Creating a cyber corridor across the North West
The Lancaster University is at the heart of an ambitious programme that has made the North West a UK hub for cyber expertise and research, second only to London and the South East.
Earlier this year it opened a new educational facility to train the next generation of computer science and cyber security students, including eight specialist teaching laboratories and a Data Immersion Suite equipped with a 22m floor-to-ceiling, wrap-around video wall, surround sound and audio capture, and a set of headsets for immersive engagement.
This enables students, academics, policy makers and engineers to explore complex problems using on-screen data visualisations with real-time updates from cyber and physical systems. It allows users to generate scenarios which unfold over hours or days to create a life-like experience.
The Data Immersion Suite also offers businesses and industry the opportunity to engage with experts from Lancaster University to explore data-driven solutions tailored to their business.
The new facilities are central to Lancaster University’s Data Cyber Quarter and support the launch of Security and Protection Science at Lancaster, a £19m initiative to boost the University’s teaching and research capabilities around cyber security.
The opening coincided with the arrival of the National Cyber Force (NCF) in Samlesbury, Lancashire, where its new headquarters is due to open later this year, eventually house 3,000 people and cementing the North West’s position as a national cyber hub.
It follows the decision by GCHQ – the cyber and signals arm of the UK intelligence services – to open a major base in Manchester in 2019 – now home to several hundred staff.
Simon Cook, Professor in Practise for Data and Cyber Research, Enterprise & Engagement at Lancaster University, said: “What we are creating is a North West cyber corridor, joining Manchester with Samlesbury, Lancashire, Lancaster and beyond.
“We are building a coalition of people to make the most of that. At the moment there are around 12,000 jobs in the North West engaged in cyber security. After London and the South East it's the largest area in the UK.
“We think that with a bit of economic stimulation and intervention, we can take that up to 30,000 in the next five years or so. And those are high quality, lifelong careers for people.
“Likewise the economic impact of cyber in the North West at the moment is estimated to be worth around £750 million in GVA per annum, but we think we can grow that to £2.5 billion.”
An Exciting Time
Lancaster University is playing a central role in those efforts, in terms of education, research and working with a broad range of businesses from start-ups and SMEs to multinational tech companies across the breadth of the cyber field.
Simon Cook explains that his role is as professor in practice rather than an academic. “My background and area of practise is national security and intelligence.
“I’ve had a long career working in government in national security roles, most recently focused on the North West and developing the North West cyber ecosystem.
“After completing my previous career I was looking around and Lancaster was doing by far the most in that area. They have all the connections with all the national security organisations, so it seemed like a good place to work with. I’ve been here now about two and a half years.
“It’s a very exciting time to be here, with GCHQ building its presence in the North West and the National Cyber Force opening its headquarters 20 miles down the road in Lancashire. With the thousands of jobs and multi-billion pound investment, they are once-in-a-generation catalysts for the region.
“They offer great potential but working with national security is also really hard. What they do has to be secret, so there is a culture of working closely with defined partners over very long periods of time. Getting on their commercial frameworks is tricky.
“So part of our role at Lancaster is working on that engagement, building the bridges so the region can maximise the benefit for the local economy.
“The prime suppliers to national security and the cyber sector are all moving up here to the North West. That is encouraging us here at the University to look at how we can best profit from the ideas coming out of research at Lancaster, creating spin-out companies and commercialising those ideas.
“It involves industry large and small, it's academia, it's local government, seeing how we can all work together with inventors and founders and also with investors and capital risk capital.
“That is the ecosystem we’re trying to build in the North West. It won’t happen by itself, because it’s a difficult sector and will require some interventions. But Lancaster is a university with deep roots in cyber. It probably started nearly 20 years ago when they started making it a specialism and now there is a wide range of activities going on.
“Lancaster was among the first group of universities to be recognised as academic centres of excellence for cyber security research (ACE-CSR) – which is an official accreditation from the National Cyber Security Centre.
“Manchester and Liverpool are also ACE-CSRs, which is good for the region and the economy,
“And it puts us in a great position working with national security. But it’s a slow burn thing; we have to build communities of trust, they need to get to know us and we need to invest money, time and resources up front before there is any payback.
“We are using our experience, with our new Security and Protection Science department and creating our Data Cyber Quarter on the campus.
