Quantum Information Processing employs the laws of quantum mechanics which apply to individual atoms or photons for example to advance the technology underlying current computers and communication systems such as the internet in an essential way. If realized it would allow for much faster computation and would for example threathen the security of current cryptographic schemes for secret communication. It also offers the potential many novel communication schemes including novel cryptographic schemes that are unconditionally secure, even against quantum information processing. A variety of candidate technologies, such as ion traps, optical lattices, quantum dots, superconducting devices and in particular photons, are currently being explored as candidates for the experimental implementation of quantum information processing and quantum communication. In this context photon based implementations play a particularly important role as they represent ideal carriers of quantum information. Any quantum communication network or distributed quantum information processing device would require the ability to manipulate photonic degrees of freedom coherently at the single photon level. For longer distance communication the unavoidable noise and absorption processes would require the use of quantum repeaters to refresh the quantum information. Repeaters for such a photon-based system would require the ability for small scale photon based quantum information processing.The proposed project aims to implement the required technology employing highly integrated optics devices rather than the more traditional bulk optics approach where one arranges individual optical elements on an optical table. This approach avoids many of the problems that bulk optics suffers and also permits more general ways to code and manipulate information. We aim to explore the use of this novel technology for quantum information processing both experimentally and theoretically to develop novel methods for quantum information processing and to demonstrate the feasibility of basic quantum information processing in such arrangements.

The aim of the proposed research is to provide mechanims that can be used to establish trust in mobile distributed computing platforms. The initial task will be to allow mobile terminals to authenticate themselves to the existing fixed network of distributed computers. However, while authentication may establish the identity of an any two connected parties, this is not enough to establish trust that each computer in the network will behave as expected. Mechanisms have been proposed to establish trust based on an entitiy's reputation. This reputation, however, should be bound to a specific identity that cannot be easilly changed, otherwise an entity that had gained a poor reputation could change its identity and esablish a good reputation. There are other problem that may arise too, if stable identities are not established.The trusted computing group is a major research consortium who are developing standards that allow identity to be bound to specific computing platforms. Moreover, trusted computing technology allows the platform to attest to its state. In other words, the stable id can be used to sign a message stating what operating system the platform is running and what other software applications are running at any moment in time. This attestation can be verified by a challenger. Another security mechanism provided by trusted computing technology is the idea of 'sealing' data. Data may be sealed, or encrypted in such a way that it can only be accessed when the trusted platform is in a particular state. This mechanism can therefore be used to make sure data is released only when known trusted applications are running on the trusted platform.The research proposed will investigate how the mechanisms of trusted computing may be applied to the e-Science network to support reputation based trust mechanisms by providing stable platform identities. Furthermore, once the stable identity and reputation of a platform has been established, this research will investigate how techniques like sealing and attestation may be used to provide a challenger with a degree of confidence that a the platform is running software that can be trusted to maintain data security.In conjunction with this, the proposed research will investigate how the techniques of digital rights management (DRM) may be used to protect data in the e-Science grid. DRM is currently used to protect multimedia content by scrambling the content so that it can only be accessed by authorized viewers. The access requirements associated with the content are broadcast with the content itself. The authorization rights that allow the content to be viewed, however, are bound to each receiver. Only if the rights match the access requirements will the content be descrambled.If platform in the e-Science grid can support the trusted computing mechanisms then it may be used with DRM techniques to control access to sensitive data. The proposed research will investigate how the sealing and attestation mechanisms of trusted computing may be used to define the authorization rights required by DRM. In this way sensitive data may be securely released to the grid, and given to any platform, with confidence that it will only be accessed by those platforms that can be trusted to protect the data.The consequence of this proposed research is that the e-Science grid will be able to provide greater assurance that it can be trusted to protect sensitive data. Thus allowing wider access to its resources. The obvious beneficiary of this will be the health care community. The e-Healthcare initiative is a major European project to provide an electronic infrastructure for health care. The trust mechanisms to be investigated by the proposed research could form the basis of providing security for the exchange and processing of sensitive patient records and diagnostic data.

