The emergence of a global ubiquitous computing environment in which each of us routinely interacts with many thousands of interconnected computers embedded into the everyday world around us will transform the ways in which we work, travel, learn, entertain ourselves and socialise. Ubiquitous computing will be the engine that drives our future digital economy, stimulating new forms of digital business and transforming existing ones.However, ubiquitous computing also carries considerable risks in terms of societal acceptance and a lack of established models of innovation and wealth creation, so that unlocking its potential is far from straightforward. In order to ensure that the UK reaps the benefits of ubiquitous computing while avoiding its risks, we must address three fundamental challenges. First, we need to pursue a new technical research agenda for the widespread adoption of ubiquitous computing. Second, we must understand and design for an increasingly diverse population of users. Third, we need to establish new paths to innovation in digital business. Meeting these challenges requires a new generation of researchers with interdisciplinary skills in the technical and human centred aspects of ubiquitous computing and transferable skills in research, innovation and societal impact.Our doctoral training centre for Ubiquitous Computing in the Digital Economy will develop a cohort of interdisciplinary researchers who have been exposed to new research methods and paradigms within a creative and adventurous culture so as to provide the future leadership in research and knowledge transfer that is necessary to secure the transformative potential of ubiquitous computing for the UK digital economy. To achieve this we will work across traditional research boundaries; encourage students to adopt an end-to-end perspective on innovation; promote creativity and adventure in research; and place engagement with society, industry and key stakeholders at the core of our programme.Our proposal brings together a unique pool of researchers with extensive expertise in the technologies of ubiquitous and location based computing, user-centred design, societal understanding, and research and training in innovation and leadership. It also involves a wide spectrum of industry partners from across the value chain for ubiquitous computing, spanning positioning, communications, devices, middleware, databases, design, and our two driving market sectors of the creative industries and transportation.Our training programme is based on the approach of personalised pathways that develop individual students' interdisciplinary and transferable skills, and that produce a personal portfolio to showcase the skills and experience gained alongside the more traditional PhD thesis. It includes a flexible taught programme that emphasises student-led seminars, short-fat modules, training projects and e-learning as delivery mechanisms that are suited to PhD training; an industrial internship scheme under which students spend three months working at an industrial partner; and a PhD research project that builds on a proposal developed during the first year of training and that is supported by multiple supervisors from different disciplines with industry involvement. Our DTC will foster a community of researchers through a dedicated shared space, a programme of community building events, training for supervisors and well as students, funding for a student society, and an alumni programme.

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.

Horizon will tackle the challenge of harnessing the power of ubiquitous computing for the digital economy in a way that is acceptable to our society and increases the quality of life for all. This will involve establishing a world-leading and sustainable centre of excellence for research and knowledge transfer for the ubiquitous digital economy. Horizon will conduct a five-year programme of research into the key scientific challenges involved in the widespread adoption of ubiquitous computing; collaborate with users to create, demonstrate and study next generation services; deliver a knowledge transfer programme that ensures that the results of our research are fully connected to the digital economy; train a new generation of researchers to meet the demands of industry for skilled interdisciplinary staff; engage with policy makers and the wider public in order to address societal concerns; and provide a focal point for international, national and regional research in this area.Horizon will exploit the distinctive nature of hub funding to develop a unique approach to this challenge. Our Collaborative Research Programme will be driven by the overarching concept of a lifelong contextual footprint, the idea that each of us throughout our lifetimes will lay down a digital trail that captures our patterns of interaction with digital services. Our research will explore the major infrastructural, human and business challenges associated with this concept, adopting a unique multidisciplinary approach that integrates insights from computer science, psychology, sociology, business, economics and the arts and humanities. We will collaborate with over 30 users from different sectors of the Digital Economy in order to create, deploy and study a series of next generation services 'in the wild' so as to drive our underlying research. We will initially focus on the creative industries and transportation sectors, but subsequently extend our focus to additional sectors in partnership with other hubs and major initiatives. In parallel, our Transformation Programme will drive knowledge transfer and long-term economic impact through partnership management, public engagement, international outreach, incubation of new ventures, the transfer of people, and training for 24 associated PhD students, funded by the University.Our team draws on leading groups at Nottingham spanning computer science, engineering, business, psychology and sociology, complemented by expertise at two spokes: distributed systems and communications at Cambridge, and mathematical modelling and advertising at Reading. A series of further mini-spokes will enable us to introduce other key individuals through hub fellowships.These multiple disciplines and partners will be brought together in a new centre at Nottingham where they will be able to engage with a critical-mass cohort of research staff and students to explore innovative and challenging new projects. The Hub will be directed by Professor Derek McAuley who brings extensive experience of working in academia, directing major industrial research laboratories, and also launching spin-out companies. He will be supported by Professor Tom Rodden, an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow who previously directed the Equator IRC. The net result will be a unique partnership between EPSRC, industry, the public, and the University, with the latter committing 16M of its own funds to match the 12M requested from EPSRC.