to software that enables them to adapt their behaviour. Conversely, digital products are ultimately physically experienced by people in some real-world context and increasingly adapt to both. This real-world context is social; hence the data is social and often implicates groups, not just individuals. We foresee that this blending of physical and digital will drive the merging of traditional goods, services and experiences into new forms of product. We also foresee that - just as today's social media services are co-created by consumers who provide content and data - so will be these new data-driven products. At the same time, we are also witnessing a crisis of trust concerning the commercial use of personal data that threatens to undermine this vision of data-driven products. Hence, it is vitally important to build trust with consumers and operate within an increasingly complex regulatory environment from the earliest stages of innovating future products. Our user-centred approach involves external partners and the public in "research-in-the-wild", grounding our fundamental research in real world challenges. Our delivery programme combines a bottom-up approach in which researchers are given the opportunity (and provided with the skills) to follow new impact opportunities in collaboration with partners as they arise (our Agile programme), with a top-down approach that strategically coordinates how these activities are targeted at wider communities (our Campaigns programme, with successive focus on Consumables, Co-production and Welfare), and reflective processes that allow us to draw out broader conclusions for the widest possible impact (our Cross-Cutting programme). Throughout we aim to continue to develop the capacity in our researchers, the wider DE research community and more broadly within society, to engage in responsible innovation using personal data within the Digital Economy.

Changes in the domain and complexity of consumer decision making raise key challenges for modern societies. Increasingly governments transfer responsibility for complex decisions away from the state towards the individual. The decline of state provision of social insurance and financial security has seen very important decisions, such as over retirement saving and personal protection insurance, become the responsibility of consumers, just as more familiar but often also highly complex decisions are. This project will drive forward scientific understanding of consumer behaviour in the face of difficult choices and of how public policy can intervene most effectively to promote their success. The modern consumer faces decisions of bewildering complexity, with choices to be made between numerous options differing from one another in multiple ways. Consider e.g. all the specifications of mobile phone and new car available in typical modern economies, and all the different pension schemes or insurance products. Besides the number and complexity of the options, consumers face uncertainty e.g. about reliability, service quality or resale value. Even when a great deal of information is available, it may be framed by firms or suppliers in ways intended to induce particular customer responses e.g. via complex utility tariffs or terms and conditions for financial products. Many choices involve consideration of costs and benefits spread over time, e.g. lifestyle and savings decisions, or large consumer durable purchases. Decades of research in behavioural science and psychology, and recent developments in behavioural economics, show that many individuals find even quite simple decisions difficult, are not always consistent, and often behave in ways reflecting biased or poor decision processes. The results can be highly detrimental to consumers concerned and, sometimes, to wider society. Our research programme, drawing on economics and psychology and at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary behavioural science, will advance understanding of consumer behaviour. Theme 1 will study foundations of individual choice, with particular attention to decision processes and consumers' responses to features of their environment. Theme 2 will examine how firms frame and structure environments for actual and potential customers in the light of behavioural characteristics of consumers of varying sophistication. It will focus on how firms' strategies affect and are in turn affected by competition between firms. Understanding this interaction is vital to successful regulation of consumer markets. Theme 2 will also study the form of appropriate regulation directly, in collaboration with UK regulatory bodies. Theme 3 will apply lessons of behavioural science to personal and household financial decision making - an area of consumer behaviour that typifies the combination of choice between multiple, complex products; uncertainty; time; and potential for serious consumer detriment. The work will be carried out by a team that is built out of, and develops, the existing Network for Behavioural Science, the hub of which is a partnership between leading behavioural science groups at the Universities of Nottingham, East Anglia and Warwick. The team will include world-renowned psychologists and economists, emerging scientists and team members with direct experience of consumer market regulation. The team will conduct and publicise research that achieves international academic recognition through publication in top-flight scientific journals and conferences. It will enhance the consumer environment for citizens by influencing policy formulation and consumer market regulation in the UK. By creating new data sets, training and nurturing researchers, and fostering an international research network with links between academics, the private sector and policy makers, the project will increase the research capacity of UK universities in behavioural science.

Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study is the largest household panel study in the world, designed to address key scientific and policy questions of the 21st century. It collects high quality annual longitudinal data on individuals of all ages in households representative of the UK population. Such data enable researchers to explore the experiences, causes and consequences of changes in people's lives - their family structure, health, income, expenditure, employment and housing. The Study has additional samples for the detailed exploration of the circumstances of key immigrant and ethnic minority groups; and collects data on cognition, objective measures of health and genetics to understand how people's health and wider circumstances interact. Increasingly we have been able to secure linkage to contextual information for places and organisations, and with consent, to individual level data including administrative records, social media and commercial information. Additionally, the Study experiments with innovative ways of collecting data to continually improve the content and quality of data available. Finally, we invest in supporting researchers and working with policy makers to ensure the research based on these data is used to inform policy and practice. The Study began in 2008 with the Innovation Panel (IP), which tests methods, and the first main wave of fieldwork started in 2009. It builds on and incorporates the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which means for some families we have annual information from 1991. To date, seven waves of the main Study and nine waves of the IP, as well as data collected from a nurse visit, are deposited in the UK Data Service. Data collection and planning are ongoing for Waves 9-11 and IP11-12; IP10 and Wave 8 data will be released in 2018. This bid covers the costs of data collection for Wave 12 of the main Study and IP13 and 14, and associated activities. In Wave 12 we will continue to push web-first data collection within our mixed mode framework to reduce costs while maintaining response rates and data quality. We are funding Methodological Fellowships to support this. Additionally, in IP13 and 14 we will experiment with other ways of collecting and harvesting data - for example between-wave surveys, apps, scanning till receipts - to expand the research opportunities available. We are also reaching out to other potential respondents: those whom we lost in BHPS where we can find them, and the partners of people in the Study who do not live in the same households. Finally, we will be trying to understand why people who emigrant do so by interviewing such groups as they leave the Study, and also we will interview family members when a respondent moves into a care home. Policy and research agendas are constantly evolving, and it is important in a longitudinal study to balance creating long series of the same data with including new questions that address emerging topics. For Wave 12 we are reviewing whether our survey adequately captures the way in which technology impacts on different aspects of our lives. We have appointed a number of experts - Topic Champions - to improve the content of the survey and the way we present the data to users. We also aim to focus on developing our content in childhood, which is limited at present. Supporting researchers in universities, government, third sector and businesses to use the data effectively is fundamental to the success of the Study. We have a Policy Unit that directly works with government departments and third sector organisations to help them use Understanding Society data, and we undertake a wide range of activities to promote findings based on the Study to policy users. We are planning a range of international events to promote effective comparative research, especially in relation to policy analysis using the Study. We are also funding Policy Fellowships to promote the policy impact of the Study.

BARAC investigates the feasibility of using blockchain technology for automating regulation and compliance producing a proof-of-concept platform and facilitating knowledge transfer by means of a bottom-up cross-disciplinary approach developed together with industry and regulators. Blockchain Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are of great interest to the financial industry because they have the potential to improve efficiency, augment security, eliminate duplications, simplify compliance and increase settlement speed, transparency and verifiability while preserving privacy and anonymity. These technologies are also of great interest to regulators because they provide very powerful auditing tools which can be used for automatic compliance reporting and algorithmic regulation. These technologies introduce several disruptive innovations in this area giving access to auditable data which are hard to tamper with and include both real time and the entire history; providing new instruments to monitor and quantify reputation of users; generating transparent, yet securely encrypted, environments where rules can be implemented enforced and adapted. In this project we investigate technical, legal and managerial aspects related to use of DLT in the services industry including the significance of new business models and their effects on industry structure. BARAC aims to: i) demonstrate that blockchain technologies can be used to acquire and record financial activity data and to securely retrieve them for regulation and compliance purposes; ii) implement a case-study proof-of-concept platform for automatic compliance and algorithmic regulation from blockchain data; iii) transfer knowledge to industry and regulators and disseminate results to academic community and the wider public. This will be achieved by adapting existing DLT systems, such as hyperledger (open source DLT project from Linux Foundation) and Corda (DLT project from R3-CEV for financial applications), to provide access to regulatory and compliance data for regulators and by designing smart contracts that automatically verify and execute regulations using smart contracts. We intend to set up a proof-of-concept platform where the feasibility of using DLT technology for compliance and regulation of financial services can be tested in practice addressing industry-relevant case studies. This platform will be built with a bottom up approach working together with our industry and regulator partners and constructed around their requirements and perspectives. BARAC addresses several challenges that span across many disciplines; therefore a cross-disciplinary effort is essential and indeed this project has gathered together PI and co-Co-Is from five different Departments including Computer Science, Mathematics, Law, Economics, Management and Finance from four different institutions. Together with academia, the proponents' consortium includes regulators, financial industry and the technology sector. This project has the potential to radically change the way in which regulation and compliance are performed essentially reverting the present approach. Firms will no longer have the duty to report to regulators but instead regulators will access auditable data directly from the DLT. This will radically reduce the burden on firms increasing efficiency, transparency and eliminating the risk of unintentional breaching of compliance and regulation rules. The impact will not only be felt on the financial services sector but will also ripple across the entire services sector from healthcare to the food industry and education. Indeed all industries and services are regulated and need to comply by reporting information to the relative authorities and government bodies. It will also have impact upon business models and managerial practices.

