The event brought together six EPSRC funded Next Stage Digital Economy Centres to showcase outputs and impacts of socio-technical research in the UK and was attended by industry, academics and UKRI representatives. Each of the centres have a focus on harnessing digital technologies for our economy, our communities, our cultural lives, and our health and wellbeing which has led to impact on policy, patents, publications in the UK.

The event opened with an insightful keynote from Professor Yvonne Rogers, Director of UCL Interaction Centre, addressing the requirement to use research to address real world problems and noting the challenges as society becomes more data enabled. In the afternoon, a second engaging keynote was delivered by Lord Chris Holmes of Richmond MBE UK Parliament, highlighting the need for a people-centred approach and public engagement to achieve prosperity for society.

DECaDE’s strong co-creation and engagement with Industry, with a particular focus on real-world problems was demonstrated by DECaDE’s director, Professor John Collomosse who presented the centre’s key outputs from its first three years. He summarised how decentralised platforms could transform our future digital economy and highlighted our research in Media Tokenisation and blockchain systems in supply chain and our work to support and influence Government work in this area. Summarising the event, John said,

 DE-NEXUS was a fantastic opportunity to showcase the work of the six Digital Economy Next Centres, and as Lord Holmes noted in his keynote, also the significant impact enabled by the unique support for socio-technical research offered by the UKRI Digital Economy Theme.  It was an honour to present our centre DECaDE’s research, including our work with the Cabinet Office on cross-border supply chain and our research in media provenance helping to fight fake news with the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative.”

John Collomosse, DECaDE

The day concluded with Professor Christopher Smith Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council delivering a UKRI perspective on a digital future and its investment in digital twinning to build an academic research community focusing on ethics and human interaction, security and resilience and environmental sustainability. Attendees also heard the outcomes of the panel sessions they attended, in the plenary discussion, which proved to be an invaluable opportunity to engage with the broader digital economy community.

The Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy (DECaDE) is a five-year EPSRC funded Next Stage Digital Economy Centre, part of the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing exploring how data-centric technologies, such as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and artificial Intelligence (AI) could transform our future digital economy through decentralised platforms.

For further details or for media enquiries please contact decade@surrey.ac.uk