Impact case study database

Impact on border guards and authorities: FastPass developed a next-generation harmonized ABC eGate solution, integrating novel technology modules for traveller identification and monitoring [S6]. The reference implementation, for the first time, facilitated adaptability and deployment to all types of border (land, sea and air) based on an open-system architecture. The solution represents the first European solution for cars at land borders with ABC, as well as the first solution for cruise ships [S1a]. The overall FastPass solution was thoroughly evaluated at three different border control points: the Port of Piraeus in Greece, the Airport of Vienna in Austria, and the land border crossing point of Moravita in Romania, over several months. More than 10,000 travellers and approximately 200 border guards used the system, which provided a novel analysis and insight into different scenarios and their results from technical, operative, social and legal perspectives [S1a]. In 2020, the FastPass eGate solution was positively evaluated for clearance of people in vehicles at Dunkirk ferry port [S1b]. Finally, the Reading researchers contributed to an in-depth evaluation of the FastPass solution, on biometrics and monitoring, which resulted in a best practices report – ‘Recommendations for future ABC installations’ for setting-up, operating and assessing ABC systems’ [S2] published via FRONTEX – the European Border and Coast Guard Agency – to EU border guards.

PROTECT’s system is world-leading. It is the first example anywhere of a multimodal biometrics on-the-move system for border control incorporating mobile and advanced passports, applicable to all border crossing types. As well as a series of technical reports, the PROTECT system was demonstrated in two real-world locations in 2019: at London St. Pancras Eurostar international train station in collaboration with Border Force and Eurostar, and at a border guard training facility at Kętrzyn, Poland, in collaboration with the Polish Border Guard [S6].

Prof. Ferryman directly engaged with the UK Home Office: Border Force and Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO), and the Cabinet Office, as key stakeholders. The Cross-Government Border Delivery Group on Future Borders in the Cabinet Office stated that “ *Overall the PROTECT outcomes have contributed to implementation of the 2025 UK Border Strategy.*” The 2025 UK Border Strategy is Her Majesty’s Government’s exploration on how new digital systems can improve trader and traveller experience at the border and make the UK more secure [S3]. These new digital systems include a contactless travel model, digital travel credentials and reduction in transaction times. The Cabinet Office stated that PROTECT has shown how “ the transaction time at the border can be reduced to zero for a fully contactless control”, enabling “ significant improvement in the flow of low risk travellers through the border”, that PROTECT increases deployment of ABC in sea and land borders, over existing use at airports only, and that PROTECT “ supports health protection in a post-pandemic environment” [S3]. HMPO stated that that PROTECT has provided them with “ an appreciation of the infrastructure [supporting digital travel credentials] which would be required” [S4] with the Cabinet Office adding that PROTECT “ enables a reduction in the need for fixed and costly infrastructure as used in existing control systems.” [S3].

Outside of the UK, the Polish Border Guard stated that the PROTECT is a solution to “ further improve the border traffic control process at the external borders of the European Union” [S5]. Specifically, it “provides the Polish Border Guard with a high level of biometric checks which helps them to deal with increasing vehicle flows. This means border guard experts can focus on high risk passengers, whereas low-risk passengers can go through the border control process smoothly and quickly” [S6], a view similarly endorsed by the Cabinet Office [S3]. Finally, Professor Ferryman has produced a white paper on the outcomes of PROTECT which has directly informed FRONTEX [S7]. Overall, the PROTECT outcomes have been validated by significant authorities with direct responsibility for implementing future border control systems.

Impact on commercial sector: PROTECT’s main industrial partner, Veridos GmbH, is a world-leading provider of identity solutions. PROTECT has been a key driver in formation of a new organisational unit within Veridos focussing on document verification, ABC, self-service enrolment kiosks, non-stop access control solutions and non-stop traveller verification. PROTECT has directly led to the development and deployment of new products (VeriGO^® eAccess portal and of VeriGO^® eVisa mobile app **), exploiting PROTECT RFID (radio-frequency identification) and NFC (near field communication) innovations, and RFIs with customers for deployment of PROTECT sUHF (secure ultra high frequency) access control solutions beyond border security, for critical infrastructure protection. PROTECT directly led to Veridos’ decision to invest in, and lead on, a new competitively won €7m EU research and innovation project D4fly, which directly exploits the PROTECT innovations in free-flowing biometric identification and integrates them into the wider identity lifecycle of a traveller [S8].