CENTRE VISION Our vision for the new CDT in Financial Computing and Analytics is to as a national 'beacon' linking PhD & Masters' students, industry and academia in financial computing and analytics. We and our Industry partners are also central to the forthcoming investments in Big Data from EPSRC and ESRC (e.g. Business Datasafe). Its principal objective is to educate the next generation of elite PhDs with unparalleled, cross-disciplinary expertise in applied computing, analytics and financial mathematics, as well as in-depth sector understanding, to meet an increasing demand for their skills within the Financial Service Industry, Government, Retail and other Service sectors. Our existing DTC in Financial Computing is unique (there is no other research & training activity like it in the world) and by placing our PhD students in financial institutions and regulators it has had a major impact on the UK financial sector, as indicated by the Financial Times article (School for QUANTS) and our Letters of Support. The CDT is a new partnership between UCL, LSE and ICL, all providing MRes courses and PhD supervision. NATIONAL IMPORTANCE & GROWING NEED FOR CROSS-DISCIPLINARY SKILLS London is the world's leading international financial centre and the UK financial services industry is the key sector for the UK economy, contributed £124bn to the UK economy, generating a trade surplus of £36bn in 2010 and employing 1 million people. London is also the location for our financial regulators and world-class Retailers. Our Financial and other Service industries are therefore crucial to the UK's, and especially London's, continuing social and economic prosperity. Although we receive over 600 enquiries/applications per annum, and growing, recent reports by McKinsey and Accenture highlight the major and growing skills shortage of (postgrad) IT/data scientists in the USA 22,000 and the UK 4,000. EPSRC PRIORITIES AND RESEARCH The proposed CDT is aligned to EPSRC priorities across a number of Themes, in particular: Data to Knowledge (an ICT Theme priority), Industrially Focussed Mathematical Modelling (Mathematical Sciences) and New Digital Ventures (Digital Economy). The crucially important IT research challenges in just one area, namely the application of software engineering, AI and verification/correctness to algorithms for automated trading, illustrates the enormous research opportunities. IMPACT The current DTC in Financial Computing is acknowledged by the Department of Business Innovation & Skills as having had a major impact on our financial industry partners and on our academic partners. This will continue with the new CDT, impacting Regulators, government, Retailers and analytics companies. * STUDENTS - In 2011 the Centre funded more female PhD students than males, and in 2012 the Centre started 40 new PhD students if we count DTC funded students, students funded by other sources, such as retail and analytics companies, and industry-based part-time students. * ACADEMIA - UCL, LSE and Imperial College have all appointed new faculty in applied financial computing and business analytics; and UCL and ICL have started new Masters programmes. * INDUSTRY - many of the Banks now have established formal PhD programmes, in part due to the current DTC, and proved lecturers to the partners for industry-oriented programmes. * REGULATORS AND GOVERNMENT- we have placed PhD students in the BoE/FSA/PRA/FCA and the Cabinet Office, and as discussed in the Case for Support, we have held individual meetings and workshops with the Regulators (BoE, PRA, FCA) and with new (Retailer) partners (Tesco, BUPA, Unilever) to discuss how we can support them. * SOCIETAL - we encourage and support our PhD students in launching their own start-up, and we provide Masters and Undergraduate students to London-based start-ups, especially in the area called New Finance (e.g. P2P lending, crowdfunding).