UK Privacy Enhancing Technologies Challenge Prize

Deadline: 19-Sep-22

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation is inviting Applications from organisations for Privacy Enhancing Technologies Challenge.

The aim of this competition is to develop innovative privacy-preserving solutions that address one or both of the specific challenge use cases in financial crime or public health.

Innovate UK, will work with the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) to run a Privacy Enhancing Technologies Challenge. This is part of an aligned programme with the US National Science Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Specific Themes

Your project must address one or both of the pre-defined, high-impact use cases.
You must specify the use case in your application, and can submit technical solutions for both use cases. The technical evaluation of these will be treated separately.
A full technical briefing is attached to each use case, providing details of the datasets, analytical tasks, and evaluation criteria that will be used during the challenge. The briefings will also outline the requirements for what should be included in the white paper.
Use case 1: Financial Crime Prevention
- This use case is focused on enhancing cross-organisation and cross-border data access, supporting efforts to combat money laundering and other financial crime.
- You will utilise synthetic datasets representing data held by the SWIFT payments network and datasets held by partner banks.
- This is a high-impact use case for novel privacy enhancing technologies. Successful solutions will allow for effective detection of illegal financial activity while addressing the challenges arising between enabling sufficient access to data and successfully limiting the identifiability of innocent individuals and possibility of inference of their sensitive information from that data.
- The scale of the problem is vast: the UN estimates that US$800-2000bn is laundered each year, representing 2-5% of global GDP.
- A full technical briefing for this use case can be found here.
Use case 2: Pandemic response and forecasting
- This use case is focused on enabling privacy-preserving access to health and mobility data in order to improve forecasting related to public health emergencies, and there by bolster response capabilities for future emergencies, including pandemics.
- You will utilise synthetic datasets representing data held by the University of Virginia. This use case is an opportunity to prepare for future epidemics and public health emergencies.

Program Phases

The challenge is split into 3 phases:

Phase 1: Your approach. You will develop a technical white paper which will describe your proposed approach
Phase 2: Solution development. If successful in phase 1, you will be invited to develop your solution
Phase 3: Testing. The top solutions will be tested by dedicated Red Teams

Funding Information

Up to £700,000 is available in funding across the three phases of the competition.
£10,000 awards will be awarded to up to 10 of the highest scoring applicants from phase 1 to help grow their organisation. Your phase 2 project’s total costs can be up to £50,000 and will help you to develop your solution.

Projects Criteria

You must develop privacy-preserving federated learning solutions that:
- use a combination of input and output privacy techniques
- demonstrate the ability to protect privacy against a set of defined attacks and threat models
- effectively accomplish a set of analytical or predictive tasks specified in the use case provided
You must determine the set of privacy technologies used in your solutions. For example:
- any de-identification techniques
- differential privacy
- cryptographic techniques
- combinations that could be a part of the end-to-end solutions
The Innovate UK encourage projects that:
- display a high degree of novel innovation
- rigorously describe how their solution will provide guarantees of privacy appropriate to the use case
- consider how their solution, or a future version of it, could be applied in a production environment

Eligibility Criteria

Lead Organisation: Your organisation must be UK registered:
- business of any size
- academic institution
- charity
- not for profit
- public sector organisation
- research and technology organisation (RTO)
Subcontractors
- Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.
- You must include all other organisations you wish to work with on your project as subcontractors in your project costs and in your answer to question 6.
- Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
- You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the UK.
- You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. The Innovate UK will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.
- All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
Number of Applications
- Your organisation can lead on one proposal in each theme only. You can only receive funding for one successful proposal.
Your Project
- If successful and invited, your phase 2 project must:
  - have total costs of up to £50,000
  - start by 25 October 2022
  - end by 24 January 2023
  - last up to 3 months
  - carry out the majority of its project work in the UK
  - intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
  - You can only claim for eligible project costs for your phase 2 projects.
- Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian source.
- If your total project’s costs or duration falls outside of the eligibility criteria, you must provide justification at least 10 working days before the competition closes. They will decide whether to approve your request. If you have not requested approval or your application has not been approved by the Innovate UK, you will be made ineligible. Your application will then not be sent for assessment.