In recent years, considerable effort has gone into defining "responsible" AI research and innovation. Though progress is tangible, many sectors still lack the tools and capabilities for operationalising and implementing ethical principles. Furthermore, many project teams also find it challenging to know how to achieve goals, such as fairness or explainability, and communicate that they have been realised to other stakeholders of affected users. If ignored, these gaps could hamper efforts to build public trust in AI technologies or amplify existing societal harms and inequalities caused by biased and non-transparent sociotechnical systems. The Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance for Digital Twins (TEA-DT) project will develop an existing open-source platform, known as the Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance (TEA) Platform, which has been designed to help users navigate the process of addressing the aforementioned challenges. The TEA platform helps users and project teams define, operationalise, and implement ethical principles as goals to be assured, and also provides means for communicating how these goals have been realised. It achieves this by guiding individuals and project teams to identify the relevant set of claims and evidence that justify their chosen ethical principles, using a participatory approach that can be embedded throughout a project's lifecycle. The output of the platform—a user-generated assurance case—can be co-designed and vetted by various stakeholders, fostering trust through open, clear, and accessible communication. The TEA platform consists of three main elements: 1) an online tool for crafting well-reasoned arguments about ethical goals, 2) user-friendly guidance to foster critical thinking among teams and organisations, and 3) a supportive community infrastructure for sharing and discussing best practices. Although the platform is designed for a wide range of applications, the TEA-DT project will specifically focus on digital twins—virtual duplicates that are closely coupled to their physical counterpart to enable access to data and insights that can improve and optimise the way their real-world versions operate. More specifically, the project team will carry out scoping research on the assurance of digital twins within three different contexts: health, natural environment, and infrastructure. Although digital twins promise vast societal benefit in these areas, the fact that they increasingly rely on various forms of AI and often operate in safety-critical settings, means that several challenges must be addressed to ensure their ethical and trustworthy development. For instance, in health, questions about data privacy and ownership arise; environmental applications must tackle bias and fairness issues, complicated by global scales and differing laws; and in infrastructure, technical challenges concerning uncertainty communication give rise to additional needs for transparency and explainability. In collaboration with key partners and stakeholders, the TEA-DT project will carry out scoping research to co-develop exemplary assurance cases and enhance the platform's features to make it more user-friendly and integrated into workflows. By committing to open research and community-building principles, the project aims to a) systematically share best practices and standards, b) make the operationalisation of ethical principles more accessible and inclusive, and c) integrate the project sustainably with existing networks and communities.

Vehicles are increasingly connected, to each other (vehicle-to-vehicle), to the underlying road and service infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure) and, especially, connected to the people who use them, often via smart devices (vehicle-to-device). This emerging Internet of Vehicles (IoV) offers tremendous opportunities in transforming our transportation system. Real-time data about traffic allows more efficient traffic flows, increasingly autonomous vehicles promise greater safety and apps that seamlessly organise multi-modal journeys enable greener approaches to transportation, including car sharing or ride sharing schemes. The IoV can be seen as a microcosm for the Digital Economy. However, a key element of the IoV, often overlooked, is the citizen that should be central to the system and the prime motivator for its development. In such an approach, the IoV is focused around the needs of the individual to connect, in person, with a range of entities from families to colleagues to services, where physical distances must be overcome in timely ways to enable these connections. The foundation of the IoV is also, like the web economy more generally, founded on personal data. Data sharing on the Internet is used mainly as a currency in the sense that it could be replaced with money. Within the IoV, however, personal data is far more mission critical to the efficacy of the entire system: using personal travel plans enables improved traffic flows; storing relevant medical records on a vehicle allows better on-scene support during accidents, and learning a driver's interests and routines creates the opportunity for giving relevant contextual information. While this promises better safety, reduced carbon and increased travel efficiency, the IoV's reliance on personal data is also potentially its Achilles' heel. Large-scale sharing of data is constantly shown to be vulnerable to massive identity thefts (eg Sony's user database being hacked) & infrastructure threats (Stuxnet worm). Furthermore, connected devices themselves