Externally funded projects
Our academics and researchers contribute to a range of externally funded projects.
- Project Dates: 31/03/2024 (End)
- Project Leader: Dr Andy Large (PI); Newcastle University (Anthropocene Research Group), Professor Susan Chilton (COI); Newcastle University Business School
- Sponsors: NERC
Additional Co-I’s on the project include Professor Darren Duxbury, Newcastle University Business School and Dr. Srmiti Sharma, Newcastle University Business School.
The GCRF Living Deltas Hub will co-develop transdisciplinary frameworks needed to understand delta Socio Economic Systems (SES’s), and will work with delta-dwellers and policymakers to develop solutions that can help realise the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in delta contexts.
The Hub comprises six innovative work packages co-developed with Global South partners and research institutes addressing specific in-country and delta-scale needs. NUBs contributes to Workpackage 2 “Delta system characterization and risk assessment”. There are two main starnds to our investigations:
- (i) in-depth assessment of the risks to local SES emanating from households’ attitudes and behaviors in order to explore the potential for behavioural-based interventions to mitigate these risks.
- (ii) develop a novel methodology combining environmental and human safety valuation frameworks to inform economic decision-making at the national or transnational level, to capture the economic value of delta improvement actions and/or risk mitigation and resilience enhancement measures.
- Project Dates: 31/07/2021 (End)
- Project Leader: Professor Savvas Papagiannidis; Newcastle University Business School
- Sponsors: ESPRC
Many people using cloud computing services often entrust their data and identity without realising that service providers may share the data with other services, such as analytics and advertisers. This is likely to be greatly exacerbated by the expansion of internet-connected devices.
This interdisciplinary project aims to address challenges facing the capacity of users to give informed consent to the use, sharing and re-purposing of data through a mobile software ‘container’ that will securely log all access instances, thereby improving transparency, creating an audit trail of providers and facilitating greater trust between users and service providers.
The project, involving Cardiff University, Newcastle University and UCL, will develop novel computational methods to better ensure that cloud providers can enhance data privacy and will provide the basis for conforming to recently-introduced General Data Protection Regulation requirements.
Project staff:
- Professor Raj Ranjan; School of Computing,
- Professor Savvas Papagiannidis; Newcastle University Business School
- Project Dates: 31/05/2021 (End)
- Project Leader: Professor Matt Gorton, Newcastle University Business School
- Sponsors: European Commission
The overall objective of the VALUMICS project is to provide decision makers throughout food value chains with a comprehensive suite of approaches and tools that will enable them to evaluate the impact of strategic and operational policies, and enhance the resilience, integrity and sustainability of food value chains for European countries.
The project brings together 19 European partners from 14 countries, and two Asian partners. It develops approaches and tools to analyse the structure, dynamics, resilience and impact of food chains on food security, economic development and the environment.
To achieve this, VALUMICS analyses the suitability of selected indicators to capture the evolution of resilience, the sustainability and the integrity of a set of major food value chains across Europe, and their transformative capacity. It also develops an integrated modelling approach and use for the analysis of external and internal drivers influencing the performance of food value chains and demonstrate options for improved business strategies.
Finally, it builds foresight scenarios to reflect on the possible evolution of those food chains and on the kind of public, private and civil society instruments that would enable enhancing their desirable outcomes or counteract their negative impacts.
The Newcastle University team lead the research focuses on modelling supply chain logistics (Task 7.1) and agri-business profitability (Task 5.6).
- Project Dates: 30/04/2021 (End)
- Project Leader: Professor Aad van Moorsel, Newcastle University School of Computing
The FinTech industry is one of the major growth industries in the United Kingdom. These companies create new, cheaper and faster services, utilizing the latest technologies such as cloud, mobile and blockchain. To succeed they need to gain the trust of customers in a period that society's trust in the financial industry is still impacted by the mortgage crisis almost a decade ago.
Led by Newcastle University, UK, and supported by Atom bank, the UK’s first bank built exclusively for smartphone or tablet, researchers are embarking on a three-year FinTrust project that will look at the role of machine learning in banking, particularly in the context of automated lending decisions and whether these lead to bias and financial exclusion.
Professor Aad Van Moorsel, Professor in Cyber Security at Newcastle University and project lead, explains:
“Modern-day financial services increasingly rely on ‘robo-advice’, in which smart algorithms will make automated decisions about mortgages and other financial matters in seconds.
“But no-one knows if computers rather than humans making decisions increases the risk of bias against certain groups of people and whether this could lead to new forms of financial distress and financial exclusion.
“This innovative project will explore how consumer trust in banks and financial services can be enhanced while retaining the benefits of mobile banking that we now take for granted, software tools available freely and to a wide audience, training the research staff in interacting and public engagement to optimize the impact from our research.”
Dr Karen Elliott, joint project lead based at Newcastle University Business School, explains:
“Recent media reports about the exploitation of personal data and high profile technology breaches have increased public awareness of potential drawbacks of the digital age. At the same time, the success of new challenger banks like Atom shows that consumers want the convenience that the technology offers.
“The challenge is finding a way to adopt technology in a secure but customerfocused way that doesn’t differentiate between particular groups if we’re to build trust in the services and companies with whom we share our personal data.”
Project staff
- Dr Kovila Coopamootoo, Newcastle University School of Computing, Co-i
- Dr Karen Elliott, Newcastle University Business School, Co-i
Project Leader: Professor Matt Gorton, Newcastle University Business School
Project Dates: 31/03/2021 (End)
Project Leader: Professor Matt Gorton, Newcastle University Business School
Project Dates: 28/02/2021 (End)