Privacy is a human right and value that often under threat in the context of technology. While much research has been done on this topic, in the modern era of technology privacy preserving technologies must keep in pace with state of the art technological developments, as in the case of dynamically personalised technologies. Personalised technologies operate on the basis of collecting personal data, dynamically analysing it to infer knowledge about the user and providing in-the-moment responses that add value for the user. The privacy implications of this technology, however, have been not explored extensively. DROPS will address this through an examination of the privacy, trust and identity issues that arise from the development of personalized e-books for children's reading. Our focus on children's reading is motivated by evidence that shows the value of personalised e-books for learning and reading enjoyment, and yet the lack of research that engages with the range of privacy issues that these technologies introduce. DROPS has two broad synergetic goals: i) To develop a ThingsSpace that manages the computational process of personalizing technology, such as e-books, in such a way that a user's personal data is protected. ThingsSpace will use an existing personal data store, the HAT, to store personal data subsequently used by the e-book's algorithm to adapt to the child's pedagogical needs ii) To use ThingsSpace as a springboard to document and evaluate the privacy, trust and identity issues resulting from its design and use. This evaluation will lead to the development of different economic and business models creating a feedback loop with the technical design. Across all of the project stages, we will co-create the technology with future end users of ThingsSpace (publishers, SMEs, designers of personalized digital products) and end users of personalised e-books (teachers, parents, children). This multi-stakeholder approach will allow us to ensure that the aspired values of e-books (for learning and privacy) are aligned with the economic models used to monetise this technology and the technical platform that delivers it. The code for ThingsSpace will be open source in order to allow other researchers and commercial parties to transfer our project findings to the diverse domains that digital personalisation is currently used, e.g. Finance, HealthCare, Social Media.

The digital games industry has global revenues of $65bn (in 2011) predicted to grow to $82bn by 2017. The UK is a major player, whose position at third internationally (behind the US and Japan) is under threat from China, South Korea and Canada. The £3bn UK market for games far exceeds DVD and movie box office receipts and music sales. Driven by technology advances, the industry has to reinvent itself every five years with the advent of new software, interaction and device technologies. The influential 2011 Nesta "Next Gen" review of the skills needs of the UK Games and Visual Effects industry found that more than half (58%) of video games employers report difficulties in filling positions with recruits direct from education and recommended a substantial strengthening of games industry-university research collaboration. IGGI will create a sustainable centre which will provide the ideal mechanism to consolidate the scientific, technical, social, cultural and cognitive dimensions of gaming, ensuring that the industry benefits from a cohort of exceptional research-trained postgraduates and harnessing research-led innovation to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of innovation in digital games. The injection of 55+ highly qualified PhD graduates and their associated research projects will transform the way the games industry works with the academic community in the UK. IGGI will provide students with a deep grounding in the core technical and creative skills needed to design, develop and deliver a game, as well as training in the scientific, social, therapeutic and cultural possibilities offered by the study of games and games players. Throughout their PhDs the students will participate in practical industrial workshops, intensive game development challenges and a yearly industrialy-facing symposium. All students will undertake short- and longer-term placements with companies that develop and use games. These graduates will push the frontiers of research in interaction, media, artificial intelligence (AI) and computational creativity, creating new game-themed research areas at the boundaries of computer science and economics, sociology, biology, education, robotics and other fields. The two core themes of IGGI are: Intelligent Games - increasing the flow of intelligence from research into digital games. We will use research advances to seed the creation of a new generation of more intelligent and engaging digital games, to underpin the distinctiveness and growth of the UK games industry. The study of intelligent games will be underpinned by new business models and research advances in data mining (game analytics) which can exploit vast volumes of gameplay data. Game Intelligence - increasing the use of intelligence from games to achieve scientific and social goals. Analysis of gameplay data will allow us to understand individual behaviour and preference on a hitherto impossible scale, making games into a powerful new tool to achieve scientific and societal goals. We will work with user groups and the games industry to produce new genres of games which can yield therapeutic, educational and social benefits and use games to seed a new era of scientific experimentation into human behaviour, preference and interaction, in economics, sociology, psychology and human-computer-interaction. The IGGI CDT will provide a major advance in an area of great importance to the UK economy and massive impact on society. It will provide training for the leaders of the next generation of researchers, developers and entrepreneurs in digital games, forging economic growth through a distinctly innovative and research-engaged UK games industry. IGGI will massively boost the notion of digital games as a tool for scientific research and societal good.