can be vulnerable to repurposing (eg Mirai DNS Denial of Service attack). The challenges to design an IoV that is human-centered and as effective and efficient as imagined are complex and multidisciplinary. Our team brings together the best, cross-cutting group of experts in intelligent automation and services, safety and security and human computer interaction research. Our approach is to use the platform to develop the UK's IoV thought leaders of the future by having them lead rapid, agile and responsive pilot projects that are co-created with our social science, legal and industrial partners who are committed to work with us from co-creation through co-design to technical and policy translation. In particular, the Platform approach allows us the flexibility necessary to connect this robust interdisciplinary expertise through our network to appropriate stakeholder groups to co-create and rapidly prototype and pilot ideas both for scientific and applied insights of value across our DE communities. To guide this co-creation, we have developed four x-cutting research strands, vital to framing a human-in-the-center IoV: services, interaction, automation and security. For example, open research challenges include: what is the least amount of personal data required to run a service/infrastructure safely? Can this balance be dynamically responsive to detected risk situations? How can greater transparency of data-use help incentivise citizen participation where personal data is required? How to design agents and interactions to intelligently assist both citizen and service to negotiate data use agreements so people will not feel the need to fake the system to protect their privacy? By using this platform to support interdisciplinary research leadership towards co-creation and delivery of novel, human-centered approaches to the IoV, the UK will lead IoV design to support better quality of life for all.

Our Vision is for climate resilient, net zero development of the transport system to be guided by systems analysis. When this vision is realised, decision-makers will have access to (and visualisation of) data that tells them how transport is performing against resilience, decarbonisation, and other objectives, now and in the future. We will deliver them systems models that will help to pinpoint vulnerabilities and quantify the risks of failure. This will enable them to perform 'what-if' analysis of proposed investments and to stress-test scenarios for the major uncertainties that will determine the performance of future transport systems, such as population growth, new materials and technologies and climate change. Our ambition is to deliver co-created research that plots viable pathways and solutions for delivering a resilient, net-zero transport system that works for people and communities by 2050. DARe will be the go-to Hub because we will engage widely and proactively, and provide the evidence, guidance and tools to decision-makers that will enable them to prioritise early interventions and investments. . Our research programme will take a system-of-systems led approach to transport which recognises and addresses the challenges at the three, distinct but critically interlinked, scales of national, regional and local. It will address the interwoven challenges of resilience and net zero, for both existing and new transport infrastructures, and identify and provide solutions for new vulnerabilities that may occur because of the net zero transition, including critical interdependencies with digital and power infrastructures. It will demonstrate the benefits and opportunities that come from reimagining and rethinking how our transport systems deliver mobility to both people and the goods and services our economy relies on, and will offer insight on how governance and policy can enable and drive these changes. We have shaped our research programme in consultation with our multiple civic partners in North East and North West England, Northumberland, Cambridgeshire & Heartland and Scotland as well as our strong cohort of additional partners. DARe will build on this by opening the partnership to all and proactively engage in a programme of co-creation events during the first nine months to jointly define scenarios and storylines leading us towards addressing the dual challenge of decarbonising our local regional and national transport infrastructures whilst increasing their resilience and adaptability in a context of climate change. The role and participation of the wider research community via the DARe Flexible Fund will be instrumental in delivering this. The DARe work programme comprises five integrated work packages (WPs), four focussed research activities plus a management WP. WP1 delivers the co-created transport futures storylines which shape the research activities of the hub and develops the storylines to stress-test solutions across the three spatial scales, contextualised by the systems-of-systems interactions between transport-power-digital critical infrastructures. WP2 provides a new, transferable open-source modelling framework that will be co-developed with and made available to the wider community as a legacy of DARe. WP3 will address the physical implications for infrastructure assets and how their climate-perturbed performance will impact whole-life management. WP4 will provide insights into the wider implications and real-world impacts of the storylines when considering the policy, socio-economic, behavioural and land use planning aspects of the hub. WP0 will be dedicated to hub management, governance and engagement.

