United States of America

IMPRINTS: Identity Management: Public Responses to IdeNtity Technologies and Services. SUMMARY Both in the UK and the US there is an important societal agenda in relation to identity management technologies, services and practices (IM-TSP), set against a background of civil liberties. Citizens regularly express concern about the amount of personal information that is held electronically and that is available to benign and malign organisations. There are, for instance, public anxieties around biometric identification, the introduction of strong border security initiatives and the risks of identity theft. Such fears are typically heightened by media reactions to, among other things, the loss of publicly held personal data records or terrorist threats. Against this backdrop, in contrast, there is a growing appetite for identity sharing through social networks, customer profiling and collaborative filtering and various loyalty schemes. In this project, we seek a better understanding of such anxieties and appetites, by examining identity management taboos and desires and their culturally situated causes and effects. Our challenge is to understand the way that citizens in the UK and the US will respond to new IM-TSP, and to promote trustworthy and pleasurable processes of identity verification across contexts and communities, providing win-win situations for the civic, commercial government and security sectors. Our overall question is: What will influence UK and US publics to engage and/or disengage with identity management practices, services and technologies of the future? The technologies, services and practices of identity management are in a state of rapid and somewhat unpredictable flux. To examine public perceptions and responses in this field, it is necessary to take a forward looking approach. Research about the current state of IM-TPS runs the risk of being obsolete by the time it is ready for implementation and publication. We will therefore use scenarios for the future as they have been presented in research, film, literature, consumer trend reports, policy reports and security exploration as our first core of data, and use these to map an expected landscape of IM-TPS. The research then proceeds in the following phases: 1. Identify the most plausible scenarios and represent them in the form of written and visual narratives, online avatars and off-line artefacts that will function as stimuli in the research with individuals, and civil society, government, commercial and security actors, taking into account the different contexts and sensitivities in the UK and US. 2. Elicit responses to these scenarios from UK and US based individual and collective actors in the four mentioned sectors, using a range of traditional and innovative quantitative and qualitative methods of data gathering, including deliberative polling; q-sorts; peer-to-peer and intergenerational group research; interactive pop up installations and simulation games. 3. Analyse the responses to provide an a multilevel account of underlying individual, political, social and cultural reasons for the different publics' desires and taboos. 4. Represent the outcomes of the research in a grid of taboos and desires that locates opportunities for civic, government, commercial and security actors. 5. In the process, create artefacts and methodologies that will enable the various stakeholders to interact with the public and take their concerns into account in the development, production and implementation of IM-TPS. The project involves a UK-US collaboration and will be managed from Loughborough University, UK. It will progress in ongoing interaction with academic advisors and stakeholders from the four sectors, represented in two different 'boards'.

The capacity to identify one another is paramount. It underpins social dialogue, commercial transactions, individual entitlements to goods and services and issues of legal and criminal responsibility. In today's society, each of these activities can take place both within the real world and the cyber world making the concept of identity, and the process of identification, more challenging than ever before. The SID project addresses this challenge through an ambitious and innovative programme of work, bringing together experts from a diverse spectrum of scientific domains ranging from automated biometrics, cyber-psychology, forensic anthropology, human-computer interaction, mathematical modelling, and complex data visualisation. In addition, the project is backed by key industrial and governmental stakeholders, represented through an Advisory Group and providing direct input throughout the project. The first stage of the project is to define the set of identity measures of interest and to gather relevant datasets either from existing resources, or through active data collection from participants across diverse demographic populations. Our measures of interest will fall into four categories: static and behavioural measures in the real world; and static and behavioural measures in the cyber world. These measures will be the basis for our model of Super-Identity, and their selection will be informed by the input of analysts, and end-users within intelligence, e-commerce and forensic sectors. At this early stage, and throughout the life of the project, we explicitly examine the social, legal and ethical considerations associated with data privacy and data protection. Work Package 1 addresses these issues. Once this framework is in place, extensive testing will be conducted to determine the accuracy and reliability of automated and human identification from each measure. This will determine (i) the confidence that should be attributed to each measure, (ii) the effect that changing contexts may have on that measure and (iii) the potential relationship between measures. The results of this phase of work will continually update our Super-Identity model enabling measures to be combined, cross-referenced, and weighted according to their individual confidence estimates. Work Package 2 addresses these issues. Consideration of how to present the information to the end user is the crucial next stage. With the benefit of expertise in human computer interaction and data visualisation, and the participatory engagement from end-users, the model will be refined with specific attention to its visual presentation in a flexible yet intuitive format. Work Package 3 addresses these issues. In combination, SID provides fusion of known measures, revelation of unknown measures, and quantification of certainty associated with each measure, and thus the identification decision overall. In this way, it provides a step-change in the way that we think about identity and identification, and in the value that it might hold for the real world.