Impact on policy, data protection and legislation makers: The EC stated in their policy impact assessment of the PROTECT project: “ PROTECT provides the proof of concept of a new way to control border crossing using multiple new technologies, in particular using multiple biometrics. The faster pre-enrolment using modern solutions like the biometric corridor could speed up the border crossing process. The multi-factor identification process will also improve the security and efficiency of the border control process.” [S9a]. Ferryman quickly established that such innovations were ahead of current EU law in border security – they simply could not be implemented today. This is because the use of technologies such as smartphones and next-generation multimodal passports (incorporating additional biometrics beyond face and fingerprint) in the border control process is not in accordance with the current legal framework for border crossings in the EU (the Schengen Border Code). These findings, which were welcomed by the EC, specifically led to the EC inviting Ferryman to present to policymakers in Brussels in November 2018, to establish changes in legislation needed to adopt PROTECT’s innovations. With respect to wider political debate, Ferryman contributed to two Civil Service World round table discussions ( first and second) on how PROTECT’s innovations will change immigration and security systems for borders of the future.

PROTECT has given careful consideration to the implications of biometrics in terms of legislation, citizens' and residents' rights and freedom of movement. The PROTECT team has specifically sought ways to empower the public, putting them in a situation whereby they can see and understand their own personal data and how it is being used – especially in relation to development and use of a PROTECT smartphone app. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) noted that PROTECT’s work, particularly on development of methods to mitigate potential data protection issues, has positively “ informed their work,” “ extended their expertise,” and overall has “ contributed to an increase in ICO’s corporate level of understanding” [S9b].

Impact on standards: According to the British Standards Institute (BSI), PROTECT has “ emphatically impacted international standardisation efforts [in contactless and frictionless forms of biometric identification], and the biometrics industry more generally” [S10]. Specifically, Ferryman has informed the scope and content of a new international ISO standard (ISO/IEC WD TS 22604) on ‘biometric recognition of subjects in motion in access related systems’ [S10], providing guidance to practitioners on the use of biometric-recognition-in-motion technologies. Further, PROTECT’s innovations have contributed to both the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO)’s Logical Data Structure (LDS) 2.0 – the next evolution of ePassport standards – and ICAO’s Digital Travel Credentials (DTC) – which temporarily or permanently substitute a conventional passport with a digital representation of the traveller’s identity, two separate ICAO topics. Specifically, PROTECT contributed to several ICAO technical reports on LDS 2.0 (which form part of the upcoming 8^th edition of the ICAO Doc 9303 on Machine Readable Travel Documents) and DTC [S8].

Summary: The ambitious ground-breaking research and strong engagement with stakeholders has led to a world-leading transformative traveller identification system. PROTECT demonstrably resolved intractable technical and acceptability barriers to faster and safer border crossings. This has resulted in the worldwide border security industry and related policy sphere dramatically shifting their position on seamless and secure travel and aligning future priorities. PROTECT has informed and delivered on the 2025 UK Border Strategy and been positively validated by border authority practitioners in 4 EU Member States. There have been direct benefits for industry, for policymakers and legislators, and on development of new international standards in biometrics and digital travel credentials. PROTECT is currently being taken up in follow-on EU funded research which targets the countering of emerging threats in the whole traveller identity lifecycle.

Environmental science is heavily dependent on big data and has always been dependent on bleeding edge data handling technologies. The research described here has directly enabled science outcomes which would have otherwise been difficult, or even impossible, to achieve given data volumes and disparate communities. These outcomes exploited three separate activities: (i) the use of the JASMIN data commons, (ii) the use of the Earth System Grid Federation, and (iii) the re-use of metadata techniques and tools by third parties; all of which arose from the research summarised here.

JASMIN data commons usage: JASMIN is used by a range of environmental scientists who wish to either share data, or directly exploit the massive volume of data held in the archives of CEDA. CEDA itself is a key tenant of the JASMIN system, alongside a number of other organisations and individuals. The architecture and GBP20m implementation of the JASMIN was a primary research outcome – the operational implementation is now supported by annual budget in excess of GBP 1m via contributions from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and the UK Space Agency.

The JASMIN data commons depend on the data gravity asserted by the petascale CEDA archive: users are incentivised to bring their data alongside the archive and bring other users (and their data) for collaborations. In excess of 1,500 users exploit JASMIN directly, with approximately 25,000 additional users exploiting CEDA services hosted on JASMIN (Statistics, [S5.1]). The 1,500 direct users are organised into more than 250 distinct groups (tenancies) sharing data and or compute resources for data analysis – users can, and do, belong to multiple groups. JASMIN is now an integral part of UK and global science, yielding a wide variety of outcomes. Representative key JASMIN usage examples are listed below (but see also [S5.2]):

1. The ESA climate change portal ( http://cci.esa.int/data) is deployed in the JASMIN cloud, making use of metadata and data distribution technologies which have evolved from the original DataGrid work [R3.7].

