This is a presentation delivered by Professor Bryan Edwards, at the STFC Futures / RUSI Conference Series: Data for Security and Resilience 2014

1. STFC Futures / RUSI Conference Series
Data for Security and Resilience : Challenges
and Opportunities for the Next generation of
Policy Makers
bryan.edwards@stfc.ac.uk

2. Who or What is STFC ?
HM Government (& HM Treasury)

3. STFC Defence, Security and Resilience Futures Programme
• Challenge led
• Aims : Exploit existing academic know-how in order to :
– Identifying new and improving understanding of established challenges in the
DSR domain ;
– Contribute to cost effective development of solutions to unsolved problems.
• Developed and delivered in close partnership with others
– Focused primarily on the needs of government ;
– involvement of academics and industry ;
– Responsive and flexible (state of constant evolution).
• Extremely broad in scope

4. Collaboration With RUSI
• The STFC Futures / RUSI Conference Series started as an experiment but
has become an important part of the STFC programme
• Brings together our respective strengths in policy and academic research.
• Each event :
– Is tied to a topical issue in DSR ;
– Tries to address this issue in a new and interesting way ;
– Examines the interface between academic research and government policy
and/or operations ;
– Agnostic with respect to academic discipline
– Produces a report as an enduring record
• Based on presentations and distillation of the afternoon discussion groups

5. Tackling Anti-microbial Resistance: Identifying
Future Research Themes
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) - the resistance of microorganisms including bacteria and viruses to medicines
that are used to treat the infections they cause - is a growing concern not only for the healthcare sector but,
increasingly, for security and resilience.
In January 2013, the Department of Health will publish its new UK Five Year Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy
and Action Plan 2013-2018, which builds on international strategies to combat AMR, including the 2011 EU
Strategic Action Plan and 2012 EU Council Conclusions, and the 2011 report by the Transatlantic Task Force on
Antimicrobial Resistance, Recommendations for future collaboration between the US and EU.
This Conference, co-hosted by RUSI and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, focused on what further
research needs to be funded in order to ensure that the current Strategies and Action Plans can be
implemented and followed. It sought to identify gaps in current research knowledge so that future funding
calls, by the STFC and other funding bodies, can look to address existing shortfalls, and encourage knowledge
transfer between the security and health sectors.

6. Community tensions: Evidence-based Approaches to
Understanding the Interplay Between Hate Crimes,
Serious Organised crime and Radicalisation
Community tensions between different ethnic groups can result in low-level hate crimes that threaten to spill over into
more damaging crime and extremist behavior. At their most extreme, tensions caused and exacerbated by groups such as
the English Defense League and Al-Muhajiroun can lead to full-blown street riots and even to the actions of violent
extremists such as the 7/7 bombers and Anders Breivik.
While the motivations and actions of all these groups and individuals has been studied extensively, less research has been
carried out into how their actions and narratives affect each other, drive wedges between communities and push
susceptible individuals further towards the edges of acceptable and legal behavior.
In addition, many of the initiatives and programmes that have sought to address the challenges, such as the Home Office's
Prevent Strategy, have been hard to evaluate due to the lack of empirical data and/or defined metrics of success. This
workshop will seek to address the challenges facing researchers working on understanding and de-fusing community
tensions and explain how a more evidence-based empirical approach can help.
Sessions covered will include:
● Use of data sets, computer modelling and data analysis in social science
● Reporting hate crimes: understanding and analysing data collected by police and community groups
● Mapping and modelling correlations between hate crimes, serious organized crime and violent extremism
● Manipulation of mainstream media narratives by jihadist and counter-jihad supporters
● Intervention strategies for young people: embedding community cohesion at an early age

7. Measuring the Resilience of Cities: the Role of Big Data
This conference will examine how Big Data can be used to improve resilience of UK Cities as they face demographic and
socioeconomic changes.
UK Cities need to be resilient to a wide range of threats and hazards, including natural disasters, terrorist attacks, economic
crises and outbreaks of civil unrest. The very nature of cities is changing however; urban centers are becoming larger and
more densely populated, the population is aging, with increasingly complex health needs, and the economy has shifted
towards leisure and knowledge industries. As society changes, are the traditional indicators used to gather data and assess
resilience still valid?
Big Data provides opportunities to gather more information, more quickly. The way this data is collected and analysed
provides opportunities to understand and map population demographics and socioeconomic trends; to monitor and model
shifting urban landscapes; and to better understand changes in the use of transport networks, energy consumption and
communications technology.
This has the potential to drive improvements in resilience, but do we really understand what we mean by resilience and what
we need to measure in order to identify current and future indicators of good practice? This conference will compare a
number of methodologies currently in use, including that used by the UNISDR Resilient Cities imitative, the World Economic
Forum Global Risk reports and the European Smart Cities programme. It will discuss their value to assessments of UK
resilience, and consider alternative approaches to measuring and assessing resilience.
Sessions covered will include:
● Perspectives on Resilience
● Resilience Challenges in Urban Environments
● Modelling Resilience

8. Outline of Today
• Morning session intended to stimulate thinking
• Afternoon sessions are your opportunity to contribute
– Value of the day lies to a large degree in your hands ;
– Please try to avoid the temptation to retreat into comfort zones ;
– You are free to move between groups as you wish ;
– Note takers will record the discussion, and we’ll consolidate these later ;
– If there is something specific you want recorded, please say so ;
– If something occurs to you outside the meeting but you would like it noted, please
e-mail me (bryan.edwards@stfc.ac.uk) ;
– Fear not, we will not attribute comments to individuals!

9. Some Things to Think About…….
• Are there discontinuities between policy/operational planning and the Big
Data assumptions upon which they are predicated ?
• What opportunities are there to collect, analyse and interpret Big Data to
significantly change either what people do or how they do it for the better ?
– What are the particular characteristics of the data concerned ?
– What challenges would need to be overcome, and what questions could directed
research most usefully target ?

10. Future Plans
• We will circulate a copy of the final report
– Please feel free to forward it to others
• It is our aim to run more events
– Government : if you have an interesting topic, please let me know ;
– We will announce them on both STFC and RUSI websites.
• We would very much welcome your feedback and suggestions
bryan.edwards@stfc.ac.uk