With more than 1 billion of activations reported on Sep 2013, Android mobile devices have become ubiquitous with trends showing that such a pace is unlikely slowing down. Android devices are extremely appealing: powerful, with a functional and easy-to-use user interface to access sensitive user and enterprise data, they can easily replace traditional computing devices, especially when information is consumed rather than produced. Application marketplaces, such as Google Play, drive the entire economy of mobile applications. For instance, with more than 1 million installed apps and a share of 35%, Google Play has generated revenues exceeding 9 billion USD. Such a wealthy and quite unique ecosystem with high turnovers and access to sensitive data has unfortunately also attracted the interests of cybercriminals, with malware now hit- ting Android devices at an alarmingly rising pace. Privacy breaches (e.g., access to address book and GPS coordinates), monetization through premium SMS and calls, and colluding malware to bypass 2-factor authentication schemes have become real threats. Recent studies report how mobile marketplaces have been abused to host malware or seemingly legitimate applications embedding malicious components. This clearly reflects the shift from an environment in which malware was developed for fun, to the current situation, where malware is spread for financial profit. Given the limitations of the state-of-the-art just outlined and according to the security roadmap provided by the European Network of Excellence SysSec, it is clear that "[...] more research focused on the development of defensive tools and techniques that can be deployed to the current smartphone systems to detect and prevent attacks against the device and its applications is needed". MobSec wants to fill this gap with a well-rounded practical research proposal. The goal of MobSec is to improve the security of mobile devices by reducing the risk from installing and using third party applications. Our research objectives build on each other to achieve this goal: First, we will develop dynamic analyses to automatically, faithfully and comprehensively construct models of application behavior. We will address the problem of incompleteness in dynamic analysis by replaying human interaction traces and complementing them with systematic exploration using symbolic execution. Once we are able to build models containing the interesting behavioral traits of mobile malware, we focus on detecting and containing malicious behavior. We initially target information leakage by investigating evasion-resistant information leakage detection techniques and later generalize to distinguish malicious from benign apps. To handle cases in which detection is not possible, we contain potential threats by decomposing apps in logical components: this enables the enforcement of security policies and characterization of per-component behaviors, which, being more specific, allow us to detect behavior of malicious components embedded in seemingly legitimate apps. Finally, MobSec aims at exploring virtualization extensions of CPUs to open up the possibility of in-device implementation of the aforementioned analyses.

Experimental particle physics addresses some of the fundamental questions about the structure and behaviour of the Universe at the level of the smallest particles of matter, the quarks and the leptons, and the forces acting between them. We are exploring fundamental properties of particles at the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and also exploring the nature of dark matter and neutrinos by developing and employing novel detection systems. We are contributing to the continued operation of the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. We have constructed and commissioned electronic systems and the software that drives them. From the beginning of data taking we have played a leading role in searches for exotic particles, the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, and studies of properties of the top quark. We are preparing for the renewed data taking starting in 2015 with further analyses on these and related topics. Although there is ample indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter is inferred from its gravitational interactions, it has not yet been directly detected in terrestrial laboratories. Direct detection experiments seek to observe dark matter scattering on target detector nuclei. We explore these issues through a world-leading dark matter search on DEAP/CLEAN, a liquid Argon detector with unique potential for scaling to multi-tonne masses, with the DMTPC detector development programme to measure the dark matter wind, and the Lux-Zeplin experiment. The group's expertise in high pressure TPCs is now being utilised to carry out measurements relevant to the study of neutrinos as part of the Hyper-K experiment. Our expertise in accelerator science will allow us to carry out studies for the machine-detector interface for the High Luminosity LHC and ILC. We will also expand the interactions between our phenomenology group and the experimental community.

THINK DEEP pioneers a creative practice driven interdisciplinary approach to the underground. It begins from the dual premise that, firstly the underground (or subterranean) is both the site of current environmental concerns (e.g. extraction), and the setting for developing solutions to these concerns. But that secondly, currently we lack approaches that adequately understand the underground, its current use and conservation, and its future possibilities. Underground scholars have long argued that what is needed is an interdisciplinary approach, as yet, however, where interdisciplinarity has been achieved, it has largely brought together science and social science. Unconventionally, THINK DEEP situates creative practices (such as visual art or participatory theatre) together with arts and humanities theories as the cornerstone of an interdisciplinary response to three pressing underground research problems: 1. How to sense the underground, an often inaccessible environment? 2. How to contend with varied underground imaginations, which shape underground understanding, use and conservation? 3. How to understand the speculative nature of ‘knowing’ the underground? It will address these problems through global case studies from three fields of underground research: geoscience, underground urban studies, and geoconservation. Its unconventional ambition enables THINK DEEP to deliver a timely and distinctive new contribution to underground scholarship that will transform the field’s future research directions. Furthermore, the project’s pioneering approach will bring about a step-change in relations between creative practices and research more generally. In understanding and evaluating the creative practice and research relations that sit at its heart, THINK DEEP enables ground-breaking understandings of these relations, and of their profound possibilities with respect to a range of research fields, including those which engage pressing environmental issues.