The advent of practical quantum computers, expected within the next two decades, poses a serious threat to most of standard encryption systems. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNGs) aim to enhance security of communications and personal data by exploiting the laws of Quantum Mechanics and provide the solution to threat caused by a malicious use of quantum computers. QRNGs, exploiting the probabilistic nature of quantum measurements, produce truly random numbers. This is in opposition with current methods to generate random numbers which combine the use of chaotic systems and software-based pseudo random number generators. QKD systems taking advantage specific features of quantum systems such as superposition of quantum states and the "no-cloning" theorem enable parties to exchange cryptographic keys in an intrinsically secure way. Because QKD key exchange is based on physical systems as opposed to software-based encryption methods, QKD is also "future-proof" as no improvement on hacking algorithm will affect the security of the protocols. In the last few years, the efforts of the QKD and QRNG community have focused first to produce lab prototypes and more recently to provide commercial systems, which have been deployed in small scale around the globe. However, less focus has been placed on key aspects such as the form factor and technology scalability as well as power consumption and costs. Systems built with optical fibres and discrete electronics components are inevitably expensive, bulky, and limited in terms of performance and therefore intrinsically not scalable. KETS Quantum Security Ltd, spin-off of the Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (University of Bristol) has been addressing the scalability issues by combining the advantages of integrated photonics technologies and quantum cryptography protocols. While the integrated photonic chips have significantly reduced the size of the core optical system, separation between discrete electronic components and photonic chips inherently limits the overall performance of the quantum technology. Moreover, this increases the size of the devices and their costs, limiting the spread of this QKD and QRNG systems. The focus of this fellowship would be the development of some novel critical integrated opto-electronics systems, where microelectronics and quantum photonics will be monolithically integrated on the same semiconductor substrate. Monolithic integration of electronics and photonics is a critical technological step forward that will open the way to a whole new range of solutions and will improve the performance of quantum technologies potentially by orders of magnitude. This could bring groundbreaking improvements to QKD and QRNG systems, opening the way to their direct integration onto modern digital technologies.

Across the UK political spectrum there is a consensus that communities need to play a greater role in local government, both in the decisions made that affect people's everyday lives, and in the design and delivery of services provided by local government to communities. With the enormous public uptake of digital technologies including broadband internet, mobile phones, laptop and tablet computers, there are opportunities to create more representative and sustainable forms of local democracy and service provision. Digital Civics is the endeavour of developing theories, technologies, design approaches and evaluation methods for digital technologies that support local communities, local service provision, and local democracy. However, this area poses new challenges for researchers across a range of disciplines. It requires researchers that are not only experts in local government and the services they provide (such as education, public health and social care), but also researchers that can: (i) understand the limitations of existing technologies and approaches to design and use; (ii) innovate in the design, delivery and evaluation of services; (iii) produce underpinning technologies that meet the real-world requirements of local service provision and local democracy. The primary goal of our Centre for Doctoral Training is therefore to train the next generation of researchers that can meet these challenges. The Centre has three distinctive features. Firstly, it brings together academics from 5 internationally leading centres of excellence already extensively engaged in Digital Civics research at Newcastle University: (i) experts in human-computer interaction and participatory media from Culture Lab; (ii) experts in security, privacy & trust from the Centre for Cyber Crime and Security; (iii) experts in public health and social care from the Institute of Health & Society; (iv) experts in education from the Centre for Learning and Teaching; and (iv) experts on planning and politics from the Global Urban Research Unit. Working together in a Centre for Digital Civics these academics will lead the training and supervision through a 1-year taught program in Digital Civics, and a carefully coordinated collection of 60 PhD 3-year research projects over the funded lifetime of the centre. Secondly, the research will be conducted in the context of real-world service provision and communities, through the engagement of three local councils (Newcastle, Gateshead & Northumberland) who will act a host partners to the research. The centre also has a significant number of deeply committed commercial, public sector and third sector partners who will actively engage in the design and delivery of the research training. These include many of the leading national and international organisations with a direct interest in building research capacity in Digital Civics. These include Philips Research, Microsoft Research, eBay Research Labs, Orange Labs, IBM Research, BBC R&D, Tunstall, BT Labs, Promethean and SMART Technologies. In addition to these partners, we also have a partnership of local and national social and commercial enterprises, and a network of international academics who will support academic exchanges placements which will provide an international profile to our students' portfolio. Only those collaborating partners who have demonstrated a real and substantial commitment to engage have been included in this proposal. The research training provided to students will be cross-disciplinary in nature and focused upon 3 challenging application domains for digital civics research. These are: local democracy, education, and public health & social care. There will also be 2 underpinning technology training programmes: human-computer interaction and security, privacy & trust. These 5 topics span the research expertise of our 5 international centres of excellence at Newcastle University.

