Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/03/19/gov_it_research/

Government funds IT security research

Bids invited for £6m pot

By Kablenet

Posted in Channel, 19th March 2009 10:51 GMT

The government's Technology Strategy Board has invited bids for a £6m fund for research into improving information security.

Organisations and individuals are invited to take part in what the board describes as the UK's only publicly funded investigation into a "critical challenge for modern society". The aim is to combine academic excellence with the business skills required to turn ideas into innovations which will benefit information systems in the public and private sectors.

The Technology Strategy Board, set up to invest in and manage a range of programmes to promote technology-enabled innovation, intends that the outcome will be a new set of technology-inspired tools, techniques and services and the creation of a new market for complex systems modelling and analysis.

Funding for the competition is also being provided by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

A series of one day events will be organised to encourage individuals and small companies to participate by providing information about the submission process, a social networking service to help them form consortia or find existing ones, and a 'fast track' route for submissions valued at under £150,000.

Every bidder will be required to demonstrate how they intend to share expertise to deliver greater results than they could alone.

"Information is the lifeblood of our day to day existence," says Andrew Tyrer, innovation platform leader for network security at the Technology Strategy Board. "A failure to predict weakness and future vulnerabilities in the way these systems grow and develop could lead to problems in every aspect of modern society. Our competition will seek to address what we consider to be one of the greatest challenges to the way we live and work."

This article was originally published at Kablenet.

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