Research project
Turing Fellow - Professor Wall
- Start date: 1 October 2018
- End date: 1 October 2020
- Funder: Alan Turing Institute
- Primary investigator: Professor David S. Wall FAcSS
Professor Wall is one of 24 researchers awarded a prestigious Turing Fellowship at the University of Leeds, following the launch of a partnership announced earlier this year between the University and the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. Fellowships are awarded to individuals with proven research excellence in data science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or a related field. The partnership with The Alan Turing Institute is led by the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA), which will play a major role in the coordination of projects and activity amongst Turing Fellows and their research teams.
Professor Wall’s project seeks to conduct exploratory work into improving interdisciplinarity in cyber security research by exploring and mapping out a framework for developing commonly accepted conceptual metrics in cyber security. The project theme aligns with the Turing Defence and Security programme's applied area of research into cyber security and the project aims to improve the quality and extent of interdisciplinarity in the field of cyber security. The need for common cyber metrics guided by a commonly understood language has been highlighted as an important need by major policy making bodies ranging from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It also originates from a more practical need that has arisen in my own interdisciplinary research project work and also the scientific board of the Research Institute for the Science of Cyber Security.
This project will draw upon these experiences and conduct original research. The project aims are to: i) scope out the field of cyber security in terms of the different disciplinary understandings of it; ii) establish the strengths and weaknesses of different understandings of cyber security; iii) develop a 'conceptual language' or framework to enable the different disciplines to talk more meaningfully to each other, and then work together; iv) develop an agenda, and means to improve interdisciplinary communications to create added value in the formulation of ideas for proposals and improve the scientific outputs of projects, whilst increasing the overall value of the projects.