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.

Digital technologies and services are shaping our lives. Work, education, finance, health, politics and society are all affected. They also raise concomitant and complex challenges relating to the security of and trust in systems and data. TIPS (Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security) issues thus lie at the heart of our adoption of new technologies and are critical to our economic prosperity and the well-being of our citizens. Identifying and addressing such issues requires a coherent, coordinated, multi-disciplinary approach, with strong stakeholder relationships at the centre. SPRITE+ is a vehicle for communication, engagement, and collaboration for people involved in research, practice, and policy relevant to TIPS in digital contexts. Since launching in 2019, we have established ourselves as the go-to point of contact to engage with the broadest UK network of interdisciplinary, cross-sector digital TIPS experts. The second phase of SPRITE+ ('SPRITE+2') will continue to build our membership, whilst expanding the breadth and depth of our innovation, and deepen our impact through proactive engagement. SPRITE+2 will have the following objectives: 1. Expand our TIPS community, harnessing the expertise and collaborative potential of the national and international TIPS communities 2. Identify and prioritise future TIPS research challenges 3. Explore and develop priority research areas to enhance our collective understanding of future global TIPS challenges 4. Stimulate innovative research through sandpits, industry led calls, and horizon scanning 5. Deepen engagement with TIPS research end users across sectors to accelerate knowledge Exchange 6. Understand, inform, and influence policy making and practice at regional, national and international level These will be delivered through four work packages and two cross cutting activities. All work packages will be led by the PI (Elliot) to ensure that connections are made and synergies exploited. Each sub-work package will be led by a member of the Management Team and supported by our Expert Fellows and Project Partners. WP1 Develop the Network We will deliver a set of activities designed to expand, broaden, and engage the network, from expert meetings and workshops to student bootcamps and international conferences. WP2 Engage stakeholders to enhance knowledge exchange and deliver impact. We will be greatly enhancing our purposive engagement activity in SPRITE+2. This activity will include a new business intelligence function and PP engagement grants, designed to enhance mutual understanding between researchers and stakeholders. WP3 Identify, prioritise, and explore future TIPS challenges We will select and then investigate priority areas of future TIPS. Two areas are pre-scoped based on the work we have done so far in SPRITE+ (TIPS in digital cities; trustworthy digital identities) with a further two be identified during the lead up to SPRITE+2. WP4 Drive innovation in research This WP concerns the initiation and production of high-quality impactful research. Through horizon scanning, sandpits and industry-led calls, we will steer ideas through an innovation pipeline ensuring SPRITE+2 is future focused. Cross cutting activities The first cross-cutting activity will accelerate the translation of TIPS research into policy and practice for public and private sector end uses. The second focuses on mechanisms to facilitate communication within our community. The experiences of SPRITE+ and the other DE Network+s demonstrate that it takes years of consistent and considerable effort for a new network to grow membership and develop productive relationships with stakeholders. In SPRITE+2 grant we would hit the ground running and maximise the impact of four additional years of funding. A successful track record, a well-established team, and a raft of ambitious new plans provide a solid foundation for strong delivery in 2023-27.

Overview: We propose a Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science. Data science is an emerging discipline that combines machine learning, databases, and other research areas in order to generate new knowledge from complex data. Interest in data science is exploding in industry and the public sector, both in the UK and internationally. Students from the Centre will be well prepared to work on tough problems involving large-scale unstructured and semistructured data, which are increasingly arising across a wide variety of application areas. Skills need: There is a significant industrial need for students who are well trained in data science. Skilled data scientists are in high demand. A report by McKinsey Global Institute cites a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists in the US; the situation in the UK is likely to be similar. A 2012 report in the Harvard Business Review concludes: "Indeed the shortage of data scientists is becoming a serious constraint in some sectors." A report on the Nature web site cited an astonishing 15,000% increase in job postings for data scientists in a single year, from 2011 to 2012. Many of our industrial partners (see letters of support) have expressed a pressing need to hire in data science. Training approach: We will train students using a rigorous and innovative four-year programme that is designed not only to train students in performing cutting-edge research but also to foster interdisciplinary interactions between students and to build students' practical expertise by interacting with a wide consortium of partners. The first year of the programme combines taught coursework and a sequence of small research projects. Taught coursework will include courses in machine learning, databases, and other research areas. Years 2-4 of the programme will consist primarily of an intensive PhD-level research project. The programme will provide students with breadth throughout the interdisciplinary scope of data science, depth in a specialist area, training in leadership and communication skills, and appreciation for practical issues in applied data science. All students will receive individual supervision from at least two members of Centre staff. The training programme will be especially characterized by opportunities for combining theory and practice, and for student-led and peer-to-peer learning.

