Lancaster University is one of the top UK research-led Universities with 92% of its research recognized as world leading or internationally significant in the latest UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The School of Computing and Communications (SCC) at Lancaster University is, according to the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) latest landscapes document, one of the leading research centres of excellence in ICT in the UK. The School is internationally known for its leading-edge contributions to networked and distributed systems. Significant research is carried out in the area of resilient networking and the area of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Lancaster’s research work has attracted strong support and collaborations from industry such as BT Labs, Microsoft, Orange, Cisco, HP Labs, France Télécom, Lucent, Intel, Agilent Labs, Telekom Austria, and ETRI in S. Korea. Lancaster is also a central participant in many EU funded research projects, and also R&D projects funded by EPSRC.
Currently a number projects in areas related resilience, risk management and security are being carried out, forming a research environment in which the proposed work can be implemented successfully. Relevant on-going projects include the India-UK Advanced Technology Centre in Next Generation Networks and the EU EINS Network of Excellence in Internet Science in which all of the investigators in the current proposal are involved. In the past several years Lancaster has been part of the EU projects ResumeNet and ANA (David Hutchison) which are relevant to the proposed work. Recently, Lancaster has become one of the eight new Centres for Cybersecurity in the UK, and several new PhD students have started and/or are being recruited in this area of research. In addition, Lancaster has several research activities in the areas of ethnography (Mark Rouncefield) and risk management (Jerry Busby), the former within SCC, and the latter within the Management Science Department in the Lancaster Management School.
Competencies: Within the Computing department these include network resilience and security, and ethnography of human computer interaction. Within the Management Science department this includes risk analysis – ranging from expertise in risk perception and risk amplification, through to the control of risk in hazardous organizations, and specific topics such as the incorporation of intentionality into risk assessment procedures.
Main tasks: Lancaster will have an involvement in several work packages and will lead work package 3. Within work package 3 its main tasks will be to participate in the organizational fieldwork and the secondary data analysis, participate in the consumer surveys and subsequent modelling, and to participate in the development of the analytical framework, related metrics, the monitoring framework and reference architecture.