We will train a cohort of 65 PhD students to tackle the challenge of Data Creativity for the 21st century digital economy. In partnership with over 40 industry and academic partners, our students will establish the technologies and methods to enable producers and consumers to co-create smarter products in smarter ways and so establish trust in the use of personal data. Data is widely recognised by industry as being the 'fuel' that powers the economy. However, the highly personal nature of much data has raised concerns about privacy and ownership that threaten to undermine consumers' trust. Unlocking the economic potential of personal data while tackling societal concerns demands a new approach that balances the ability to innovate new products with building trust and ensuring compliance with a complex regulatory framework. This requires PhD students with a deep appreciation of the capabilities of emerging technology, the ability to innovate new products, but also an understanding of how this can be done in a responsible way. Our approach to this challenge is one of Data Creativity - enabling people to take control of their data and exercise greater agency by becoming creative consumers who actively co-create more trusted products. Driven by the needs of industry, public sector and third sector partners who have so far committed £1.6M of direct and £2.8M of in kind funding, we will explore multiple sectors including Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Food; Creative Industries; Health and Wellbeing; Personal Finance; and Smart Mobility and how it can unlock synergies between these. Our partners also represent interests in enabling technologies and the cross cutting concerns of privacy and security. Each student will work with industry, public, third sector or international partners to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, maximising its impact while also enhancing their future employability. External partners will be involved in PhD co-design, supervision, training, providing resources, hosting placements, setting industry-led challenge projects and steering. Addressing the challenges of Data Creativity demands a multi-disciplinary approach that combines expertise in technology development and human-centred methods with domain expertise across key sectors of the economy. Our students will be situated within Horizon, a leading centre for Digital Economy research and a vibrant environment that draws together a national research Hub, CDT and a network of over 100 industry, academic and international partners. We currently provide access to a network of >80 potential supervisors, ranging from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. This extends to academic partners at other Universities who will be involved in co-hosting and supervising our students, including the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features: a bespoke core covering key topics in Future Products, Enabling Technologies, Innovation and Responsibility; optional advanced specialist modules; internship and international exchanges; industry-led challenge projects; training in research methods and professional skills; modules dedicated to the PhD proposal, planning and write up; and many opportunities for cross-cohort collaboration including our annual industry conference, retreat and summer schools. Our Impact Fund supports students in deepening the impact of their research. Horizon has EDI considerations embedded throughout, from consideration of equal opportunities in recruitment to ensuring that we deliver an inclusive environment which supports diversity of needs and backgrounds in the student experience.

The Horizon institute is a multidisciplinary centre of excellence for Digital Economy (DE) research. The core mission of Horizon has been to balance the opportunities arising from the capture, analysis and use of personal data with an awareness and understanding of human and social values. The focus on personal data in a wide range of contexts has required the development of a broad set of multidisciplinary competencies allowing us to build links from foundational algorithms and system to issues of society and policy. We follow a user-centred approach, undertaking research in the wild based on principles of open innovation. Horizon now encompasses over 50 researchers, spanning Computing, Engineering, Law, Psychology, Social Sciences, Business and the Humanities. It has grown a diverse network of over 200 external partners who are involved in ongoing collaborative research and impact with Horizon, ranging from major international corporations to SMEs, from a wide variety of sectors, alongside government and civil society groups. We have also established a CDT in the third wave of funding that will eventually deliver 150 PhDs. Our critical mass of researchers, partners, students and funding has already led to over 800 peer-reviewed publications, composed of: 277 journal articles, 51 books and book chapters, and 424 conference papers, in a total of 15 different disciplines. Over the years Horizon's focus has evolved from an emphasis on the collection and understanding of personal data to consider the user-centred design and development of data-driven products. This proposal builds on our established interdisciplinary competencies to deliver research and impact to ensure that future data-driven products can be both co-created and trusted by consumers. Core to our current vision is the idea that future products will be hybrids of both the digital and the physical. Physical products are increasingly augmented with digital capabilities, from data footprints that capture their provenance to software that enables them to adapt their behaviour. Conversely, digital products are ultimately physically experienced by people in some real-world context and increasingly adapt to both. This real-world context is social; hence the data is social and often implicates groups, not just individuals. We foresee that this blending of physical and digital will drive the merging of traditional goods, services and experiences into new forms of product. We also foresee that - just as today's social media services are co-created by consumers who provide content and data - so will be these new data-driven products. At the same time, we are also witnessing a crisis of trust concerning the commercial use of personal data that threatens to undermine this vision of data-driven products. Hence, it is vitally important to build trust with consumers and operate within an increasingly complex regulatory environment from the earliest stages of innovating future products. Our user-centred approach involves external partners and the public in "research-in-the-wild", grounding our fundamental research in real world challenges. Our delivery programme combines a bottom-up approach in which researchers are given the opportunity (and provided with the skills) to follow new impact opportunities in collaboration with partners as they arise (our Agile programme), with a top-down approach that strategically coordinates how these activities are targeted at wider communities (our Campaigns programme, with successive focus on Consumables, Co-production and Welfare), and reflective processes that allow us to draw out broader conclusions for the widest possible impact (our Cross-Cutting programme). Throughout we aim to continue to develop the capacity in our researchers, the wider DE research community and more broadly within society, to engage in responsible innovation using personal data within the Digital Economy.

