The proposed project will create a knowledge exchange network between media professionals and academic researchers, to explore the potential of new forms of public service media, and will explore ways in which academic researchers can utilise new technologies to better disseminate and exchange their research and ideas.Context of the research:New internet-based forms of media are enabling a wider range of voices to participate in diverse and innovative kinds of communication, whilst more traditional media is compelled to adapt to accommodate and complement - or compete with - these new forms. Public service media remains important in that its ethos is to promote communication in the public interest which in turn encourages social cohesion, education, deliberative democracy, and creativity, as part of a functioning civil society. During the twentieth century, Britain's public service broadcasting enjoyed an excellent international reputation. But as broadcasting becomes a smaller part of the media landscape, it is necessary to support new forms of public service media, and media for the public good, in an interdisciplinary way. These developments might come from traditional major broadcasters, or from new grassroots initiatives. A knowledge exchange network is therefore proposed between producers, researchers, and digital media creatives, to help develop this potential. The network builds upon an existing network of media producers and academic researchers which formed under a three-year collaborative research initiative fostered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the BBC. What the project will do:1. A six-month feasibility study will be conducted which will provide a 'road map' for a continuing knowledge exchange network between media professionals and academic researchers in the UK. The network will be both online and offline - a social network website, integrated with other networking tools, and supported by face-to-face events. A case study will be included which will aim to illustrate how the new network could assist the development of a 'community of innovation' at Media City, Salford. 2. An existing 'seed' group of 160 producers and academics from the BBC and AHRC collaborative research initiative will be invited to join a new online network built within a premium 'Ning' site (www.ning.com). The basic framework has already been built by us working with BBC developers and designers. The present constituency comprises 60 BBC producers and 100 academics with a large number based in London, but also a good proportion based in the south (Brighton, Bournemouth), the west (Bristol and Cardiff), the north (Manchester and Newcastle) and in Scotland (Glasgow).3. The project will also begin to explore ways in which the network can enhance the capacity of the academic arts and humanities sector to communicate their research interests and findings more effectively with interested parties and potential collaborators, including industry, third sector organisations, government, and the public. Workshops and inspiration events, and a website of positive case studies, would support researchers to use Web 2.0 tools, and other means, to share their research work with wider audiences.The strategic benefit for the UK:Digital media is increasingly important to the UK economy, and in a post-industrial era the relative concentration of creative industries within Britain offers considerable economic dividends. Public service media outlets now include a wide range of companies. Ofcom, the communication and media regulator, is keen to ensure plurality of suppliers for public service media. This aim will be supported by the proposed knowledge exchange network, which will encourage SMEs, larger media outlets and academics from many different disciplines to innovate and collaborate around public service goals.

This proposal stems directly from the EPSRC Workshop held on 20 & 21 October 2010 "ICT Research - The Next Decade". It seeks to address the challenge of the navigation of time-based media collections and items throughout the content life-cycle, from creation to consumption. It will achieve this by establishing an open network of researchers from across academia and industry, who engage in workshops, sandpits and, most importantly, feasibility or path-finder mini-projects. These mini-projects have the aims not only of performing leading edge, early stage research that will lead on to larger proposals, but also of building a critical mass of researchers, whose expectation is to tackle significant challenges by collaborating. Other elements of this project are to create a Landscape document for the field, develop appropriate ontologies for capturing media semantics, present results through a diverse range of channels and summarise the findings of the project, including a Roadmap. The research agenda is based on five premises: 1. Content-related metadata is an effective and scalable approach exemplified in this domain and applicable to future large scale, automated and interactive information systems; 2. The point of creation is the best time and place to collect (and compute) metadata; 3. The best way to represent this metadata is one that is amenable to knowledge processing and management, linked data strategies and logical inference; 4. Significant challenges require a cross-disciplinary approach, ranging from fundamental theory to applied research set in the context of a real problem; and 5. The UK is supremely placed with the world-leading skills and experience to be a world-beating authority in an area of intellectual and societal/commercial benefit. This proposal deliberately does not address related problems of navigation through legacy content, nor of Rights Management, as these are already embedded in the research landscape. Instead, we concentrate on the production of future media items. The issues raised and investigated by this proposal are pertinent not only to EPSRC, but also to ESRC, AHRC, JISC and TSB, and with particular relevance to the Digital Economy. The applications of such ideas span all the different time-based media, including music, drama, documentary, film, texts and so on. In order to advance the field, this project will bring together acknowledged experts from across UK academia in a diverse range of disciplines, including Semantic Web experts, Signal Processing experts, Video experts, Performance experts and more. The project aims to form a network and a critical mass of expertise by a series of interventions that will also include industrial collaborators (assisted by the TSB Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network). Network activities include workshops and sandpits, as well as collaborative small scale research projects, each typically of 6 months duration with 2 or 3 participant universities. The outcomes of the project include: Research and Impact Roadmaps; a well-connected community of researchers engineers, creatives, content producers and funders; commercial and full-fledged research proposals; research publications; and specific impact activities at world leading Broadcast and Media conventions.