Web Science is the science of the World Wide Web and its impact, both positive and negative, on society. The Web is a socio-technical mixture of the people, organizations, browsers, policies, applications, standards, data centres, shopping baskets and social network status updates that have come to shape our everyday lives and global futures. Web Science offers the insights necessary to understand the flow of data and knowledge around the globe, and the social and technical processes that can turn gigabytes and terabytes of raw data and into valuable new applications or evidence-based policy. Web Science helps us appreciate the threats to our online identities but also the opportunities of allowing our personal digital avatars to participate in new kinds of online businesses, online politics and online social engagements. Web Science offers a basis for innovating new personal practices and new social formations, and the ability to predict the consequences for the UK's digitally connected citizens. With an integrated understanding of these research areas, Web Science doctoral graduates will be able to innovate in the shaping of Web growth and Web policy, positioned to lead UK industry and government to reap the maximum economic and social value from its emerging digital economy. The Centre will recruit 13 excellent candidates annually from a variety of science, engineering, social science and humanities backgrounds. It will provide a cohort-based, 4-year doctoral programme with an initial training year that combines foundational aspects of Web Science research with technical aspects of the Web's architecture, an intensive training in interdisciplinarity and a grounding in innovation. A student-centred process of PhD research selection will begin at the end of the first semester with students starting to negotiate a potential project topic and multidisciplinary supervisor team with members of the Supervisor Forum. The CDT will offer a thorough programme of postgraduate research and professional training in co-ordination with the University Research and Graduate School. Complementary cohort-specific training will be offered to support and enhance the opportunities offered by the CDT (e.g. more intensive team building courses or communication training to prepare for specific industry events). The cohort experience is maintained throughout the PhD with frequent team-based events including collaborations with industry partners and international research exchanges. The Web Science CDT will use a multidisciplinary training approach that has successfully cut across traditional disciplinary silos in research practice, institutional structure and University administration. Its novel cohort-based training environment creates a socially cohesive and self-supporting group of students that successfully integrate their diverse disciplinary expertise in collaborative teams. Its programme of cross-cohort activities encourages mentorship, thus making the CDT self-sustaining and allowing it to amplify the research leadership of the supervisory staff. The net effect of these cohort benefits is to allow each student to undertake more challenges and to achieve more excellent training outcomes than possible in an individual training regime.

In the post-truth society we live in, experts must find novel ways to bring hard, factual data to citizens. Data must entertain as well as inform, and excite as well as educate. It must be built with sharing through social channels in mind and become part of our everyday activities and interactions with others. Data Stories will look at novel frameworks and technologies for bringing data to people through art, games, and storytelling. It will examine the impact that varying levels of localisation, topicalisation, participation, and shareability have on the engagement of the general public with factual evidence substantiated by different forms of digital content derived and repurposed from a variety of sources. It will deliver the tools and guidance that community and civic groups need to achieve broader participation and support for their initiatives at local and national level, and empower artists, designers, statisticians, analysts, and journalists to communicate with data in inspiring, informative ways. Our research hypotheses are as follows: 1. People engage more with data that is made relevant to them by localisation (data related to a specific geographic or geopolitical area of interest) and topicalisation (data about a particular entity, theme, or event). 2. People engage more with data and understand it better when said data is provided through interactive and participatory methods that help build a coherent narrative. 3. Data is more likely to be shared, and therefore reach more people, if shareability is built into its presentation. We will test these hypotheses and propose a data experience framework supported by models, algorithms, tools, and guidelines that help individuals and groups in creating bespoke, participatory content (for example, art, games, and stories, from data). The framework design will be informed by practice-led research in three main areas: (i) finding and enriching data; (ii) generating content; and (iii) sharing and engaging with content. It will draw upon methods from several disciplines: data and content management; machine learning; human data interaction; game design and gamification; crowdsourcing; online communities; social and political sciences; creative writing; and visual arts. The research will be prototypically showcased in four contexts: (i) within the Data as Culture programme at the ODI, working together with artists, designers, and open data activists; (ii) as part of the Datapolis project run by the ODI, which looks at the use of game interfaces to demystify data, with the support of game designers and local communities; (iii) in a fact-checking & journalism showcase together with the BBC, Full Fact, and the Parliament Digital Service; and (iv) via datathons and our own Data Stories challenge, run by WSI and the ODI, alongside initiatives such as Bath:Hacked and ODCamp UK, which will build community-relevant data narratives from open data enriched with other media, using creative writing techniques. Our proposal is well aligned with the EPSRC call, addressing several themes to varying degrees. The majority of the research is focused on enabling and facilitating content creation. Specifically, we look at providing intelligent tools to make it easier for people to create data experiences. The beneficiaries are artists, storytellers (such as journalists or analysts), game makers, and those in community and civil society groups wishing to use the modes of art, games, and narration to raise broader awareness of their work. The research will include using data to create immersive experiences through art, games and virtual reality environments that are built from structured data alongside other forms of digital content. Ultimately, these novel ways to get to know and interact with data, relevant to one's context and presented creatively and innovatively, will inform and educate the public, leading, to more sustainable digital ecosystems, and to a more inclusive society.