An ontology is a precise specification of the meanings of a vocabulary of concepts. In computer systems, ontologies provide a tool for robust and flexible manipulation of diverse data. They can support transfer of information between systems, and also allow the presentation of information to be customised to a user's requirements.The domain of geography is one where there is a real and widely recognised need for ontology. Geographic Information Systems are of increasing importance in both commercial and governmental planning. Effective use of these systems requires high-level, flexible mechanisms for accessing the data. Moreover, in many situations one would like to combine information from several sources that may organise their data in very different ways.The geographic realm presents particular challenges to the formulation of an adequate ontology. Geographic classifications are highly affected by ambiguity, vagueness and context sensitivity; so establishing a precise relationship between geographic terms and the physical reality they describe is problematic.The proposed project seeks to develop an ontology based on rigorous principles of knowledge representation using formal logic. This will build on foundational theories of space, time, material objects and processes, which have been a focus of previous research conducted at Leeds. These theories will provide a framework within which specifically geographic concepts and relationships will be defined.The representation used to express our ontology will explicitly model of the vagueness present in the high-level vocabulary of natural language. It is proposed to employ a novel approach called Standpoint Semantics . This models the variable meaning of vague concepts in terms of threshold values for objective properties. For instance a relevant property for distinguishing lakes and rivers is rate of water flow. A given standpoint is associated with a particular choice of threshold separating bodies considered flowing from those considered still . (Prototype software has already been developed at Leeds that implements a standpoint semantics for geographic water features. It allows concept definitions to be inspected and modified, and will automatically label a map in accordance with these definitions.)Detailed ontology construction will focus on the geographic realm and in particular on concepts relating to a) hydrographic features (lakes, rivers, canals, marshes etc), b) the built environment (buildings, roads, towns etc).which have been the subject of pilot projects at Leeds.During the course of the project we shall develop a web-based resource to enable collation and maintenance of our ontology and will allow researchers around the world to access our theories.The project will involve close collaboration with the Research and Innovation group of Ordnance Survey, UK's national mapping agency, who will be providing geographic data, expertise and a significant financial contribution to the project. Ordnance Survey have recently undertaken a major upgrade of data-storage and delivery systems and are collating their map data within a feature-based object-oriented framework known as MasterMap . In order to organise and provide flexible access to this data they wish to develop an ontology that would enable this information to be interpreted at a conceptual level. This would allow integration with other data sources and customisable presentation of map information.Collaboration is also planned with the Laboratory for Applied Ontology in Trento, the Institute of Formal Ontology in Information Systems in Saarbrucken and the Institut fur Geoinformatik in Muenster.