This document presents the case for a DTC at Lancaster University, targeting the Digital Economy priority area. Recent government thinking (as witnessed by the Sainsbury, Cox and Denham reviews) highlights the crucial role of innovation and its importance for the future health of the UK economy (including the Digital Economy). We rise to this challenge by proposing a world class, cross-disciplinary and user-centric DTC which places innovation at the heart of its curriculum and ethos. We propose to go beyond traditional multi-disciplinary approaches by seeking a creative fusion between three key disciplines, namely computer science, management and design. The emphasis is on producing a new breed of innovative people who understand and are able to advance the state of the art in technical, design and business innovation (exploring the possible, desirable and feasible). We further propose to align the Centre closely with the needs and goals of industrial producers and consumers of digital innovation (user focus) to ensure the relevance of the PhD programme and to encourage technology transfer/ early adoption of the emerging ideas and knowledge exchange. The DTC will build on the strengths of the InfoLab21 initiative, a recognised leader in technology transfer strategies, in order to seek more valuable and viable technical, social and economic pathways from the laboratory to organisational end-users and producers. The bid also builds on existing support including a Marie Curie Training Network in Creative Design/ Innovation. The long term vision of the centre is to achieve sustainability through partnerships between the university and organisational and customer end users.Key features of the bid include:- A deliberate and distinctive cross-cutting strategy of focusing on innovation as the core of the programme and rooting each PhD within thematic clusters to achieve the desired user focus;- The bringing together of three centres of excellence at Lancaster, namely the Management School, InfoLab21 and ImaginationLancaster with a focus on the resultant creative fusion;- Strong and dedicated leadership offered by 0.5 FTE Director (Prof. Gordon Blair) with significant experience of leadership and postgraduate training;- Location in a new customised space, with value added features such as the Imagination Studio, at a total cost of 10m, building on other investments in the 3 centres of excellence of 38.5m;- Programmes to engage with producers and users of digital innovations, thereby enhancing the student experience through sponsorship, industrial internships and international placements;- Significant focus on SME engagement and their business development, with associated structures and mechanisms becoming a focus for innovation in their own right;- The incorporation of a 12 month Masters of Research (MRes) featuring core modules on innovation, tailorable elements from the three centres, and also a number of ideas factories supporting a refinement from the cross-disciplinary thematic clusters and the definition of MRes and PhD projects; - A requirements-driven transferable skills programme within the 1+3 programme, targeted at industrial needs and capabilities, with the added feature of master classes from inspirational speakers including Sir Chris Bonnington;- Strong programme and quality assurance management, including an emphasis on recruitment.This is a distinctive, bold, imaginative and potentially high impact proposal which can contribute significantly to, and indeed shape, the emerging Digital Economy agenda through its focus on digital innovation. Significant additional contributions are also planned with respect to the Innovation Nation and in particular mechanisms and policies to stimulate innovative thinking in the economy and in society.

The emergence of a global ubiquitous computing environment in which each of us routinely interacts with many thousands of interconnected computers embedded into the everyday world around us will transform the ways in which we work, travel, learn, entertain ourselves and socialise. Ubiquitous computing will be the engine that drives our future digital economy, stimulating new forms of digital business and transforming existing ones.However, ubiquitous computing also carries considerable risks in terms of societal acceptance and a lack of established models of innovation and wealth creation, so that unlocking its potential is far from straightforward. In order to ensure that the UK reaps the benefits of ubiquitous computing while avoiding its risks, we must address three fundamental challenges. First, we need to pursue a new technical research agenda for the widespread adoption of ubiquitous computing. Second, we must understand and design for an increasingly diverse population of users. Third, we need to establish new paths to innovation in digital business. Meeting these challenges requires a new generation of researchers with interdisciplinary skills in the technical and human centred aspects of ubiquitous computing and transferable skills in research, innovation and societal impact.Our doctoral training centre for Ubiquitous Computing in the Digital Economy will develop a cohort of interdisciplinary researchers who have been exposed to new research methods and paradigms within a creative and adventurous culture so as to provide the future leadership in research and knowledge transfer that is necessary to secure the transformative potential of ubiquitous computing for the UK digital economy. To achieve this we will work across traditional research boundaries; encourage students to adopt an end-to-end perspective on innovation; promote creativity and adventure in research; and place engagement with society, industry and key stakeholders at the core of our programme.Our proposal brings together a unique pool of researchers with extensive expertise in the technologies of ubiquitous and location based computing, user-centred design, societal understanding, and research and training in innovation and leadership. It also involves a wide spectrum of industry partners from across the value chain for ubiquitous computing, spanning positioning, communications, devices, middleware, databases, design, and our two driving market sectors of the creative industries and transportation.Our training programme is based on the approach of personalised pathways that develop individual students' interdisciplinary and transferable skills, and that produce a personal portfolio to showcase the skills and experience gained alongside the more traditional PhD thesis. It includes a flexible taught programme that emphasises student-led seminars, short-fat modules, training projects and e-learning as delivery mechanisms that are suited to PhD training; an industrial internship scheme under which students spend three months working at an industrial partner; and a PhD research project that builds on a proposal developed during the first year of training and that is supported by multiple supervisors from different disciplines with industry involvement. Our DTC will foster a community of researchers through a dedicated shared space, a programme of community building events, training for supervisors and well as students, funding for a student society, and an alumni programme.