The literature on social networks in economics, both empirical and theoretical has been growing substantially in the last few decades. Much of this growth can be attributed to the proliferation of online social networks. Theory papers have provided important models for the process of network formation and the spread of influence within networks (Jackson and Wolinsky, 1996; Mutuswami and Winter, 2002; Kempe et al., 2003; Ballester et al., 2006; Jackson, 2011). Empirical papers used existing data as well as field experiments to study how behavior diffuses within a network (Ichino and Maggi, 2000; Sacerdote, 2001; Mas and Moretti, 2009; Banerjee et al., 2013). There is also emerging literature on social media platforms (Ghosh and McAfee, 2011; Ashish, and Ronaghi, 2012; Ghosh and Hummel, 2014). Most of the Graph/Game theory literature of social media treats the network structure as given and fixed and focuses on the flow of information through the network and on users' strategic considerations. The role of the platform itself is typically left un-modeled. Our objective in this project is to develop and analyze models of social media using primarily tools in Game Theory and Graph Theory. Our approach is different from much of the existing literature in that we treat the platform's owners/managers as a major player in the social media game - one that has an enormous influence on the activity that takes place in the network. This influence arises through a certain degree of control over the structure of the social network and almost full control over users' available actions. Our modeling efforts will not only focus on users' motives and preferences. The motives and preferences of the platform itself are equally important. These preferences critically depend on the platform's business model. They can be aligned with users' preferences in some business models and conflicting with users' preferences in others. We note here that platforms' preferences and interests are key elements in models that aspire to provide policy implications. If platforms and users have identical interests there is little need for intervention. It is when these interests are conflicting that intervention by governments or international organizations in certain circumstances might be required. Our first objective will be to identify areas in which the interests of the platform and its users are conflicting and areas in which they coincide. We will also study mechanisms and rules for social media that can bring about Pareto improvements in SM content quality or substantial improvement to users' welfare with no major revenue losses to the platform. More specific questions we plan to address are: What are the optimal network structures from the point of view of the platform and what sort of implications such structure might have on the distribution of users' right to express themselves and their overall welfare? How do social media platforms based on undirected graphs (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn) differ from those based on directed graphs (Twitter and Instagram) in terms of users' welfare? What is the optimal policy for the flow of content in the network (e.g., feed news policy) from the point of view of both the platform and users? What are the incentives behind users' spreading abusive content and fake news through the network, and how can such ill incentives be mitigated? Our project is designed to have a substantial policy impact through collaboration with organizations such as Ofcom, FCC. Promisingly enough the initiative for such collaboration came from Ofcom following the appearance of our discussion paper on the topic. We were invited to present our work at Ofcom and we are now collaborating with Ofcom in organizing a conference on this subject where key policy people from Ofcom, the FCC, Facebook and Google have confirmed their participation. We plan to hold regular meetings with people at Ofcom during the implementation of the project.

We have yet to experience a complete lifespan in the Digital Age, from conception to death in old age. Those who have grown up interacting with digital technology from a very early age are still young, whilst older technology adopters have identities that pre-date the Digital Age, populated with paper trails of memories. Many citizens have only a limited awareness of the permanency and consequence of posting in public and extended social circles. Digital posts from student or teenage years reflecting opinions or behaviour that seemed socially appropriate at that time may not reflect well in future professional life. Digitally mediated interactions produced in life may develop an undesirable perspective if they linger after physical death. The lifelong digital trails generated through our digitally mediated interactions, including online, echo our 'offline' lives, but unlike a physical life, the Digital Lifespan can persist indefinitely, and the rich personal context it provides can be harnessed in ways an individual might not expect or desire. In this EPSRC-funded research, we will produce unique insights into the digital lifespan of UK citizens both now and in a future where our young Digital Natives approach adulthood, become parents, retire, and pass away. To help generate these insights, we will first chart the unmapped territory of the "Digital Lifespan" as it is now in the UK, exploring the ways in which virtual and physical aspects of our lives converge, diverge and clash. This chart will be grounded in a series of in-depth studies with UK citizens at four transition points in their lives: approaching adulthood, becoming parents, retiring, and bereavement. The chart that we create will guide us as we look into a future where citizens increasingly live out their lives through digitally mediated interactions. We will explore the implications of this future with individuals, policymakers, legislators and industry representatives. The knowledge and insight developed into issues surrounding ownership and management of citizens' Digital Lifespans will be used to raise digital literacy. New technologies will be designed and developed, bringing personal digital content together in one place to create a far richer picture than that afforded by currently available tools. Our new technologies will automatically draw out the personal context of such content, making inferential links and distilling the impressions that citizens present of themselves through digital media. These distilled impressions will be reflected back to individuals, raising digital literacy by promoting awareness of how individuals' digital identities are (or will in future be) represented online over their entire lifespan. Further these novel technologies will equip citizens with ways to manage the impression that they give. Beyond individual citizens, our work will inform educators, policymakers and legislators providing a deeper understanding of what it means to live as a UK citizen in a Digital Age.

