Our 21st century lives will be increasingly connected to our digital identities, representations of ourselves that are defined from trails of personal data and that connect us to commercial and public services, employers, schools, families and friends. The future health of our Digital Economy rests on training a new generation of leaders who can harness the emerging technologies of digital identity for both economic and societal value, but in a fair and transparent manner that accommodates growing public concern over the use of personal data. We will therefore train a community of 80 PhD students with the interdisciplinary skills needed to address the profound challenges of digital identity in the 21st century. Our training programme will equip students with a unique blend of interdisciplinary skills and knowledge across three thematic aspects of digital identity - enabling technologies, global impacts and people and society - while also providing them with the wider research and professional skills to deliver a research project across the intersection of at least two of these. 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. Horizon currently provides access to a large network of over 75 potential supervisors, ranging from from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. Each student will work with an industry, public, third sector or international partner to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, to maximise its impact, and also to enhance their employability. These external partners will be involved in co-sponsorship, supervision, providing resources and hosting internships. Our external partners have already committed to co-sponsor 30 students so far, and we expect this number to grow. Our centre also has a strong international perspective, working with international partners to explore the global marketplace for digital identity services as well as the cross-cultural issues that this raises. This will build on our success in exporting the CDT model to China where we have recently established a £17M International Doctoral Innovation Centre to train 50 international students in digital economy research with funding from Chinese partners. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features a bespoke core covering key topics in digital identity, optional advanced specialist modules, practice-led team and individual projects, training in research methods and professional skills, public and external engagement, and cohort building activities including an annual writing retreat and summer school. The first year features a nine month structured process of PhD co-creation in which students, supervisors and external partners iteratively refine an initial PhD topic into a focused research proposal. Building on our experience of running the current Horizon CDT over the past five years, our management structure responds to external, university and student input and manages students through seven key stages of an extended PhD process: recruitment, induction, taught programme, PhD co-creation, PhD research, thesis, and alumni. Students will be recruited onto and managed through three distinct pathways - industry, international and institutional - that reflect the funding, supervision and visiting constraints of working with varied external partners.

Public opinion on complex scientific topics can have dramatic effects on industrial sectors (e.g. GM crops, fracking, global warming). In order to realise the industrial and societal benefits of Autonomous Systems, they must be trustworthy by design and default, judged both through objective processes of systematic assurance and certification, and via the more subjective lens of users, industry, and the public. To address this and deliver it across the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme, the UK Research Hub for TAS (TAS-UK) assembles a team that is world renowned for research in understanding the socially embedded nature of technologies. TASK-UK will establish a collaborative platform for the UK to deliver world-leading best practices for the design, regulation and operation of 'socially beneficial' autonomous systems which are both trustworthy in principle, and trusted in practice by individuals, society and government. TAS-UK will work to bring together those within a broader landscape of TAS research, including the TAS nodes, to deliver the fundamental scientific principles that underpin TAS; it will provide a focal point for market and society-led research into TAS; and provide a visible and open door to engage a broad range of end-users, international collaborators and investors. TAS-UK will do this by delivering three key programmes to deliver the overall TAS programme, including the Research Programme, the Advocacy & Engagement Programme, and the Skills Programme. The core of the Research Programme is to amplify and shape TAS research and innovation in the UK, building on existing programmes and linking with the seven TAS nodes to deliver a coherent programme to ensure coverage of the fundamental research issues. The Advocacy & Engagement Programme will create a set of mechanisms for engagement and co-creation with the public, public sector actors, government, the third sector, and industry to help define best practices, assurance processes, and formulate policy. It will engage in cross-sector industry and partner connection and brokering across nodes. The Skills Programme will create a structured pipeline for future leaders in TAS research and innovation with new training programmes and openly available resources for broader upskilling and reskilling in TAS industry.

