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The United Kingdom (UK) has launched a National Centre to provide a step-change in research associated with the Internet of Things (IoT).
According to a press release, the PETRAS (privacy, ethics, trust, reliability, acceptability, and security) National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity will provide national capability enabling the UK “to become a world-leader in IoT and associated systems security.”
The new Centre’s focus will be on finding out new opportunities and threats that arise when Edge computing is deployed more widely in the economy and society: when Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies move from being centralised systems to being run at the periphery of the internet and local IoT networks.
Funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the Securing Digital Technologies at the Periphery (SDTaP) programme, this second phase of PETRAS will strengthen an already established and successful platform which, since 2016, has coordinated and convened 11 universities and 110 industrial and government User Partners in cross-disciplinary collaboration. PETRAS has created a dynamic shared research agenda that addresses social and physical science challenges in equal measure and has worked across a broad range of Technology Readiness Levels.
PETRAS will manage a series of open academic funding calls throughout its lifetime, the first of which will be announced in summer 2019.
Professor Jeremy Watson CBE FREng, PETRAS Director & Professor of Engineering Systems at UCL STEaPP, said in a written statement, “The Centre’s ultimate aim is, by creating a trustworthy and secure infrastructure for the Internet of Things, to deliver a step change in socio-economic benefit for the UK with visible improvements for citizen wellbeing and quality of life.”