This research will develop a new theory about how groups of people work with technology. We start with the Social Brain Theory which predicts that the size of groups is limited by our ability to handle social relationships. The larger the group the more time you have to spend getting to know people. Since time for social contact is inevitably limited, relationships in larger groups are less intimate. This makes larger groups less cohesive. We want to understand how social relationships work and how technology (e.g. texting, mobile phones, SMS) might make contact easier, so groups could become larger and more cohesive. To do this we will use a second theory, Small groups as complex adaptive systems, to model how people interact and communicate with each other and via computers, mobiles, etc. We will investigate a range of different groups, such as collaborating scientists and social networks of friends, and study how and when they communicate with each other, how they identify with the group and what they think of each other. We will also run experiments with groups of different sizes with and without computer technology to help communication. This will enable us to understand why some groups of people get on better than others, and how technology helps (or hinders) their communication. The results will be a new theory that predicts how well groups of differing sizes and composition will get on and how people use computer technology for social contact. A computer model of the theory will be developed to simulate groups with different sizes and compositions. We will produce recommendation for social policy on how technology should be used in the future for Internet e-communities and requirements for the next generation of computer networks to help collaborative work, e-communities and e-society.

Cyber security is recognised as important at the highest levels of international government. President Obama has said that "the Cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges [the US] face as a nation". Even the £650M in additional funding that accompanied the UK's Cyber Security Strategy is dwarfed by the >£10B estimated annual cost of cyber-crime to the UK economy. Additionally, we see links to "transnational organised crime" (cyber-crime is lucrative and widespread) as well as "Terrorism" (state-sponsored cyber-warfare is increasing) and "Ideologies and beliefs" (anti-establishment hacktivists, eg Anonymous, are also resorting to cyber-attack to express their views). Companies such as HP help organisations who are subjected to cyber attacks to protect their assets and information from such attacks. These cyber defence companies achieve this using a combination of hardware and software augmented with human effort. Allocating human effort to activity is critical since inappropriate allocation can result in human time being wasted or attacks going unchallenged. Time pressure, the presence of ambiguous information and the high stakes involved can then degrade the human judgement associated with this allocation process. Psychologists understand that such pressures degrade human decision making and similar issues have been found to exist in other domains. Indeed, Pearl Harbour and the Cuban Missile Crisis were each the result of failures in the intelligence process that can be traced back to human analysis errors educating decision making. Motivated by such experiences, in the 1970s, the CIA developed a technique, "Analysis of Competing Hypotheses" which encourages analysts and decision makers to avoid the pitfalls that can be associated with intelligence analysis. This technique involves consideration of multiple candidate explanations for what is being observed. The hypotheses are then assessed (and iteratively refined) using the observations to discriminate between likely and unlikely hypotheses. While the technique has proven its utility, for it to work effectively, it is important that the hypotheses considered include the "possible" not just the "probable" explanations. Unfortunately, "possible" and "probable" aren't precisely defined in this context. However, a recent advance in the statistics literature, "Sequential Monte Carlo Samplers", exhibits many of the same features as Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are typically applied in contexts where a computer (not a person) generates the hypotheses and assesses them. However, just like Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, they consider a population of hypotheses, assessed against data and then iteratively used to spawn a new population of hypotheses. Crucially, the analogous concept to the notion of "possible" and "probable" hypotheses is both well defined and well understood. We propose to adapt Sequential Monte Carlo samplers to become part of Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. We further propose to apply and demonstrate a tool embodying the technique in an operational cyber security context. If successful, this project would develop techniques that would ensure that decisions made in operational cyber security settings were well motivated. Where those decisions relate to the allocation of human analyst resources to activities, this would improve the efficiency of cyber security operations. The technology will position the UK at the forefront of the state-of-the-art in this high priority application domain.

This research will develop a new theory about how groups of people work with technology. We start with the Social Brain Theory which predicts that the size of groups is limited by our ability to handle social relationships. The larger the group the more time you have to spend getting to know people. Since time for social contact is inevitably limited, relationships in larger groups are less intimate. This makes larger groups less cohesive. We want to understand how social relationships work and how technology (e.g. texting, mobile phones, SMS) might make contact easier, so groups could become larger and more cohesive. To do this we will use a second theory, Small groups as complex adaptive systems, to model how people interact and communicate with each other and via computers, mobiles, etc. We will investigate a range of different groups, such as collaborating scientists and social networks of friends, and study how and when they communicate with each other, how they identify with the group and what they think of each other. We will also run experiments with groups of different sizes with and without computer technology to help communication. This will enable us to understand why some groups of people get on better than others, and how technology helps (or hinders) their communication. The results will be a new theory that predicts how well groups of differing sizes and composition will get on and how people use computer technology for social contact. A computer model of the theory will be developed to simulate groups with different sizes and compositions. We will produce recommendation for social policy on how technology should be used in the future for Internet e-communities and requirements for the next generation of computer networks to help collaborative work, e-communities and e-society.