Updates

PETRAS is excited to present a year in review summary of the Centre’s highlights in 2022. The PETRAS team has had a busy year with a wide range of events, new research projects, high quality research publications and research outputs from the Centre’s researchers and partners from across the UK.

Games and gaming have become a pervasive media across the world generating both huge revenues and social impact. Whilst games are often dismissed as trivial their design continues to be at the forefront of delivering engaging interactive experiences and can offer significant opportunities for encouraging users to play a more active role in managing their security and privacy.

PETRAS academics from the PT.HEAT project have recently developed the ThermoSecure system that can guess computer and smartphone passwords by analysing traces of heat left on keyboards and screens.This development, led by Dr Mohamed Khamis, University of Glasgow, demonstrates how falling prices of thermal imaging cameras and increasing access to machine learning are causing new cyber threats for ‘thermal attacks.’

On 17 September 2022, PETRAS took its Edge of Reality and Edge of Tomorrow projects to The British Science Festival in Leicester, aiming to inform the public about the sustainability and security of their connected devices. Lancaster University's design-led research lab, Imagination Lancaster, also rode along in its Future Mundane Caravan.

This presentation will introduce speculative design and design fiction as methods and discuss how they might be of particular interest to PETRAS researchers. It will describe how such approaches can be used both to consider possible futures and to interrogate these potential futures in order to support the design and development of technologies and systems in the present.

The REG-MEDTECH project has just published a White Paper entitled "The Future of Medical Device Regulation and Standards: Dealing with Critical Challenges for Connected, Intelligent Medical Devices", in partnership with BSI, the UK National Standards Body. The paper reviews the main trends in the existing standards and regulatory landscape applicable to connected, intelligent medical devices (CIMDs) and captures critical challenges and potential gaps in this area.

New digital technologies are making an impact when it comes to helping us make sense of the natural environment as we try to future-proof our world in the face of climate change. Yet, our current approach of creating new but often disposable hardware and devices that generate, process and store copious amounts of data via systems like AI and ML, also raises the prospect of a technological double-edged sword.

Researchers from the CyFer project, funded by PETRAS, UK, are examining cybersecurity, privacy, ethics and trust in FemTech. Female-oriented technologies (FemTech) promise to enable people to take control of their bodies and lives, helping them overcome the many existing challenges in medical care and research.

The PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity’s work was highlighted in parliamentary debates on an amendment to strengthen cybersecurity in children’s products in the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill.

The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and harnessing their economic value represents a process that takes place continually at the intersection of developments in three major domains: social, technical, and economic. We call these interrelated collections of physical and digital objects (sensors, data stores, 3rd parties, business models, actuators, and so on) IoT constellations.

The PETRAS Edge of Tomorrow (ET) project from Lancaster University took their Prometheus Game to Cheltenham Science Festival in June 2022. The game was situated in the Festival’s Arcade zone, which was visited by over 24 thousand attendees over the course of the week.