Cities are the driver of regional, national and indeed global economies. The complex inter-relationship between urban areas and their hinterlands is a vital aspect of a city's economic success. Hinterlands supply resources such as water, food and energy; while being economically-tied to the urban area through trade. Creating resilient, sustainable, water-secure cities depends on our understanding of the potential future risks of changing hydro-hazards (floods and droughts) and our ability to increase our resilience to them. Worldwide, in 2014, hydro-hazards resulted in over $16Bn (floods) and $7.5Bn (droughts) in damages. While, in the UK over the past five years there have been significant challenges to water management posed by hydro hazards. Since 2000, flooding has caused over £5Bn worth of damage, of which £3Bn was caused by the 2007 floods, and over £1Bn from the 2013/14 winter storms, impacting households and businesses alike. Similarly direct costs (estimated at £70-165M) from the recent UK drought (2011-12) arose from impacts to urban water supplies, and industry. Projections of future climate recognise that there is an added uncertainty in temperature and precipitation trends which may exacerbate the frequency and severity of such hazards. To respond to the stated challenge of transforming our cities to be resilient, sustainable urban centres and in the context of 'adapting to and mitigating climate change', I will quantify uncertainty in future hydro-hazards and design engineering/policy interventions to increase urban resilience which informs future urban water security adaptation for cities and their hinterlands. My fellowship will: 1. quantify future urban hydro-hazard uncertainty in a warming climate using novel techniques, 2. design engineering and policy interventions to mitigate the risk arising from these uncertainties, and 3. improve urban living through enhanced resilience to hydro-hazards. I will achieve this by capturing uncertainty in hydro-hazard events and cascading this through to hazard assessment, challenging the current deterministic paradigm. I will characterise the vulnerability profile of newly exposed populations or sectors, and develop a ground breaking systems approach to ameliorate risk in order to design transformative resilience strategies. The delivery of this vision is challenging yet possible through combining advances in uncertainty quantification from a variety of fields, with my research which has consistently sought to challenge the deterministic paradigm. Awarding this fellowship will create a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of the role of climate projections on the systematic risk to urban living and how such risks can be addressed. Output will include: 1. detailed understanding of the change to hydro hazards across the UK as a result of climate projections (and associated uncertainty), communicated in the context of climate variability, 2. probabilistic frameworks to capture climate uncertainty into assessments of systematic risk posed by changing hydro hazards at the urban scale, 3. analysis of the changing urban vulnerability, the uncertainty associated with this and exploration of the newly exposed population using new, and highly discretised vulnerability metrics, 4. a systems approach to urban resilience to changing hydro hazards, and 5. resilience strategies; e.g. transformative engineering interventions.

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.

Gaps remain in our understanding of how different combinations of business, technology and relationship strategies influence the growth of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), especially in the context of networked interactions by SMEs at regional, extra-regional, and sectoral levels. In each new round of economic and technological development, these strategies evolve, highlighting the importance of tracking in close to real-time the nuances of emerging enterprise strategies. In this project, we will probe differential strategies for SME growth and the role of regional clustering in the growth of innovative companies, building on new and unobtrusive methods of web mining to gain timely information about enterprise developmental pathways. Three key research questions will be addressed: (1) What differentiates the business strategies, technology pathways, and relationships of innovative companies that stay in business and grow? (2) How does regional clustering influence the business strategies, technology pathways, and relationships of innovative companies that stay in business and grow? (3) What are the contributions of policy-induced resources in supporting innovative companies that stay in business and grow? These questions will be probed through a mixed-methods approach using both quantitative and qualitative data. We focus our research on the emerging green goods sector (GGS) - comprising firms producing outputs that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources, with an international comparative element involving the UK, the US, and China. We will identify 300 GGS companies in each country established during the time period 2004-2007, for a total study sample of 900 companies. We will apply a stratified sample selection procedure, to match the distribution of the UK GGS sector by broad product classes with the US and Chinese GGS sectors. We will then combine structured and unstructured data sources to track the origins, business, technology, and relationship strategies, and performance outcomes of these firms through to 2011. Structured data will include corporate databases, corporate patents and publication records. Unstructured data will be derived from new methods of web-scraping and data mining the current and archived web-sites of the sample enterprises. Survival analysis will indicate the pathway of firms from the founding period through to the current period. Hierarchical cluster analysis will be applied to explore differential business strategies by the three countries and by types of metropolitan location and product class. Multivariate regression will relationships between high growth (and other) outcomes and business strategies, technological approach, and the role of regional relationships and policy instruments, controlling for country and other factors. Insights from US and Chinese enterprise growth strategies will be compared with those of UK firms. In the subsequent phase, we will undertake case studies with selected UK enterprises, to test and refine propositions about differential strategies, regional and policy interactions, and outcomes. Interviews (60) will be conducted with high growth firms, stable firms, and other key informants in five UK metropolitan areas. The interviews will examine what differentiates the most successful firms, trace the use and benefit of technology-related and other programmes, and probe for wider policy-related locational attractiveness. The project will be led by the University Manchester in partnership with Experian UK, Georgia Institute of Technology (US), and Beijing Institute of Technology (China). An active dissemination and engagement programme will be pursued with the academic and non-academic worlds, including mechanisms for advanced training and outreach to users in the business sector, including start-up firms and business support programmes, to university and other technology transfer managers, and to local and national policymakers.