The project will develop detailed insight into the opportunistic and situational context in which sexual harassment and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) in the night-time economy (NTE) is perpetrated in Newcastle upon Tyne. The project engages existing and new stakeholders through working with statutory partners, new grassroots community projects, and key informants from victims and mens' groups. Through its work the project will forge new partnerships and important opportunities for knowledge exchange. These will 'fill the gap' in terms of understanding the dynamics and character of the significant and complex criminal and harms associated with this emerging aspect of VAWG.This will help identify new opportunities for preventive intervention and develop insight to inform awareness-raising campaigns that can seek to challenge normative cultures that enable offending and harmful behaviours to occur. The project will develop detailed insight into the opportunistic and situational context in which sexual harassment and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) in the night-time economy (NTE) is perpetrated in Newcastle upon Tyne. The project engages existing and new stakeholders through working with statutory partners, new grassroots community projects, and key informants from victims and mens' groups. Through its work the project will forge new partnerships and important opportunities for knowledge exchange. These will 'fill the gap' in terms of understanding the dynamics and character of the significant and complex criminal and harms associated with this emerging aspect of VAWG.This will help identify new opportunities for preventive intervention and develop insight to inform awareness-raising campaigns that can seek to challenge normative cultures that enable offending and harmful behaviours to occur.

Cyber-physical risks pose new challenges to the UK security and defence community. Nation state actors are increasingly equipping themselves with tools capable of causing damage to cyber-physical systems. During times of elevated threat, e.g. the Ukraine war, it has become common for such tools to be used in the theatre of conflict, but the risk that they will be used outside the affected region also increases, as does the risk that they will fall into the hands of non-state actors and used more widely than against conventional cyber-physical systems. At the same time, society as a whole is developing a growing reliance on social-media, apps, connected IoT devices and both AI and Mixed Reality. By itself, this also has major security implications leading to high volumes of new crimes that need addressing but, when used in combination with cyber-physical attacks, a qualitatively different form of attack is experienced, known as a hybrid threat because of its similarity to the hybrid cyber/kinetic warfare that has emerged as a feature of recent conflicts. Our team will create a cohort of leaders equipped with specialist skills specifically adapted to tomorrow's cyber-physical risks. They will learn how to (1) manage risks that develop jointly across the cyber and physical domains, (2) reduce risks in one domain by intervening in the other domain, (3) understand how criminal groups protect their interest by operating across domains, and (4) pre-empt the propagation of unintended consequences from one domain to the next. These future leaders will also undertake an intense programme of activities designed to nurture key complementary skills. The eXchange, Lead!, Get it Done, and Next Step schemes will be shaped with our industry partners to address important gaps highlighted in a recent government report: "40% of businesses reported that cybersecurity job applicants are deficient in their complementary skills". Beyond fostering technical expertise, the CDT will help students and partners develop an acute awareness of the wider issues and dilemmas posed by all such work in democratic societies. To deliver an exceptional learning experience, we bring a powerful group of industry partners and academic experts from the engineering, natural and social sciences within a single-site research training centre in London. Academically excellent and pro-active within and between cohorts, the 50+ CDT students will specialise in a range of scientific techniques from at least two of the following four 'cyber-physical risk' themes. These were selected in consultation with students and partners based on their relevance, attractiveness and employment opportunities: 1. Futures: forecast how future socio-technical trends will shape the geopolitical implications of cyber-physical risk, understand how to co-design effective control and mitigation measures for different legal, technical, and policy contexts in order to support societal resilience. 2. Cyber-physical systems: support regulation of IoT devices, detect 'below the radar' attacks against cyber-physical control systems; contribute to the resilience of critical infrastructures. 3. Online Communication: prevent the misuse of social media for disinformation campaigns, detect incitement to hate crime in games, analyse crime related communication on the dark web, etc. 4. Simulation and Interaction: develop and apply simulation technologies (e.g., digital twins, VR, XR) for the study of human behaviour in a range of cyber-physical risk scenarios. EPSRC areas directly relevant to the following themes: Artificial intelligence technologies, Building a secure and resilient world, Digital security by design, Digital signal processing, Human communication in information and communication technologies, Human-computer interaction, ICT networks and distributed systems, Image and vision computing, Natural language processing, Operational research, Pervasive and ubiquitous computing.

The proposed project provides a near real-time evidence base to inform the police approach to the apparent surge in domestic violence and abuse (DA) triggered by the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK. Police case file data from seven diverse police forces are pooled to track the impact of the pandemic on DA, analysing changes in the risk factors, frequency, nature and profile of DA reported to police. These changes are mapped closely to shifts in the restrictions imposed during lockdown, transitional phases and post lockdown, when DA calls to police are expected to spike. The proposed study is the largest and most rigorous analysis of police DA case file data conducted anywhere in the world to date. The statistical analysis is complemented by regular focused semi-structured phone interviews with police officers, to identify emerging challenges and best practice in the frontline response to DA. The mixed-methods study addresses urgent questions on the impact of Covid-19 on DA, which may have significant implications for the complex task of accurate police risk assessment, victim safeguarding, and criminal prosecution as the Covid-19 pandemic evolves. The Home Office, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), and College of Policing (CoP) are project partners and constitute direct links to critical decision-makers and provide direct routes to impact. A timely and evidence-based development of a police strategy is urgently needed to address the emerging DA crisis and its devastating, long-lasting consequences for victims and their children.