Digital services are rapidly becoming the norm; many of these services are already being taken for granted (except when they fail) – ranging from traffic lights that react to real time traffic flows, to indoor climate systems that note our presence and patterns of use of the space. It is also clear that developments are increasingly driven by Communities, which are not always confined within borders, let alone jurisdictions per se. This, and the work on Privacy, Security, Standards and Spectrum led to a number of strategic recommendations that have been expressed and substantiated in the PICASSO Policy White Paper that is now released:

  1. Privacy: Solutions need to be found to allow services to develop that respect (European and US) privacy and data protection frameworks and – where appropriate – challenge their provisions. This will require policy collaboration that is looking forward to joint and sustainable solutions aimed at ensuring an even higher level goal than preserving privacy: that of preserving “human dignity” in a digital age, ensuring that we can still live as humans in our digital environment
  2. Security: Recognising basic security is key to whatever we want to ensure: set up joint EU/US research collaboration to develop biologically inspired security. With IoT and underlying interconnections, there’s a significant risk with IoT devices providing a back door to enterprise systems and data. Using biological constructs (in particular those relating to immune responses and contagion), we may be able identify attacks before they become widespread and respond in a proportionate and dynamic fashion by directing resources to the appropriate area.
  3. Standards: Stimulate participation of sponsored research and innovation in global (IETF, ITU, IEEE etc.) rather than focus on regional standardisation platforms alone, for EU/US collaboration.
  4. Spectrum: Set up joint EU/US research collaboration on developing agility in spectrum allocation and management to ensure that ubiquitous connectivity enabling digital services to work becomes possible, not being held back by (slow and ineffective) spectrum allocation negotiations.

For EU and US ICT R&I programmes, it would be good to specifically support exchange of good practice experience between Communities in EU and US; many societal challenges are common to both regions and different types of communities and the potential of many solutions that have already been devised for adaptation elsewhere and optimisation in situ remain under-explored.

These and other findings can be found in PICASSO’s Project Reports and public Project Deliverables in the Outreach section of our webpage.