Recently the media has been awash with reports on the downloading and sharing of music files, a crisis which strikes at the economic viability of the entire global music industry. This is a startling reminder of the security challenges posed, in both the civil and criminal domains, as we move relentlessly to a world in which all Information Technology is fully connected, facilitated by the development and rapid uptake of Web 2.0. This, and its successors, will radically transform society in a way unimaginable a decade ago. However, with the accrued benefits come major threats in terms of privacy, security of information and vulnerability to external attack. Threats range, in the criminal domain, from the petty criminal stealing credit card details, through trouble making hacktivists, who attack organisations to further political aims, to the sinister cyber-terrorists, who attack strategic targets in the same way that terrorists would bomb and destroy national infrastructure. At the heart of the CSIT project is the perennial challenge of making all of the IT solutions, of today and tomorrow, secure. CSIT will be a world-class Research and Innovation centre coupling major research breakthroughs in Secure Information Technology with exciting developments in innovation and commercialisation.Information Technology in the widest sense deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, analyze, transmit, and retrieve information. So, the IT field covers every aspect of data processing from the banking using one's home PC with its (increasingly wireless) broadband connection, through to the complex systems which control and manage the world's aviation, maritime and telecommunications systems. As anyone who has had a virus, worm, Trojan or spyware on their home PC can readily testify, security is an essential requirement for any IT systems in order to retain privacy, integrity and trust. When electronic sensor devices and CCTV cameras are networked and combined with computer processing, IT then becomes a power enabling tool in the field of physical infrastructure protection, which includes fire monitoring, asset tracking and intrusion detection. Thus while IT security itself is often a matter of defending against automated attack by viral programs, IT for asset protection is a tool to assist the human operator. The IT systems used for infrastructure systems must themselves be secure not least because personal biometric data is increasingly being rolled out as a part of the solution.IT systems are analysed into a stack of independent layers along lines defined in international standards. CSIT staff are world leaders in academic research in these layers, an attribute which is reflected in the four initial fields of academic research: data systems, networks, wireless and intelligent surveillance. However a key distinguishing feature of CSIT is the fact that it understands, because of its history, the necessity to ultimately take a the holistic, or systems engineering, perspective in order to research and develop the creation of complete secure IT systems, which undoubtedly are greater than the sum of their layers. The involvement of many industrial partners in CSIT bears witness to this.The driving goal for CSIT is to strategically position U.K. industry at the forefront of the field of secure IT because this field is a critical, emerging and rapidly growing sector with its wider benefits for the safety and security of society. Embedded within Queen's University, with its very successful record of industrial collaboration and spin-out company formation, CSIT therefore lends itself well to a strong business and academic partnership, creating a continuous flow of knowledge transfer opportunities, with realizable shorter term milestones for transfer of the research, coupled with exciting opportunities for major breakthroughs and ensuing commercial opportunities for UK industry.