The increasing popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices, where the end user has access to a host of rich multimedia functionality, means that the current mobile network architecture is struggling to meet surging data demands. Smartphone ownership in the UK alone has risen from 38% of the population in early 2010 to 60% in 2013 with the ONS reporting that over 32% of adults now access the Internet using their smartphone every day. This figure is expected to grow significantly in the coming years with Cisco predicting that worldwide demand for mobile data traffic will outstrip fixed data, reaching 11.2 Exabytes per month by 2017. Although the global rollout of 4G networks is well underway, it is unlikely that that 4G alone will be able to service the growing data requirements of mobile users. Furthermore, while voice, data, and compressed streaming media are now the norm, it is future social networking applications which will undoubtedly present mobile network designers and operators with their greatest challenge. Both Google and Samsung, through their Glass and Galaxy Gear based concepts respectively, have given us a glimpse of some of the exciting new pervasive technologies that will push the boundaries on the maximum rate at which data can be communicated over mobile networks. For example, using Google Glass, users will no longer just shop and download compressed audio and video, instead they will be immersed into a completely new augmented reality in which they can share their immediate perception and senses with friends and colleagues in the cloud. While this technology will revolutionise social networking it will add further stress to already overburdened mobile networks. To avoid future congestion caused by this huge influx of data, a major change in the way mobile networks are setup and operated is required. However, considerable academic, industrial and regulatory challenges remain and this is the focus of the proposed research programme. To help overcome the future "communications bottleneck" in mobile systems, this project proposes a new paradigm for ultra-high capacity mobile networks by simultaneously and jointly addressing the bandwidth problem and the dynamic network management issues associated with device-to-device communications. Combining the complementary expertise of research teams in Queens University Belfast and Cardiff University, this project will focus on understanding and exploiting incentivised, multimode user equipment operating as an ultra-high capacity underlay network featuring real-time opportunistic adaptive routing all overseen by a context aware mobile network infrastructure.

Every day millions of citizens do something creative, from knitting and genealogy to photography and choirs. These creative citizens, some organised in groups and networks, some not, are the bedrock of the creative economy. As such, they underpin the intangible assets of the "knowledge economy" upon which the UK depends for its prosperity. At present, there is much that we do not know about our creative citizens. Why do they do what they do? What is the value of their creativity, to them as individuals and to their communities? How is their potential changed by the emergence of communications technologies which permit on-line social networking? Does inequality of digital access undermine this new creative citizenship? Are today's creative citizens capable of providing more local and flexible services, previously delivered by more remote public and private sector organisations? If their work is valued, what interventions and policies would facilitate their growth? This research seeks to answer these questions by examining three manifestations of creative citizenship: - hyperlocal publishing groups, writing neighbourhood news most often as a blog site have started to emerge in scores of communities around the UK, sometimes in response to the scaling back of traditional media; - community-led design, which is increasingly deployed as a means of ensuring that new buildings and other products reflect the needs, creativity and aspirations of the people who will use them; - creative practitioner communities, which take many forms: here we explore the value-creation that arises between relatively formal communities of this kind and the growing highly informal networks of individual creative citizens, many built around online communications platforms. Our aim in studying these cases is to generate data and insight about each case, but also to answer the more general questions set out above: what is the value of their work, to these citizens as individuals, to their communities and to wider civic goals? The background to our interest in creative citizenship arises from the way that on-line communications have enabled inviduals and small groups of individuals to engage more frequently, deftly and in greater depth with many types of organisation. Today, many companies design their products and services in close dialogue with users: this is routine for, say, video games developers, but it is also increasingly true of "smart" manufacturers of cars, toys and other consumer-focused industrial products, using Web2.0 technology. This shift from a "user pays" to a "user makes" approach supports the possibility of a growth in smaller-scale, more flexible and voluntary community services. Nesta, one of our partners in this project, has a laboratory for public service design based upon these principles. Glass-House Community Led Design, another partner, specialises in connecting designers and the widest possible range of stakeholders. The research will produce:- - improved data on the value, scale and potential of UK hyperlocal publishers and how they interact with traditional media; plus working with our partner (Talk About Local) sharp insights into the conditions likeliest to support the development of successful hyperlocals and the tools needed to achieve this; - understanding the value, potential and practicalities of community-led design, with a particular focus upon understanding the potential and limitations of digital media; - an evaluation of everyday, "at home" creative citizenship which provides an indication of its scale and potential, along with insight into the most effective ways of providing gateways between the work of these lone or loosely networked creative citizens and more formal organisations and structures. Our findings will be of value to policy-makers concerned with the development of the UK creative economy, along with strong communities of place and interest.