“Physically that includes our Data Immersion Suite and LENS, our collaborative co-working spaces for working digital and cyber-related businesses. There is also DiSH – the Greater Manchester Digital Security Hub.”
An interdisciplinary approach
Led by Lancaster University, this is a partnership between Barclays Eagle Labs, Plexal and Manchester University that has created a hub in Manchester city centre to bring together experts in digital and cyber security from the public, private and academic sectors to help Greater Manchester’s digital security startups to innovate and grow.
“At Lancaster the growth of the Security and Protection Science department involves the University recruiting 33 academics – we’re up to 20 so far – along with 10 professors in practise and a number of professional services people. It is part of building a world-leading research community to put around all this national security infrastructure.
“We've taken an interdisciplinary approach to cybersecurity research. That ranges from computer science, maths, statistics and AI, but we've also recruited to our cohort people in linguistics, management science, international relations, medicine, marketing and law.
“Cyber security research is going on across all those areas – it is much broader than most people would imagine.”
It comes in the face of increasing cyber attacks from criminals and state actors – and sometimes both. “The threats are enormous; in 2020, there were 50 billion devices connected online. NCS predict that by 2030 there will be 500 billion.
“It's everybody's home and everybody's business.”
Simon continued: “Currently I am focused on commercialisation and innovation opportunities. The first has been North West Cyber Security Connect for Commercialisation – NW CyberCom for short. It’s a Lancaster-led project with five other North Western universities: Liverpool, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan, Salford and UCLan – the University of Central Lancaster, supported by Plexall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and consultancy CRSI.
“It’s basically seeing if we can take pioneering research at the universities and turn it into commercial opportunities. Currently it’s a pilot project, with £1.2m from Research England over two years. We've been able to engage over 800 academics across those universities. We've hosted numerous ‘sandpits’ – intensive discussion forums – to come up with challenges for people to work on. We had 32 potential proof-of concept-projects, we've sponsored 14 of them. We’ve got three spinouts so far coming out of that cohort with some more to come.
“One of the Lancaster projects is Quantum Ring Single-Photon LEDs which enable quantum key distribution (QKD), a super-secure way to encrypt data that’s practically impossible to hack.
“Another project is putting cybersecurity on AI-driven robots to help decommission nuclear submarines. There’s also cybersecurity for software around exoskeletons to help with emergency services and combat troops, to give them super strength.
“The breadth of it all never ceases to amaze me.
“NW CyberCom was always conceived as a pilot project to see what we could do. People say all the time there's fantastic research in British universities but how much of it gets pulled through and commercialised? Is it more about publishing and putting your research on the shelf or is it creating wealth and creating jobs?
“So it was a real test to see if that willingness and ideas were out there and we have been blown away by the response. As that project winds down, we're fortunate we've got £5m of funding from the UKRI Place Based Impact Acceleration Account for a project called Cyber Focus.”
Cyber Focus is a consortium of seven regional higher education institutions (HEIs), three of which are NCSC-recognised Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, with each contributing a distinct portfolio of research expertise and knowledge.
“So again, we're the lead with access to a series of funding streams – Seed, Growth, Accelerator, Public Engagement, and Policy – to conduct a whole load of activities to try and stimulate that North West cyber ecosystem.
“We've just done our first call for projects and the ones I've been able to review are quite wildly different but all advancing the agenda towards building a thriving cyber ecosystem in the North West. So the good news is there is no shortage of projects and brilliant academic ideas, as well as academics who are prepared to go on that route to commercialisation.”
Meanwhile there is talk of setting up an innovation and collaboration site near the National Cyber Force headquarters. The Samlesbury Enterprise Hub has already secured £13.2m funding will involve building a 20,000 sq ft facility combining a mixture of private offices, collaboration space, events facilities and a café.
Simon said: “That could be a place where these businesses can spin out and accelerate and incubate and scale.”
“Meanwhile we’ve got the LENS here at Lancaster which we hope will foster innovation and collaboration on a cyber theme, where academics can can get together with businesses large and small, and hopefully government representatives as well.
“What we need to build across the North West is a number of innovation centres where this can take place.
“We're not the finished article yet, but the more you grow the more it snowballs. We're definitely in that position now.”
Discover more online For more information, please visit either lancaster.ac.uk/security-and-protection-science or lancaster.ac.uk/cybersecurity/cyber-focus