Dr Lachlan Urquhart part of new £4.1 million EPSRC award to the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute
Fri 30 October 2020
New research to explore the possibilities of the digital revolution and address key challenges for online safety and privacy, has been announced.
The University of Nottingham has received £4.1 million from UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Digital Economy Theme towards continued funding of the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, originally founded in 2009.
The Horizon Institute will explore how challenges, such as trust regarding the use of personal data can be addressed in the development of new technologies and products that blend physical and digital elements, for example community casting of virtual music festivals, personalised digital mental health interventions, and data-driven consumer goods.
Dr Lachlan Urquhart, Lecturer in Technology Law at Edinburgh Law School, is a founding academic partner of the Horizon Institute, along with colleagues at Glasgow, Cambridge, East Anglia, Newcastle and De Montfort. He will work closely with Horizon’s Cross-Cutting Programme to provide new cross-sectorial insights that can be applied to emerging issues more widely across the Digital Economy.
“I am really excited to be one of the founding academic partners of the next generation of the EPSRC funded Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (2020-2025),” said Dr Urquhart.
“I did my PhD in the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training, worked as a research fellow there and I’ve worked on a range of projects with fantastic colleagues there since moving to Edinburgh (e.g. Defence Against the Dark Artefacts; Cardographer; Memory Machine; and the Moral-IT cards).
“With this new collaboration, I’ll get the opportunity and resources to work with researchers on new projects and activities, focusing on legal and design aspects of building trustworthy data driven products.
“Horizon is a cutting-edge centre that has been doing novel interdisciplinary work since 2009. This has involved bringing together teams of digital economy researchers from across the social sciences and computing with wider stakeholders from industry, government, NGOs and civil society. This stakeholder led approach has helped us to co-design research projects that holistically consider the practical challenges and opportunities of living with data driven systems in the wild.”
The Horizon Institute is one of six research centres across the UK announced this week as part of a £29 million investment by UK Research and Innovation.