It is recognised that global communication systems are rapidly approaching the fundamental information capacity of current transmission technologies. Saturation of the capacity of the communication systems might have detrimental impact on the economy and social progress and public, business and government activities. The aim of the proposed research is to develop, through theory and experiment, disruptive approaches to unlocking the capacity of future information systems that go beyond the limits of current optical communications systems. The research will combine techniques from information theory, coding, study of advanced modulation formats, digital signal processing and advanced photonic concepts to make possible breakthrough developments to ensure a robust communications infrastructure beyond tomorrow. Increasing the total capacity of communication systems requires a multitude of coordinated efforts: new materials and device bases, new fibres, amplifiers and network paradigms, new ways to generate, transmit, detect and process optical signals and information itself - all must be addressed. In particular, the role of fibre communications, providing the capacity for a lion share of the total information traffic, is vital. One of the important directions to avoid the so-called "capacity crunch", the exhaust in fibre capacity - is to develop completely new transmission fibres and amplifiers. However, there is also a growing need for complimentary actions - innovative and radically novel approaches to coding, transmission and processing of information. Our vision is focused on the need to quantify the fundamental limits to the nonlinear channels carried over optical fibres and to develop techniques to approach those limits so as to maximise the achievable channel capacity. The information capacity of a linear channel with white Gaussian noise is well known and is defined by the Shannon limit. Wireless systems can approach this limit very closely - to within fractions of a dB. However, the optical channel is nonlinear. Fibre nonlinearity mixes noise with signal. Therefore, results of the linear theories on capacity can be applied in fibre channels only in the limit of very small nonlinear effects. Optical communication systems are undergoing another revolution with the development of techniques of coherent detection, the ability to detect both the amplitude and the phase of a transmitted signal and use of digital signal processing techniques to reconstruct the original signal. Use of the optical phase in emerging coherent transmission schemes opens up fundamentally new theoretical and technical possibilities most as yet unexplored. The challenge is to understand to what degree optical nonlinearity can also be compensated or, indeed, used to unlock the fibre capacity, maximise both the information transmission rate and the total bandwidth, to determine the fundamental Shannon limit for nonlinear channels and to develop methods to approach this capacity. We propose to explore fundamentally new nonlinear information technologies and to develop a practical design framework based on integration of DSP techniques, novel modulation formats, and novel source and line coding approaches tailored to the nonlinear optical channels. We believe this to be the key to designing the intelligent information infrastructure of the future.

The Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC) will theorise, design, develop, and evaluate new digitally mediated models of citizen participation that engage communities, the third sector, local government and (crucially) the commercial digital economy in developing the future of local service provision and local democracy. DERC will deliver a sustained program of multi- and cross- disciplinary research using research methods that are participatory, action-based, and embedded in the real world. The research approach will operate across multiple scales (e.g. individual, family, community, institution) and involve long-term embedded research activity at scale. The overarching challenges are significant: -- the development of new technologies and cloud-based platforms to provide access to open and citizen-generated data, big data analytics and software services at scale to support trusted communication, transactions, and co-production between coalitions of citizens, local government, the third and commercial sectors; -- the development of participatory methods to design digital services to support citizen prosumption at the scales of communities and beyond; -- the development of new cross-disciplinary insights into the role of digital technologies to support these service delivery contexts as well as understandings of the interdependency between contexts and their corresponding services. The backbone of this research agenda is a commitment to social inclusion and the utilisation of participatory processes for user engagement, consultation and representation in the design and adoption of new forms of digital services. The main research themes of DERC address the development of models of digitally enabled citizen participation in local democracy (planning), public health, social care and education, and the nature of new civic media to support these. The Centre's research will be conducted in the context of local government service provision in the Northeast of England, in close partnership with Newcastle City Council, Gateshead Council and Northumberland, and supported by a consortium of key commercial, third sector and professional body partners. DERC's extensive program of research, knowledge exchange and public engagement activities will involve over 20 postdoctoral researchers and 25 investigators from Computer Science (HCI, Social Computing, Cloud Computing, Security), Business & Economics, Behavioural Science, Planning, Education, Statistics, Social Gerontology, Public Health and Health Services Research.