The aim for this project is to explore how we can define and foster a healthy relationship between people, the internet and things using the ethos and practices of craft, informed by knowledge within the humanities, augmented with technical know-how and leveraging citizen engagement/collaboration. The internet is a powerful force in society. Since the inception of the World Wide Web, the internet was held up as a place of wonder, creativity and opportunity. Yet it is currently in a very problematic position: fake news, centralisation of power, the dominant control of a select number of technology giants, disinformation, the weaponization of social media, the undermining of democratic processes, mass manipulation of citizens, cyber crimes and abuse of personal data are internationally recognised as areas of significant concern. As more and more everyday objects become internet-connected, become part of the Internet of Things (IoT), these questions of trust, privacy, security and abuse of data will become more pressing, as anxieties over the eavesdropping capabilities of smart speakers such as Alexa demonstrate. Furthermore, it is widely recognised, and even promoted, that industrial design has led to a step-change in the way that digital technology companies are able to significantly amplify the reach of their products (Apple being the most obvious example). Yet this has led to a wholly unsustainable, homogeneous, global culture of two-year life-cycle devices and an internet that is being 'colonised' by a handful of US and Chinese companies. These issues are not ones that can be addressed exclusively with technological innovation and instrumental solutions. They require initiatives that consider the social and ethical implications and consequences (intended or not) of the underlying ethos and structure on which internet businesses are founded. We will be partnering with Mozilla, and inspired by their Internet Health Report, we are challenging existing 'unhealthy' ways in which the IoT is being conceptualised and implemented (i.e. privileging economic business models over user agency, lacking openness, transparency and legibility) and provide an alternative 'healthier' trajectory for IoT development. While design often aspires to ubiquity and standardisation, craft thrives on specificity and bespokeness, which is often rooted in localism, and embodies the values of authenticity, provenance and care. Through working at a local level, in terms of both consideration and production, we seek to bring new perspectives and methods for conceptualizing and creating forms of IoT, embodying our craft ethos. As such we will create compelling examples of context specific, meaningful and trusted forms IoT in order to explore and understand the ways that we can change current trajectories across the sector. Based in the North East of England, this project will work closely with local groups, businesses, organisations and individuals, alongside experts from design, craft and the Humanities to critique existing IoT offerings. Craft centred explorations will result in radical reimaginings of what an IoT artifact might be and do, falling outside established IoT tropes (E.g. Amazon Echo, Google Nest, LG's Alexa powered fridge). These will inform participatory co-design activities and the production of a series of new IoT devices that participants will live with over several months. The project will investigate four scales of relationship between individual people, the internet and things: Person + Body, Person + Home, Person + Neighbourhood, Person + Town/Rural region. These contexts of scale will enable the investigation of meaningful and sustainable forms of relationship between an individual and their wider environment at a number of levels, ultimately providing a resource of radical new exemplars of IoT and a roadmap to a healthier digital future (i.e. recommendations for new approaches to, and conceptualisations of IoT).

Key exchange protocols address a crucial problem in security: how to securely distribute cryptographic keys to remote users. Since the seminal paper by Diffie and Hellman in 1976, this subject has been extensively studied for over thirty years. Yet, designing a secure key exchange protocol is notoriously difficult. Many proposed schemes have been found with security flaws, including those specified in the international standards. Heuristic designs based on ad-hoc arguments rather than rigorous security proofs are commonly seen as bad practice. However, several "provably secure" key exchange protocols also turn out to be insecure. So far, almost all key exchange protocols in the past have sidestepped an important engineering principle, namely the sixth principle -- i.e., "Do not assume that a message you receive has a particular form unless you can check this" (Anderson & Needham, 1995). The importance of the sixth principle has been widely acknowledged by the security community for many years, but in reality, key exchange protocol designers have generally abandoned this prudent principle on the grounds of efficiency -- following the sixth principle would require using Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP), which is considered too computationally expensive. However, discarding ZKP has the serious consequence of degrading the security, as evident by many reported attacks in the past. All these indicate a gap in the field. In the project, we propose to bridge the gap by combing the sixth principle and the Public Key Juggling (PKJ) technique. The PKJ technique has proved useful in tacking several important security problems in the past. It can be integrated with the sixth principle in a perfect match: the former serves to optimize the protocol efficiency while the latter underpins the protocol robustness. In the proposed research, we will apply the sixth principle and the juggling technique to design new key exchange protocols that are robust and efficient. We will develop new formal models to capture the sixth principle, which has been largely neglected by existing model specifications. Finally, we will aim to promote robust and efficient key exchange protocols to the international standards. In particular, our J-PAKE key exchange protocol has stood years of cryptanalysis and has been deployed in practical applications. Its standardization is a natural step forward and will benefit the security industry in general.

