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Centre for Digital Trust and Society - Anniversary Forum A digital futures event

By Dr Siddharth Gulati (Research Associate, Alliance Manchester Business School), Dr David Buil-Gil (Lecturer in Quantitative Criminology), and Phil Wallace (Communications and Engagement Coordinator, Digital Futures) at the University of Manchester.

As we continuously surround ourselves with more complex and connected technologies, understanding the issue of whether we can trust the systems we use, and the people we interact with has become critical. This requires us to think differently and develop new methods and mindsets to ensure the technologies that we design can be trusted and accepted by society. With this in mind, the Centre for Digital Trust and Society (CDTS) was created, through the University of Manchester’s Digital Futures research platform, to act as an access point to the University’s expertise in digital trust and security, and facilitate interactions between researchers and problem holders.

The research being carried out at CDTS is truly interdisciplinary which is reflected in the backgrounds of members, whose expertise and interests span fields as varied as data science, financial technology, innovation, psychology, and strategic management. You can read more about the research clusters of the CDTS here: https://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/dts/research/clusters/.

On 6th July 2022, the CDTS held an Anniversary Forum to celebrate their first year of activity and bring together interdisciplinary researchers and key partners in the Greater Manchester ecosystem to help inform and design the CDTS’s activity and research going forward.

Following a welcome and overview by Professors Mark Elliot (Forum Chair) and Nick Lord (Director of the CDTS), the Forum was kicked off in earnest by an excellent keynote from Beena Puri, Digital Innovation and Partnerships Lead at Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). Beena stressed the importance of digital inclusion and how it can act as a pre-cursor for other important harms (e.g. COVID infections). Beena highlighted the development of a Digital Exclusion Risk Index tool developed by the GMCA to benefit local authorities in providing detailed insight into where digital inclusion initiatives are needed most. The tool can be accessed through this link: https://bit.ly/3zg5Sgv.

Following Beena’s excellent keynote, the Forum hosted three engaging panels, bringing together representatives from academia, industry and the wider community. The panel themes reflected key interdisciplinary areas of research currently undertaken through the CDTS.

Panel 1: Digital Inclusion and Identity

Chair: Professor Emma Barrett (with thanks to Professor Rachel Gibson for her role in bringing our expert panel together)

Panellists: Professor Jackie Carter, Dr Christopher Forster, Micheal Omoniyi (sadly Lauren Coulman was unable to join us on the day - you were missed!).

As more and more of day to day life shifts online, questions about how open, fair and inclusive the virtual world is, and how it can be made more so, are increasingly important for researchers and practitioners to address. What values should be used to inform the creation of digital spaces? How do we manage competing visions of the ‘good’ e-society? Should technology and AI be given a more decisive role in designing our digital future or should human intelligence be at the forefront? This panel and the audience could have gone on for another hour in discussing these issues, probably a session that could have been its own event! A core theme was the importance of social sciences’ important contribution to what might seem at surface level to be technical issues.

Panel 2: Future Data, Future Tech

Chair: Professor Mark Elliot

Panellists: Dr Darminer Ghataoura, Professor Niels Peek, James Ramsden, Dr Vanessa Higgins

Data are everywhere, digital tech is sprawling and at the interface of the two we are evolving as hybrid digital-physical entities – what does this mean for the future of our privacy, our trust in systems, our individual identities? What could it mean to be “secure” in this every expanding data-tech environment? This panel grappled with these questions and many more

Panel 3: Cybersecurity in the Workplace

Chair: Dr Richard Allmendinger

Panellists: Professor Danny Dresner, Professor Gerard Hodgkinson, Katie Gallagher, Professor Michael Levi.

Challenges around cyber security – technical, economic, and social - are rapidly evolving for businesses across all sectors, not least because of the rapid acceleration of online services across a range of sectors in the wake of the pandemic. This panel, capping off a fantastic day of interaction, brought together figures from industry and academia to discuss these issues, and also looked at the relationship between cyber security and productivity.

Discussions continued to flow into the evening, with the Forum achieving its ultimate purpose of bringing together key stakeholders from across Greater Mancehster’s digital ecosystem to foster greater interconnections and understanding. We hope that all those taking part went away not just with a better understanding of the widespread activity in Greater Manchester’s digital ecosystem and the region’s ambitions for the future, but also the new connections and strengthened relationships that will help us realise those ambitions. A huge thank you to all of our speakers for their time and expert input. Digital Trust and Society Forum 2023, anyone?

If you are interested in joining future events you can sign up for our DTS mailing list and follow our Twitter account @UoM_CDTS. The University of Manchester's wider Digital Futures network is highly interdisciplinary and operates across the whole range of the University’s digital research - connect with us and keep in touch:

Credits:

Image adapted by a photo from Mylo Kane on Unsplash