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Aberdeen City Council

Aberdeen City Council

9 Projects, page 1 of 2
  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/N028074/1
    Funder Contribution: 809,734 GBP

    The Internet of Things (IoT) concept refers to the seamless integration of physical objects, sensors and mobile devices onto the Internet. The IoT encompasses many different technologies, services and standards and is seen by many as the cornerstone of the ICT market in the coming years. However, IoT solutions comprise more than just the hardware and software necessary to realize the technical infrastructure, as they also include the human actors, organisations, policies and regulatory systems involved. With some estimates predicting 50 billion devices by 2020, and the proportion of data collected passively through machine-to-machine transactions surpassing that actively generated by individuals - solutions are needed to strengthen trust. Using an existing community Internet of Things testbed located in the Tillydrone district of Aberdeen, we will explore what it means to realize solutions that are transparent, accountable, and which empower end-users. The TrustLens is our vision of a future toolset that will enable individuals, and the communities of which they are a part, to better understand and manage the data about them. However, before we can realize the TrustLens, several key issues need to be investigated: What are the appropriate governance arrangements covering IoT deployments? How do we deliver meaningful accountability? How can we develop an understanding of the interplay between individuals and devices, and the wider relationship to social/cultural norms? What are the attitudes of citizens and communities to privacy and risk in an IoT context? How should risks and benefits be communicated? How do users make informed decisions to judge the trustworthiness of information? Answers to these (and the many other questions that will certainly emerge) will lead us to develop prototype solutions that will be evaluated with members of the Tillydrone community. Our ambition is to create a means by which a user can review the characteristics of an IoT device in terms of its impact on their personal data, answering questions such as: What type of data is it capturing? For what purpose? Who sees it? What are the (potential) benefits and risks? They also should be able to exert a degree of control over their data, and be guided to assess its reliability and accuracy.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: ES/W000520/1
    Funder Contribution: 400,895 GBP

    Conventional approaches to mobility planning, based on the forecast-led paradigm, have led to unrealised expectations concerning alleviating problems such as congestion and delivering economic, social and environmental outcomes. Evidence shows plans become rapidly obsolete and lack resilience with regard to future developments. This project aims to improve Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs), addressing both the movement of people and goods, through two significant new considerations: (1) Triple Access Planning (TAP) - future sustainable urban accessibility can be achieved through the transport system (physical mobility), the land-use system (spatial proximity) and the telecommunications system (digital connectivity); together constituting a Triple Access System (TAS). (2) Accommodating uncertainty - unpredictable change dynamics such as demographics, economic developments, locational choices, regulatory context, technological breakthroughs, travel demand, and stakeholder behaviour can be explicitly taken into account in the plan, in terms of development and implementation. This research project is highly collaborative and involves seven case study cities in five countries. Through a methodological approach that sequentially addresses theory, practice, design and application, TAP for uncertain futures guidance will be developed and evolved that complements existing SUMP guidelines. The project will strengthen resilience and adaptiveness in SUMPs by advancing theory and translating it into accessible, state-of-the-art, practical guidance.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/P011829/1
    Funder Contribution: 756,643 GBP

    The behaviour of people is known to be critical to the security of organizations across all sectors of the economy. As users of IT systems, their action, or inaction, can create cyber security vulnerabilities. For example, users can be tempted to give away their authentication credentials (by phishing), to install malign software (malware), choose weak or inadequate passwords, or they may fail to install security patches, to scan computers for viruses, or to make secure backups of critical data. Organizations design security policies which users are supposed to follow, for example, instructing them not to give away their authentication (login) credentials, or not to open certain kinds of attachments sent in unsolicited emails. However, in practice, managers find it very difficult to encourage users to follow policy. This project will investigate effective ways to improve security communications with users, to enable them to understand security risks, and to persuade them to comply with policy. Our hypothesis is that to be most effective, communications and policy implementations must take into account individual personalities and motivations. Technological support is therefore required to support security communications and security persuasion so that it can scale up to large organizations. We propose to transfer ideas and knowledge from the existing academic field of persuasive technologies and digital behaviour interventions, and apply them to the user security compliance problem. We will build, and trial, real technologies that implement persuasive strategies in real user security scenarios. These scenarios will be selected in partnership with industrial security practitioners. The project takes a broad, interdisciplinary view of the roots of the user compliance challenge, and draws additionally on expert knowledge from the fields of psychology, behavioural decision, security, sentiment analysis and argumentation in search of solutions.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: ES/J007374/1
    Funder Contribution: 911,715 GBP