Understanding the behaviour of the Internet with its inherent complexity and scale is essential when designing new Internet systems and applications. Simulation, emulation, and test-bed experiments are important techniques for investigating large-scale complex Internet systems. It is now widely recognised that classical theoretical/simulation scalability studies for Internet research are unreliable without relevant and representative supporting experimental evidence. This is increasingly important with the emergence of 5G, cloud services and IoT, which lead to at least 2 orders increase in connection capacity requirements and 3 orders of additional devices that require Internet connectivity. Great progress has been made in the UK over the years on the development of communications laboratories infrastructure in ICT domains such as optical & wireless, signal processing, networks and distributed systems, where the UK is internationally leading. However, UK telecommunications research remains largely segregated in independent optical, wireless or computer network research labs, so researchers very rarely have the opportunity to experiment across the boundaries between these disciplines. Due to the limitations of performing research in discipline-specific facilities, the current UK ICT research output does not address realistic end-to-end Internet systems INITIATE will create a new, specialist distributed test-bed to facilitate the increasingly large and complex experimentation required for future Internet research. This will be achieved by interconnecting operational, state-of-the-art operational laboratories at the Universities of Bristol, Lancaster (UoLan), Edinburgh (UoEd) and Kings College London (KCL). These laboratories will contribute many key capabilities for Internet research including optical networks, wireless/RF communications, the Internet of Things (IoT), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and cloud computing. Therefore INITIATE will offer the combined capability to the UK Internet research and innovation communities as a single distributed test-bed able to support the increasingly complex experimentation required for future Internet research. For example, INITIATE will enable for the first time experimentally driven research addressing the integration of multi-domain and multi-technology 5G and IoT access platforms with high-speed optical transport and investigate full system optimization strategies. Uniquely, INITIATE will also be able to integrate end-users as part of the experimental process and support user driven scenarios such as mobile edge computing, data visualization and autonomous mobility. The applicants have an outstanding worldwide reputation for creating, maintaining and operating research test-beds. They have repeatedly enabled remote access to their laboratories for experimenters and they have worked in multiple initiatives involving interconnection of research test-beds either locally, across the consortium partners or at a regional, national and international scale. Examples are: Bristol Is Open (UoB), TOUCAN (EPSRC involving UoB, UoEd, UoLan), NDFIS (UoB, UCL, SOTON, Cambridge), wireless mesh networks for rural communities (UoLan) and the Ofcom whitespace trial environment (KCL), among others. Internationally, the partners have been involved in numerous Future Internet infrastructure projects such as OFELIA & Fed4FIRE (EU FIRE), FIBRE & FUTEBOL (EU-Brazil), STRAUSS (EU-Japan) and GEANT, where they have delivered test-bed infrastructure, developed experimental control and federation tools and supported user experiments. INITIATE will create an environment for delivering excellence in Internet research, educational and industrial innovation and cross-discipline interaction through experimentally driven national collaboration. The project will also support academia as well as industry and SMEs and will deliver a sustainable engagement model.