Building smart system foundations for smart cities

Smart technologies are an important tool to address efficient resource management in the face of global challenges such as urbanization and climate crisis. In spite of popularity of these technologies, foundations which would enable building of sophisticated systems of systems, necessary for the existence of smart cities, have not yet been formed. At the same time, domains such as industry, infrastructure and public services - where applications of this nature are anticipated to bring the most significant impact - are experiencing challenges threatening further developments: an abundance of issues stemming from intersections between policy and technology, such as security and privacy. Given the critical and cyber-physical nature of these systems, resolving these issues is crucial to prevent potentially catastrophic failures of formerly isolated system which are now being connected to the internet in an enthusiastic push to exploit better connectivity for improved performance and efficiency. Addressing these issues and forming principles upon which smart systems can be built to form an interconnected ecosystem is a necessary step towards applying smart technologies in practice and towards building the sophisticated and complex systems of systems heralded by smart city visionaries.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.