    Patterns of migration have changed dramatically over the last 20 years and increased freedom of movement for people living in countries once separated from western Europe by 'the iron curtain' has played an important part in this. The UK has seen new flows of migration coming from Central Eastern Europe and other parts of the former 'Soviet bloc'. Within the UK, Scotland presents a particularly interesting and distinctive case, due to: the specifics of its economic and demographic situation, related political discussion of the need for migration, and the division of responsibilities between UK and Scottish parliaments and local authorities for migration. Both the Scottish Executive and many local authorities have expressed a wish to attract and retain migrant workers. However, challenges have also been highlighted relating to demand for and adequacy of service provision. Meanwhile the experiences and perspectives of migrants themselves remain little understood. This project aims to study perspectives and experiences of 'social security' amongst migrants from Central Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union in Scotland. Through its long-term and deep engagement with migrant communities, the project will deliver significant new and original empirical data. It will generate important new academic insight through its innovative synthesis of existing theoretical frameworks. Moreover, the project proposes a groundbreaking approach to developing practical and policy outcomes and solutions through the use of a participatory action research approach. A first phase of research will identify key themes and areas of concern, drawing particularly on the experiences and perspectives of migrants themselves. This will be followed by the phase of participatory action research, during which we will work directly with migrants, migrant organisations, policy makers, service providers and employers to develop practical projects addressing particular issues. The process of developing these projects will be evaluated as will their short, medium and long-term outcomes with a view to determining 'best practice' and the potential for replication in broader local, regional and national contexts. We use 'social security' to mean the ways in which migrants are able to make themselves socially, economically, personally and culturally secure in a new environment and their strategies for dealing with every day risks. The project will examine the ways in which migrants' experiences and perspectives on 'social security' affect their longer term intentions regarding settlement in Scotland. Migrants' experiences and needs differ depending on their levels of education and skill, the kinds of work they do, their language abilities, their age, which country they come from, whether they are male or female and which part of Scotland they have come to live and work in. Levels of service provision, local economic and demographic needs and local community perceptions of and responses to migration differ quite markedly between, for example, large cities and more remote rural areas. These differences also impact on migrants' experiences and aspirations. The project will pay attention to these various forms of diversity. The research will be conducted in eight locations in Scotland: two cities (Glasgow and Aberdeen) two medium-sized towns (Peterhead and Arbroath) and four more remote rural locations in Aberdeenshire and Angus. In each location, the project will explore the different kinds of resources, networks, structures and services which migrants draw on in order to make themselves materially and emotionally secure within the places where they live and work. It will also tease out which aspects and perceptions of security (economic, personal, cultural, social) are deemed particularly important by migrants and how these influence migrants' decisions to settle in a particular location, to move on, or to return to their countries of origin.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: NE/V021370/1
    Funder Contribution: 1,593,860 GBP

    The future of treescapes belongs to children and young people. Yet there is a lack of interdisciplinary research that explores their engagement with treescapes over time. This project aims to re-imagine future treescapes with children and young people, working with local and national partners including Natural England, Forest Research and the Community Forests and Scottish stakeholders. We will identify opportunities and barriers to treescape expansion and pilot innovative child and youth-focused pathways to realising this goal. We will create curricula material which will be disseminated with the support of our project partners, Early Childhood Outdoors and the Chartered College of Teachers. The aim of this project is to integrate children and young people's knowledge, experiences, and hopes with scientific knowledge of how trees adapt to and mitigate climate change in order to co-produce new approaches to creating and caring for resilient treescapes that benefit the environment and society. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches and in collaboration with stakeholders, the team will produce a 'lexicon of experience' that captures the ecological identities of children and young people. An audit of existing activity in the field of activism and treescapes, with a particular focus on marginalised groups, will inform the project. In particular, the project will produce new material for use by practitioners, educators and policy makers that will inform future treescape planting and will be rolled out nationally, with the help of our project partners. Novel methods for assessing carbon storage in trees and soil will inform a 'tree-twinning' project to enable children and young people to recognise how they can relate to treescapes. Children and young people will draw on the scientific work together with their lived experience to balance their evolving carbon footprint with the changing treescapes they have partnered with. New treescapes will be planted with the help of Community Forests and local authorities. Learning will be enhanced by the scientific project on tree-twinning, embedded within the project, to advance knowledge about the relationship between climate science and urban trees. This research will be carried out with children and young people as co-researchers. The project will focus on hope as a vital ingredient of future planning and philosophically and practically create a set of actions to look to the future while addressing temporalities, including past archival work on trees. It will work with cohorts of young people across early years, primary, secondary and young people out of school, as well as families and communities, to think about and engage with treescapes, to plan as well as plant new treescapes and to engage in treescape thinking and curricula innovation. Working with Natural England as project partners, a toolkit will be developed to guide this work and a set of resources and outputs to be rolled out nationally that inspire and inform future generations of children and young people to become involved in treescapes, which will re-shape the disciplinary landscape of treescapes research and inform policy and practice. Community forest planners, policy-makers and practitioners will better understand how to engage children and young people in treescapes and how to work with their knowledges to inspire and inform future generations. Innovative approaches to arts and humanities, environmental science and social science will produce a new understanding of how combining disciplines can further treescape research with children and young people. The project will also advance methodological understandings of the relationship between children and young people and treescapes with a focus on co-production and attending to lived experience while conducting environmental scientific research. New knowledge in the fields of environmental and social science will create new disciplinary paradigms and concepts.

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