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.

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.

Horizon is a multidisciplinary centre for Digital Economy (DE) research and impact. We balance the development of new technologies to capture and analyse human data, with explorations of how these can be used to deliver powerful experiences to people, with an awareness and understanding of the human and social values that must underpin these. We follow a user-centred approach, undertaking research in the wild based on principles of open innovation. In its first phase, Horizon has established a core team of over 50 researchers and has reached out to build a wider network of 35 academic and 200 industry, public and third-sector partners. We have established a Centre for Doctoral Training and inaugurated the DE All Hands series of conferences and national DE CDT Summer School. World-class scientific outputs in diverse disciplines have been balanced with economic, cultural and societal impact. This proposal builds on this critical mass to enable a step-change in Horizon's translational research and impact. We respond to the changing nature of the digital economy as it matures, as the social, physical and digital become blended and as human data becomes an increasingly valuable asset. We offer a vision in which human data enables the creation and delivery of highly personal experiences. We propose to address three major challenges. The first is to establish new technologies that collect and interpret our human data in a more transparent way. The second is to be able to better understand and design new kinds of experiences that employ these technologies to promote the values of personal fulfilment, wellbeing and sustainability. The third is to address key ethical challenges around design for privacy and new models of ownership. We will work closely with a range of external partners whose interests span: computing and analytics; social policy; and diverse sectors of the DE including creative industries, retail, fast moving consumer goods, finance, energy, transportation and healthcare. We will engage these through a programme of agile translational research projects. These will be integrated into an overarching strategic impact campaign that revolves around three flagships. In turn, these will be supported by two further programmes; one targeted at sustaining the wider DE community and the second at developing the capacity of our researchers to deliver translational research and impact.

The proposed network addresses the 'Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities' Highlight Notice. It will explore the challenges and opportunities posed by the 'infinite archive', in the shape of the web and other digital resources which have become an increasingly important component in all fields of academic enquiry in recent years. The impact of these 'infinite' digital resources on the processes of academic research are so far not well understood; neither is the role methods of enquiry specific to the humanities could play in the creation and exploitation of next-generation digital resources and repositories. The network will examine: the ways in which the infinite archive structures the recording, representation, and replay of digital records, how we analyse evidence; the production and communication of knowledge within the infinite archive; how the analytical and methodological skills specific to the humanities may have to change to accommodate the infinite archive; and, finally, how the humanities can transform current data management processes and increase the value of existing and future digital assets. In Phase 1, the network will focus on three fundamental protocols of academic research in the context of the infinite archive - data gathering and retrieval, knowledge preservation and expertise, methodology and interpretation; Phase 2 will build on the outcomes of Phase 1 to explore the potential and role of practical applications in the digital economy. The network is designed to include a range of research and engagement cultures and mechanisms to help break down boundaries between the individual constituencies and explore the potential for innovative knowledge exchange. It draws on existing collaborative partnerships - regionally, nationally, and internationally, within academia and with public and private partners. It benefits from collaboration with US partners conducting world-leading research in the field of digital humanities; from the expertise and support of nationally and internationally leading public and private industry partners; and from strong intellectual, technical and financial support from the Horizon Digital Economy Hub based at Nottingham. To foster exchange between these groups, the network will employ traditional modes of interaction alongside more innovative forms of engagement, chosen specifically to bridge existing communication gaps between the arts and sciences, and between academics and commercial partners.

The UK and global research and development communities have made tremendous strides in electronic device prototyping. Platforms that support conventional electronics have become well established, and the emerging potential of printed electronics and related additive technologies is clear. Together these support fast and versatile prototyping of the form and function of digital devices that underpin novel interactive data-driven experiences, including the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable technologies and more. However, challenges remain to realise their full potential. Interactive devices prototyped in labs and makerspaces implement novel capabilities and materials which require holistic manufacturing capability beyond simulation of conventional electronics. Even for conventional bench designs, to make the transition from prototype to product they need to be suitably robust, safe, long-lived, performant and cost-effective to deliver value as products - whether as a series of one-off mass customised devices, low-volume batches, or mass-produced artefacts. Unfortunately, the transition from prototype to production is not a natural one for end users; many ideas with potential don't progress beyond the first few designs. Democratising access to device production is the key next step in underpinning scalability and entrepreneurship in digital systems. We propose a Network+ of universities, research organisations and commercial enterprises who share the common goal of improving the transition from prototyping to production of digital devices. The Pro2 community will build upon the design and fabrication expertise of its researchers and practitioners to facilitate a deep synthesis of established principles, techniques and technologies and develop new concepts that span computer science, engineering and manufacturing. We will complement the on-going global investment into a variety of 'digital manufacturing' topics - including the UK's Made Smarter initiative - by tackling the challenge of progressively and cost-effectively transitioning from unconventional and single digital device prototypes, through tens of copies that can verify a design and validate utility, to batch production of hundreds to thousands of units. In prototyping, as additive manufacture and printed electronics converge further, in unconventional fields such as soft robotics and 4D printing, we need to identify how to integrate and optimise tools into workflows that support digital behaviour across materials, scales and functionalities. In production, smoothing the path from one-off microcontroller prototypes to scale-up is a significant challenge, and requires new processes and tools as well as reconfiguration of business models and services. Our vision for 'organic scaling' from prototype to production will allow faster exploration and exploitation of these digital device concepts and applications. This will accelerate the adoption of IoT, the growth of new consumer electronics markets, and more generally underpin the data-driven digital transformation of many industries. It will enable new research directions, create new business opportunities and drive economic growth.