A Mesoscale Convective System (MCS) is an organisation of many convective thunderstorms, each a few km in scale, into a coherent entity on scales of hundreds of km. We use the term to encompass a range of organised convective phenomena, including squall lines, supercells, and mesoscale convective complexes. MCS sit at the intersection between weather and climate. On weather timescales, these long-lived systems produce extreme precipitation and flash flooding. Through their coupling to the large-scale circulation, they play a key role in climate phenomena including the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and the Monsoons. The dynamical coupling is two-way: large-scale environmental conditions dictate the likelihood of convective organisation occurring, while in turn the MCS strongly feedback on the dynamics and thermodynamics of the environment. Global numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, with grids of 15-20 km, and climate models, with grids of 50-100 km, cannot represent MCS. Our models operate in the "grey zone" where the phenomenon occurs at scales similar to the grid scale. This means that MCS are not fully resolved, but cannot be parametrised using conventional approaches, which assume that the unresolved process occurs on scales much smaller than the grid scale. Biases in the representation of the MJO, Asian Monsoons and ITCZ, as well as too few strong precipitation events, have been linked to deficiencies in the representation of MCS in models. Furthermore, "forecast busts" over the UK, for which the five- to six-day lead time forecast skill drops to around zero across the world's leading NWP centres, have been linked to a poor representation of MCS upstream over North America. We must improve the representation of MCS in weather and climate models. This project addresses the representation of MCS in the grey zone in a comprehensive and coordinated manner. We will first combine a new global satellite-derived database of MCS with analysis products to assess the predictability of MCS formation and evolution conditioned on the large scales, taking a novel, probabilistic approach. Secondly, several theoretical frameworks have recently been developed which describe the dynamical impact of MCS back onto the large scales. We will critically assess these frameworks, making innovative use of analysis increments from within the data assimilation cycle, to measure the upscale impacts of MCS that are missing from current models. We will use the fundamental understanding gained to develop a new parametrisation of the dynamical coupling between MCS and the larger scales. We will couple our approach to the new CoMorph convection scheme, which is undergoing trials for operational implementation in the UK Met Office's model. While CoMorph shows substantial improvements in initiating organisation, coupling of MCS to the large scales remains a problem. The representation we develop will be stochastic: we will represent the probability of different MCS tendencies conditioned on the resolved scale flow. Stochastic schemes are well suited to the grey zone, where parametrised motions are poorly constrained by the grid-scale variables, and so are very uncertain. Evaluating the new parametrisation will critically test the knowledge gained throughout the project. Having validated our knowledge, we will use the scheme to measure the importance of the dynamical impacts of MCS on climate phenomena including the ITCZ and the MJO. This project will produce a new understanding of the dynamics of MCS formation and upscale impacts. Through close collaboration with the Met Office, we intend to translate this into improved probabilistic forecasts for the UK and wider world. Only with reliable probabilistic forecasts can industry, policy makers, and the humanitarian sector quantify the risks of natural hazards, and act appropriately to protect against those hazards.

Clouds formed by aircraft (contrails) are the most easily visible human forcing of the climate system. Trapping energy in the Earth system, they contribute more than half of the total climate impact of aviation. This makes reducing contrails an important goal to achieve the UK's climate commitments. Theoretical considerations indicate two pathways for reducing contrails. First, improving engine design to emit fewer particulates may reduce contrail lifetimes and so their climate impact. Second, rerouting aircraft to avoid contrail forming regions. Assessing these pathways requires accurate models of contrail formation, evaluated at the level of an individual aircraft. This evaluation requires observations of contrails across their lifetime, coupled to details of the generating aircraft. Even where they are matched to specific aircraft, existing observations typically view a contrail once, (limiting their use for measuring contrail lifecycles) or cannot provide the detail on the contrail microphysical properties (such as ice crystal number or shape) necessary to assess the efficacy of different pathways to contrail reduction. Improving confidence in our contrail models urgently requires novel observations of contrail properties and lifecycles from individual aircraft. The impact of aircraft on clouds is not limited to contrails forming in clear air. Over half of contrails form embedded in existing clouds and the particulates emitted by aircraft can affect cloud formation several days after they were released. These effects produce a cooling, potentially large enough to offset all other warming effects of aviation, but are not represented in aircraft-level models used for planning contrail avoidance strategies. There are few observational constraints of these effects, targeted observations of the impact of individual aircraft on cloud microphysics are required to assess them and to improve future model simulations. To address these uncertainties and around contrail formation, persistance and climate impact as well as aerosol-cloud interactions, COBALT has three core components: 1. A measurement campaign in the southern UK, combining an array of ground-based cameras with a steerable cloud radar, to make high resolution observations of contrail formation from individual aircraft. Guided by aircraft transponder information, these observations will be focused on contrails and clouds modified by aircraft, characterising contrail formation and perturbed cloud properties within the first few hours of their lifecycle. 2. Counterpart satellite observations, using novel techniques to characterise contrail and cloud development from an hour to several days behind the aircraft. Building on techniques for studying natural cirrus, this will produce a complete characterisation of the contrail lifecycle, along with the first estimate of the aviation aerosol impact on existing cirrus clouds at a global scale. 3. The complete lifecycle characterisation will be combined with flight data from aircraft operators to produce a unique dataset designed specifically for the evaluation of aircraft-level models of contrail formation. An initial focus will be placed on evaluating aircraft-scale models, as these are currently being used to plan aircraft diversions. A comparison of climate model parametrisations of contrail formation will assess the ability of the parametrisations to reproduce the wide-area (>1000km2) contrail observations taken by the camera array. Led by an inter-disciplinary team of scientists and engineers, with partners in key international research centres and industry groups, COBALT will provide the tools necessary to evaluate our current models and ability to avoid contrails, guiding future modelling and operational trials of sustainable fuels and contrail avoidance.