UK Privacy Enhancing Technologies Challenge Prize

Overview

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 3 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 10 awards of £10,000 will also be given tothe 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.

Project Size

£10,000 awards will be awarded to up to 10 of the highest scoring applicants from phase 1 to help grow their organisation. Your phase 2 project’s total costs can be up to £50,000 and will help you to develop your solution.

Who can apply

Your Project

If successful and invited, your phase 2 project must:

have total costs of up to £50,000
start by 25 October 2022
end by 24 January 2023
last up to 3 months
carry out the majority of its project work in the UK
intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

You can only claim for eligible project costs for your phase 2 projects.

Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian source.

If your total project’s costs or duration falls outside of our eligibility criteria, you must provide justification by email to support@iuk.ukri.org at least 10 working days before the competition closes. They will decide whether to approve your request. If you have not requested approval or your application has not been approved by us, you will be made ineligible. Your application will then not be sent for assessment.

Lead organisation

Your organisation must be UK registered:

business of any size
academic institution
charity
not for profit
public sector organisation
research and technology organisation (RTO)

Their funding rules will give you more information on organisation types.

Subcontractors

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.

You must include all other organisations you wish to work with on your project as subcontractors in your project costs and in your answer to question 6.

Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.

You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the UK.

You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. We will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.

All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.

Number of applications

Your organisation can lead on one proposal in each theme only. You can only receive funding for one successful proposal.

This application process represents the UK side of the challenge. US applicants must apply to the US competition. Each organisation can only apply once into either the UK or US competition. This includes if your organisation is linked in anyway.

In applying to this competition, you are entering into a competitive process. This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated.

Previous applications

Given the specific nature of this challenge a previously submitted application cannot be used to apply for this competition(though participants are welcome to reuse relevant background details from previous applications).

They will not award you funding if you have:

failed to exploit a previously funded project
an overdue independent accountant’s report
failed to comply with grant terms and conditions

Please find attached the Eligibility Tree regarding this competition.Eligibility Tree - PET Challenge.pdf (opens in a new window)

Minimal Financial Assistance (and De minimis where applicable)

Grant funding in this competition is awarded as Minimal Financial assistance (MFA). This allows public bodies to award up to £315,000 to an enterprise in a 3-year rolling financial period.

In your application, you will be asked to declare previous funding received by you. This will form part of the financial checks ahead of Innovate UK making a formal grant offer.

To establish your eligibility, we need to check that our support added to the amount you have previously received does not exceed the limit of £315,000 in the ‘applicable period’.

The applicable period is made up of:

(a) the elapsed part of the current financial year, and

(b) the two financial years immediately preceding the current financial year.

You must include any funding which you have received during the applicable period under:

Minimal Financial Assistance (previously referred to as Special Drawing Rights)
De Minimis Regulation

You do not need to include aid or subsidies which have been granted on a different basis (such as an aid award granted under the General Block Exemption Regulation).

Further information about the UK subsidy control requirements can be found in:

EU Commission rules now only apply in limited circumstances. Please see our general guidance to check if these rules apply to your organisation.

Further information

If you are unsure about your obligations under the UK’s International Obligations to Subsidy Control or the De minimis rules, you should take independent legal advice. We cannot advise on individual eligibility or your legal obligations.

If there are any changes to the above requirements that mean they need to change the terms of this competition, they will tell you as soon as possible.

Funding

Up to £700,000 has been allocated to fund innovation projects.
Up to 10 £10,000 awards will be awarded for the best solutions from phase 1 to help grow their organisation.

If you are invited to phase 2 you can request up to £50,000 to develop your solution against a synthetic dataset provided by the organisers.

If you would like access to synthetic datasets referenced in the technical brief, you must request this by emailing support@iuk.ukri.org with your application number once you have started your application.

For more information on company sizes, please refer to the Company accounts guidance. This is a change from the EU definition unless you are applying under European Commission De minimis.

If you are applying for an award funded under European Commission Regulations, the definitions are set out in the European Commission Recommendation of 6 May 2003.

Scope - Your proposal

The aim of this competition is to develop innovative privacy-preserving solutions that address one or both of the specific challenge use cases in financial crime or public health.

You must develop privacy-preserving federated learning solutions that:

use a combination of input and output privacy techniques
demonstrate the ability to protect privacy against a set of defined attacks and threat models
effectively accomplish a set of analytical or predictive tasks specified in the use case provided

You must determine the set of privacy technologies used in your solutions.

For example:

any de-identification techniques
differential privacy
cryptographic techniques
combinations that could be a part of the end-to-end solutions

They encourage projects that:

display a high degree of novel innovation
rigorously describe how their solution will provide guarantees of privacy appropriate to the use case
consider how their solution, or a future version of it, could be applied in a production environment

They want to fund a variety of projects across different technologies, markets, technological maturities and research categories. They call this a portfolio approach.

Specific themes

Your project must address one or both of the pre-defined, high-impact use cases.

You must specify the use case in your application, and can submit technical solutions for both use cases. The technical evaluation of these will be treated separately.

A full technical briefing is attached to each use case, providing details of the datasets, analytical tasks, and evaluation criteria that will be used during the challenge. The briefings will also outline the requirements for what should be included in the white paper.

Use case 1: Financial Crime Prevention

This use case is focused on enhancing cross-organisation and cross-border data access, supporting efforts to combat money laundering and other financial crime.

You will utilise synthetic datasets representing data held by the SWIFT payments network and datasets held by partner banks.

This is a high-impact use case for novel privacy enhancing technologies. Successful solutions will allow for effective detection of illegal financial activity while addressing the challenges arising between enabling sufficient access to data and successfully limiting the identifiability of innocent individuals and possibility of inference of their sensitive information from that data.

The scale of the problem is vast: the UN estimates that US$800-2000bn is laundered each year, representing 2-5% of global GDP.

A full technical briefing for this use case can be found here.

Use case 2: Pandemic response and forecasting

This use case is focused on enabling privacy-preserving access to health and mobility data in order to improve forecasting related to public health emergencies, and there by bolster response capabilities for future emergencies, including pandemics.

You will utilise synthetic datasets representing data held by the University of Virginia. This use case is an opportunity to prepare for future epidemics and public health emergencies.