The Centre for Digital Citizens (CDC) will address emerging challenges of digital citizenship, taking an inclusive, participatory approach to the design and evaluation of new technologies and services that support 'smart', 'data-rich' living in urban, rural and coastal communities. Core to the Centre's work will be the incubation of sustainable 'Digital Social Innovations' (DSI) that will ensure digital technologies support diverse end-user communities and will have long-lasting social value and impact beyond the life of the Centre. Our technological innovations will be co-created between academic, industrial, public and third sector partners, with citizens supporting co-creation and delivery of research. Through these activities, CDC will incubate user-led social innovation and sustainable impact for the Digital Economy (DE), at scale, in ways that have previously been difficult to achieve. The CDC will build on a substantial joint legacy and critical mass of DE funded research between Newcastle and Northumbria universities, developing the trajectory of work demonstrated in our highly successful Social Inclusion for the Digital Economy (SIDE) hub, our Digital Civics Centre for Doctoral Training and our Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC). The CDC is a response to recent research that has challenged simplified notions of the smart urban environment and its inhabitants, and highlighted the risks of emerging algorithmic and automated futures. The Centre will leverage our pioneering participatory design and co-creative research, our expertise in digital participatory platforms and data-driven technologies, to deliver new kinds of innovation for the DE, that empowers citizens. The CDC will focus on four critical Citizen Challenge areas arising from our prior work: 'The Well Citizen' addresses how use of shared personal data, and publicly available large-scale data, can inform citizens' self-awareness of personal health and wellbeing, of health inequalities, and of broader environmental and community wellbeing; 'The Safe Citizen' critically examines online and offline safety, including issues around algorithmic social justice and the role of new data technologies in supporting fair, secure and equitable societies; 'The Connected Citizen' explores next-generation citizen-led digital public services, which can support and sustain civic engagement and action in communities, and engagement in wider socio-political issues through new sustainable (openly managed) digital platforms; and 'The Ageless Citizen' investigates opportunities for technology-enhanced lifelong learning and opportunities for intergenerational engagement and technologies to support growth across an entire lifecourse. CDC pilot projects will be spread across the urban, rural and costal geography of the North East of England, embedded in communities with diverse socio-economic profiles and needs. Driving our programme to address these challenges is our 'Engaged Citizen Commissioning Framework'. This framework will support citizens' active engagement in the co-creation of research and critical inquiry. The framework will use design-led 'initiation mechanisms' (e.g. participatory design workshops, hackathons, community events, citizen labs, open innovation and co-production platform experiments) to support the co-creation of research activities. Our 'Innovation Fellows' (postdoctoral researchers) will engage in a 24-month social innovation programme within the CDC. They will pilot DSI projects as part of highly interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder teams, including academics and end-users (e.g. Community Groups, NGO's, Charities, Government, and Industry partners). The outcome of these pilots will be the development of further collaborative bids (Research Council / Innovate UK / Charity / Industry funded), venture capital pitches, spin-outs and/or social enterprises. In this way the Centre will act as a catalyst for future innovation-focused DE activity.

1) To create the next generation of Natural Language Processing experts, stimulating the growth of NLP in the public and private sectors domestically and internationally. A pool of NLP talent will provide incentives for (existing) companies to expand their operations in the UK and lead to start-ups and new products. 2) To deliver a programme which will have a transformative effect on the students that we train and on the field as a whole, developing future leaders and producing cutting-edge research in both methodology and applications. 3) To give students a firm grounding in the challenge of working with language in a computational setting and its relevance to critical engineering and scientific problems in our modern world. The Centre will also train them in the key programming, engineering, and machine learning skills necessary to solve NLP problems. 4) To attract students from a broad range of backgrounds, including computer science, AI, maths and statistics, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology and provide an interdisciplinary cohort training approach. The latter involves taught courses, hands-on laboratory projects, research-skills training, and cohort-based activities such as specialist seminars, workshops, and meetups. 5) To train students with awareness of user design, ethics and responsible research in order to design systems that improve user statisfaction, treat users fairly, and increase the uptake of NLP technology across cultures, social groups and languages.