Digital twins are a fusion of digital technologies considered by many leading advocates to be revolutionary in nature. Digital twins offer exciting new possibilities across a wide range of sectors from health, environment, transport, manufacturing, defence, and infrastructure. By connecting the virtual and physical worlds (e.g. cyber-physcial), digital twins are able to better support decisions, extend operational lives, and introduce multiple other efficiencies and benefits. As a result, digital twins have been identified by government, professional bodies and industry, as a key technology to help address many of the societal challenges we face. To date, digital twin (DT) innovation has been strongly driven by industry practitioners and commercial innovators. As would be expected with any early-adoption approach, projects have been bespoke & often isolated, and so there is a need for research to increase access, lower entry costs and develop interconnectivity. Furthermore, there are several major gaps in underpinning academic research relating to DT. The academic push has been significantly lagging behind the industry pull. As a result, there is an urgent need for a network that will fill gaps in the underpinning research for topics such as; uncertainty, interoperability, scaling, governance & societal effects. In terms of existing networking activities, there are several industry-led user groups and domain-specific consortia. However, there has never been a dedicated academic-led DT network that brings together academic research teams across the entire remit of UKRI with user-led groups. DTNet+ will address this gap with a consortium which has both sufficient breadth and depth to deliver transformative change.

Rapidly developing digital technologies, together with social and business trends, are providing huge opportunities for innovation in product and service markets, and also in government processes. Technology developments drive socioeconomic and behavioural changes and vice versa, and the rate of change in these makes tracking and responding to high-speed developments a significant challenge in public and private sectors alike. Agile governance and policy-making for emerging technologies is likely to become a key theme in strategic thinking for the public and private sectors. Particular trends that are challenging now, and will increasingly challenge society include developments in technologies on the outskirts of the internet. These include Artificial Intelligence, not just in the cloud but in Edge computing, and in Internet of Things devices and networks. Alongside and in conjunction with this ecosystem, is Distributed Ledger Technology. Together this ensemble of technologies will enable innovations that promote productivity, like peer-to-peer dynamic contracts and other decision processes, with or without human sight or intervention. However, the ensemble's autonomy, proliferation and use in critical applications, makes the potential for hacking and similar attacks very significant, with the likelihood of them growing to become an issue of strategic national importance. To address this challenge, and to preserve the immense economic and productivity benefits that will come from the successful deployment and application of digital technologies 'at the edge', a focused initiative is needed. Ideally, this will use the UK's current platform of experience in the safe and secure application of the Internet of Things. The contributors to this platform include PETRAS partners, and several other centres of excellence around the UK. It is therefore proposed to build an inclusive PETRAS 2 Research Centre with national strategic value, on the established and successful platform of the PETRAS Hub. This will inherit its governance and management models, which have demonstrated the ability to coordinate and convene collaboration across 11 universities and 110 industrial and government User Partners, but will importantly step up its mission and inclusivity through open research calls for new and existing academic partners. PETRAS 2 will maintain an agile and shared research agenda that views social and physical science challenges with equal measure, and covers a broad range of Technology Readiness Levels, particularly those close to market. It will operate as a virtual centre, providing a magnet for collaboration for user partners and a single expert voice for government. User partner engagement is likely to be strong following the successes of the current PETRAS programme, which has raised over £1m in cash contributions from partners during 2018. The new PETRAS 2 'Secure Digital Technologies at the Edge' methodology will inherit the best of PETRAS, including open calls to the UK research community and a partnership-building fund that allows a responsive approach to opportunities that emerge from existing and new user and academic partnerships. PETRAS 2 will be driven by sectoral cybersecurity priorities while retaining a discovery research agenda to horizon-scan and develop understanding of new threats and opportunities. The scope of projects and the associated Innovate UK SDTaP demonstrators, spans early to late TRLs and aims to put knowledge into real user partner practice. Furthermore, the development of many early career researchers through PETRAS 2 research activities should lead to a step change in our national capability and capacity to address this highly dynamic area of socio-technical opportunity and risk.