UK registered organisations can apply for grants to develop innovative privacy solutions to two real world challenge use cases.

The aim of the UK Privacy Enhancing Technologies 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: Approach. Applicants will develop a technical white paper which will describes their proposed approach.
• Phase 2: Solution development. If successful in phase 1, applicants will be invited to develop their 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 against a synthetic dataset provided by the organisers in Phase 2. Up to 10 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 the business.

This competition is open to single applicants only. To lead a project the organisation must be a UK registered business of any size, academic institution, charity, not for profit, public sector organisation or research and technology organisation (RTO).

The deadline for applications is 19 September 2022 (11:00 BST).

 

How To Apply

Competition dates:

• Open: 20 July 2022
• Competition closing date: 19 September 2022 (11:00 BST)

Applicants are encouraged to read the general guidance for applicants to help their chances of submitting a quality application.

Applications are made online. More details can be accessed at the Innovate UK website.