A passenger in an aircraft requires information about a flight at a very different level of detail from the pilot. A map of an entire country on a computer screen shows far less detail than a map of single town on the same screen. For certain kinds of data, reducing the level of detail is a relatively well-understood process, but for other kinds this reduction is a challenging problem. This project is concerned with reduction in level of detail for data associated to networks in geographic information systems. Examples of such networks are roads, rivers, railways, electricity distribution networks, etc.Manipulation of level of detail, or granularity, is vitally important for any kind of system for managing processes and detecting events in geographical networks. For example: congestion and accidents on roads, floods in rivers, or terrorist attacks on railways. Such systems require some level of human intervention, and to do this effectively requires the ability to zoom in and out of the data in various ways. Changing the spatial level of detail, or 'scale' in traditional paper-based maps, is only one of the requirements -- it is also necessary to deal with classification of the things represented (ontologies), and with time at different granularities.Features in geographical information are usually classified by what kind of thing they are: here is a house, there is a school and that is a railway station, and they are all buildings . In a large scale (i.e. detailed) map we generally work with a classification that is itself detailed. Besides showing individual buildings, such maps can make fine distinctions between many different kinds of building. At smaller scales, as the separate buildings merge into undifferentiated built-up areas on the map, the classification becomes coarser too. The level of detail in classification is termed ontological granularity.If dealing with a map showing, say, traffic flow along streets in a city, we might need to see how levels of traffic vary over a single day or at a given time over a number of different days. In both of these examples, temporal granularity is involved -- grouping together and selecting periods of time.The challenge that this project addresses is the combination of these three kinds of granularity: the spatial, the ontological, and the temporal. In varying one kind of level of detail, what changes are necessarily imposed in the other kinds of level of detail? Some simple examples are easily understood: if a church and an adjacent house become represented at a smaller scale by a single entity, it might get classified simply as a building. However, general theoretical principles are lacking; the project will develop these and will evaluate them in collaboration with the Ordnance Survey. The principles will be used to specify operations for changing level of detail in network-based geographic data.The evaluation will be based on a major resource for UK network data: the Integrated Transport Network. This is a layer within Ordnance Survey'sMasterMap providing two themes: the Roads Network (containing all navigable roads in Great Britain) and Road Routing Information (containing additional information such as one-way streets and other restrictions). The project will also make essential use of the expertise of Professor Michael Worboys, Chair of the Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering, University of Maine, who will be based in Leeds as a visiting researcher.

Civil infrastructure is the key to unlocking net zero. To achieve the ambitious UK targets of net zero by 2050, we require innovative approaches to design, construction, and operation that prioritise energy efficiency, renewable resources, and low-carbon materials. Meeting net zero carbon emissions will require not only significant investment and planning, but also a radical shift in how we approach the design and management of our civil infrastructure. Reliable low carbon infrastructure sector solutions that meet real user needs are essential to ensure a smooth and safe transition to a net zero future. To address these challenges, the UK must develop highly skilled infrastructure professionals who can champion this urgent, complex, interconnected and cross-disciplinary transition to net zero infrastructure. This EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment: Unlocking Net Zero (FIBE3 CDT) aims to lead this transformation by co-developing and co-delivering an inspirational doctoral training programme with industry partners. FIBE3 will focus on meeting the user needs of the construction and infrastructure sector in its pursuit of net zero. Our goal is to equip emerging talents from diverse academic and social backgrounds with the skills, knowledge and qualities to engineer the infrastructure needed to unlock net zero, including technological, environmental, economic, social and demographic challenges. Achievable outcomes will include a dynamic roadmap for the infrastructure that unlocks net zero, cohort-based doctoral student training with immersive industry experience, a CDT which is firmly embedded within existing net zero research initiatives, and expanded networks and outward-facing education. These outcomes will be centred around four thematic enablers: (1) existing and disruptive/new technologies, (2) radical circularity and whole life approach, (3) AI-driven digitalisation and data, and (4) risk-based systems thinking and connectivity. FIBE3 doctoral students will be trained to unlock net zero by evolving the MRes year to include intimate industry engagement through the novel introduction of a fourth dimension to our successful 'T-shaped' training model and designing the PhD with regular outward-facing deliverables. We have leveraged industry-borne ideas to align theory and practice, streamline business and research needs, and provide both academic-led and industry-led training activities. Cohort-based training in technical, commercial, transferable and personal skills will be provided for our graduates to become skilled professionals and leaders in delivering net zero infrastructure. FIBE3's alignment with real industry needs is backed by a 31 strong consortium, including owners, consultants, contractors, technology providers and knowledge transfer partners, who actively seek engagement for solutions and will support the CDT with substantial cash (£2.56M) and in-kind (£8.88M) contributions. At Cambridge, the FIBE3 CDT will be embedded within an inspirational research and training environment, a culture of academic excellence and within a department with strategic cross-cutting research themes that have net zero ambitions at their core. This is exemplified by Cambridge's portfolio of over £60M current aligned research grant funding and our internationally renowned centres and initiatives including the Digital Roads of the Future Initiative, the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, Cambridge Zero and Cambridge Centres for Climate Repair and Carbon Credits, as well as our strong partnerships with UK universities and leading academic centres across the globe. Our proposed vision, training structure and deliverables are exciting and challenging; we are confident that we have the right team to deliver a highly successful FIBE3 CDT and to continue to develop outstanding PhD graduates who will be net zero infrastructure champions of the future.