UK Privacy Enhancing Technologies Challenge Prize

Apply for a share of up to £700,000 to develop innovative privacy solutions to two real world challenge use cases

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is working with the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation - part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) - 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.

The aim of this challenge is to accelerate the development and adoption of privacy-preserving federated learning approaches, and build trust in their adoption.

To achieve this, participants are asked to develop approaches that:

• leverage a combination of input and outputs privacy techniques
• deliver strong privacy guarantees against a set of common threats and privacy attacks
• develop privacy technologies that are capable of supporting machine learning tasks in one or two predefined use cases in the financial crime and public health sectors

The challenge is split into three 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.

Up to £700,000 is available in funding across the three phases of the competition.

Applicants successful in Phase 1 and invited to Phase 2 will be able to apply for up to £50,000 to develop their solutions in Phase 2. Up to ten awards of £10,000 will also be given to the highest scoring projects from phase 1. The £10,000 can only be used to support with the growth of your business and the costs associated with this must be evidenced.

Find out more about the UK Privacy Enhancing Technologies Challenge Prize and how to apply.

First published 1 August 2022