Dr Will Jones is part of a new consortium which has been awarded a major grant by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to investigate the use and exploitation of personal data in the digital age.

Dr Jones will be part of an interdisciplinary research team from Cranfield University and the University of Portsmouth, as well as Professor Lizzie Coles-Kemp of Royal Holloway’s Information Security Group. The full project description is below. With Professor Coles-Kemp, Dr Jones will be investigating the ways in which datafication and algorithmification have transformed the conduct of refugee resettlement policy in Europe combining top-down market and institutional design approaches with bottom-up ethnography to discover how these systems really work, what they fail to do, and unintentionally do, and how they can be redesigned to be more efficient and empowering for refugees themselves, the communities that host them, and the public agencies which work with both.

For more information click here.

People Powered Algorithms for Desirable Social Outcomes – EP/R033382/1

Without confidence in the legitimacy and credibility of algorithms used in interactions between government and citizens, trust between the two can be dramatically reduced. The project will focus on three key public policy areas where algorithmic decision-making is employed – refugee resettlement, welfare and healthcare provision, and examine how the interaction between public policy and system design and implementation affects the security and wellbeing of individuals, the security of the state with the aim of increasing confidence in digital service design.