Personalisation of media experiences for the individual is vital for audience engagement of young and old, allowing more meaningful encounters tailored to their interest, making them part of the story, and increasing accessibility. The goal of the BBC Prosperity Partnership is to realise a transformation to future personalised content creation and delivery at scale for the public at home or on the move. Evolution of mass-media audio-visual 'broadcast' content (news, sports, music, drama) has moved increasingly towards Internet delivery, which creates exciting potential for hyper-personalised media experiences delivered at scale to mass audiences. This radical new user-centred approach to media creation and delivery has the potential to disrupt the media landscape by directly engaging individuals at the centre of their experience, rather than predefining the content as with existing media formats (radio, TV, film). This will allow a new form of user-centred media experience which dynamically adapts to the individual, their location, the media content and producer storytelling intent, together with the platform/device and the network/compute resources available for rendering the content.The BBC Prosperity Partnership will position the BBC at the forefront of this 'Personalised Media' revolution enabling the creation and delivery of new services, and positioning the UK creative industry to lead future personalised media creation and intelligent network distribution to render personalised experiences for everyone anywhere. Realisation of personalised experiences at scale presents three fundamental research challenges: capture of object-based representations of the content to enable dynamic adaption for personalisation at the point of rendering; production to create personalised experiences which enhance the perceived quality of experience for each user; and delivery at scale with intelligent utilisation of the available network, edge and device resources for mass audiences. The BBC Prosperity Partnership will address the major technical and creative challenges to delivering user-centred personalised audience experiences at scale. Advances in audio-visual AI for machine understanding of captured content will enable the automatic transformation of captured 2D video streams to an object-based media (OBM) representation. OBM will allow adaptation for efficient production, delivery and personalisation of the media experience whilst maintaining the perceived quality of the captured video content. To deliver personalised experiences to audiences of millions requires transformation of media processing and distribution architectures into a hybrid and distributed low-latency computation platform, allowing flexible deployment of compute-intensive tasks across the network. This will achieve efficiency in terms of cost and energy use, while providing optimal quality of experience for the audience within the technical constraints of the system.

Generative Models are AI models that can generate data. Recently researchers have shown that by training these models on large amounts of data (text data from the internet and images) these models learn to understand the regularities of our text and image world so well that they can generate responses to questions and create new images with surprising fidelity. This heralds a new era in which computers can assist humans to carry out tasks more efficiently than ever with significant opportunities for society, science and industry. However, these advances need significant research still -- how to make them train efficiently on different problems, how to understand their reliability and adherence to ethical norms.

Intelligent Visual and Interactive Technology allows us to perceive, understand and re-create the world around us. With it we can digitise the world with 3D cameras, use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict and enhance the health of people within our world or to educate and train them. It allows us to experience this world, or imagined ones, through immersive technologies, movies and video games, and interact with these worlds through technologies that analyse our movement and behaviour. There is a clear benefit to applying this technology across domains, for specific health or education purposes, but doing so requires coordinated action and genuine democratisation of the underpinning technologies, such that non-expert users are empowered. To address this challenge, CAMERA 2.0 will perform world-leading research in Intelligent Visual and Interactive Technology - underpinned by academic and partner expertise across Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and AI - and engage a range of partners to generate impact and translate this technology across a range of themes. This multi-disciplinary approach is supported by academic and external partner expertise spanning healthcare, biomechanics, sports performance and psychology. These collaborations will allow us to carry out new research, create new impacts and develop further partnerships that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. This proposal builds on our highly successful Next Stage Digital Economy Centre for the Analysis of Motion Entertainment Research and Applications (CAMERA). Over the last 4 years, we have built a team of 14 academics and over 40 PhDs and researchers who have created real impact, alongside our partners, across themes of i) Entertainment; ii) Health, Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies and; iii) Human Performance Enhancement. CAMERA 2.0 will also focus on three themes, supported by over 20 impact partners: i) Creative Science and Technology, ii) Digital Health and Assistive Technology and iii) Human Performance Enhancement. Furthermore, CAMERA 2.0 will work closely with our EPSRC CDT in Digital Entertainment and our new UKRI CDT in Accountable, Responsible and Transparent AI (ART-AI). Our research programme will deliver continuing impact through four primary mechanisms: (i) Theme Driven Impact Projects, (ii) Cross-Cutting Theme R&D Challenges, (iii) Reactive Impact Projects and (iv) Open Community Engagement. Theme Driven Impact Projects will be 12 to 24-month projects co-designed through sand-pits and co-delivered with partners. Although primarily aligned with a single theme they will overlap with at least one other. Our Cross-Cutting Theme R&D Challenges engage with R&D challenges shared by partners/academics across themes. Translating innovations across themes not only democratises and accelerates technology adoption but can significantly enhance impact. This will be addressed through key research projects, that support and feed into all other activities. Our reactive model allows us to carry out commercial projects as research impact vehicles at short notice - essential being able to work with the short-deadline driven creative sector. CAMERA 2.0 evolves our unique reactive impact model by placing our CAMERA student technical team at its core under the supervision of our experienced studio managers. Impact through Open Engagement. Our ambition is to raise the level of UK and international DE research through collaboration and technology democratisation. CAMERA 2.0 will operate an open-door model for reasonable access to facilities, data, software and training. In coordination with commitments from the University of Bath and external EU funding we are expanding our physical facilities and technical team to provide assisted motion capture and immersive technology training for free to over 100 creative industries, HEIs and healthcare companies.

Data-driven innovation is transforming every sector of our digital economy (DE) into a de-centralised marketplace; accommodation (AirBnb), transportation (Uber), logistics (Deliveroo), user-generated vs. broadcast content in the creative industries (YouTube). We are witnessing an inexorable shift from classical models centred upon monolithic institutions, to a dynamic and decentralised economy in which anyone is a potential producer and consumer. A gig economy, underpinned by digital products and services co-created through shorter-lived, diverse peer-to-peer engagements. Yet, the platforms that enable this DE are increasingly built on centralised architectures. These are not controlled by society, but by large organisations making commercial decisions far from the social contexts they affect. There is an urgent need to disrupt this relationship, to deliver proper governance that empowers society to take control of the DE and enables people to assert greater agency over the vast centralised silos of data that drive these platforms. We stand on the cusp of a second wave of DE disruption, driven by bleeding edge data-driven technologies (AI) and secure, distributed data sharing infrastructures such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), in which data is no longer siloed but becomes a fluid, de-centralised commodity shifting power away from tech giants to individuals and de-centralised organisations. This future Decentralised Digital Economy (DDE) enables people and organisations to work together, to trade, and ultimately to trust via frictionless digital interactions free from reliance upon centralised third parties, but often with reliance upon autonomous services. This shift in agency and power is a game changing opportunity for society to take back control over its digital economy - but we have a limited window of opportunity to get it right. We have already witnessed de-centralisation in the financial sector, where the lack of regulation and clear governance of crypto-currencies has proven a double-edged sword, allowing free exchange of value across the globe, but that is coupled with fraudulent company flotations and currency rates rigged by large mining pools. This is a consequence of technology-driven innovation unchecked by socio-economic insight; a lack of knowledge making policy makers impotent in the face of the tech giants. We are now at the tipping point of similar wide-sweeping disruption across all sectors in the DDE, a transformation that will radically redefine our models of value and how it is created, the ways in which we work, and how we use and extract value from our data. DECaDE represents a critical and timely opportunity to shape this emerging de-centralised digital economy (DDE), to develop insights that define a new 21st century model of work and value creation in the DDE, and ensure a prosperous, safe and inclusive society for all. DECaDE is a 60 month centre, comprising 21 people and building upon over 8.6 million pounds of feasibility scale UKRI/EPSRC investments in DLT and Human Data Interaction (HDI) held by the proposing team. DECaDE is a three-way partnership between the Universities of Surrey and Edinburgh, and the Digital Catapult DLT Field Labs. The latter is a full member of the consortium, through which we have co-created this research programme and with whom we will engage in further co-creation of the future DDE through diverse end-users in the public and private sector to support the competitive position of the UK