2. JASMIN is providing the underpinning services for UKSA contingency planning for retaining access to EC Copernicus data post-Brexit and for the commercial activities of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s RALSpace and others [S5.3].

3. The production of unique rainfall estimates and insurance products for over three million African farmers are now predicated on climate services deployed on JASMIN [S5.4].

4. The dominant mode of analysis for UK CMIP6 work feeding into the sixth assessment report of the IPCC is the use of JASMIN, [S5.3] and [S5.5].

5. The most recent UK State of Nature Report, a key government indicator for guiding environmental policy, covering how biodiversity has changed from 1970 to 2015 analysed 12,000 species using over 34 million records on JASMIN [S5.6].

All these outcomes were predicated on the co-location of curated data, user data, and specialised computing which arose from the University of Reading research into ‘disparate communities with common data’.

Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) and policy change: The ESGF provides the mechanisms for global management and distribution of data products produced by environmental groups worldwide – the ‘common community distributed data’ problem. In particular, it was designed to support the fifth and sixth global coupled model intercomparison projects – CMIP5 and CMIP6 – which themselves were timed to support the fifth and sixth assessment reports of the IPCC. The IPCC is a UN entity created to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options. Those responsible for the fourth assessment report of the IPCC shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

As of July 2020, the ESGF hosts 28 different projects with 21 petabytes of data. These are from 7.3 million datasets, distributed across 15 data nodes, which provide data downloads to 140 countries [S5.7]. The UK ESGF data nodes are deployed by CEDA and hosted on JASMIN, one cataloguing UK data for third-party download, and one hosting third-party data which has been replicated to JASMIN to avoid multiple petascale downloads to the UK. The research described here was integral to the initial architecture and deployment in CMIP5 [S5.3].

Much of the ESGF data is simulation data, used directly by academics, climate change consultants, and indirectly by those making commercial and policy decisions. All can find it difficult to understand the difference between different simulations. The Reading research on simulation provenance [R3.4] provided technologies to support the creation, extraction, and comparison of simulation documentation directly addressing this issue. As a consequence, the Reading researchers developed new systems and all modelling groups have been mandated [R3.2] to use them to construct simulation documentation for the sixth global model intercomparison project (CMIP6). (The mandate is described in [R3.3] and further evidenced in [S5.5]).

Reuse: Two examples are presented: (1) how the climate forecast (CF) metadata conventions [R3.1] are integral to weather forecasting and earth observation [S5.8]; and (2) how the JASMIN concept was copied and implemented by the Met Office to provide them with internal capability (SPICE) which matched the JASMIN provision to the wider UK community [S5.9].

The importance of the CF conventions to applications in weather and climate is well known and accepted, but prior to the advent of Reading’s data model, they were not very interoperable with other systems. With this data model in place, the World Meteorological Office is now exploring the development of new regulations to encourage such interoperability. Whether or not these are put in place, the use of CF and the data model is now changing information transfer in global weather forecasting (on top of its integral role in climate model intercomparison). CF is now also becoming integral to earth observation, allowing major satellite data providers to lower costs and make data available to more users. The Reading team’s data model has been a key part in making data products accessible to more of the users of Europe’s largest provider of satellite based meteorological data, EUMETSAT [S5.8].

JASMIN was the first environmental ‘‘super data computer’’, showing the benefit of centralising high-volume data with dedicated high-performance analysis compute. The existence of JASMIN has enabled international research collaborations like PRIMAVERA (an EU Horizon 2020 research project involving the University of Reading and 19 European partners with the aim of developing a new generation of advanced global climate models for the benefit of governments, business and society) [S5.10]. What is more, JASMIN has sped up research workflows to the extent that some tasks which previously would have taken years, now take days. This is allowing some people to have, and test, as many ideas in a year, as they could have done in their entire career with traditional systems. The impact on research science was significant enough that the Met Office designed and procured their own ‘‘mini-JASMIN’’ called SPICE (Scientific Processing and Intensive Compute Environment) – contracting Lawrence to provide advice and quality assurance [G3.5]. SPICE now underpins Met Office research across both weather and climate [S5.9].

Summary: Large-scale environmental science depends on vast volumes (petabytes) of data, typically in millions of files. The research carried out at Reading on techniques for managing and manipulating data at this scale (on vocabularies and tools, the earth system grid federation, and the design and implementation of JASMIN - a computational facility that delivers a ground-breaking petascale analytical environment) has been essential to the work of multi-national agencies (for example, EUMETSAT). It has underpinned the research that led to delivery of the UK climate impact projections, the Paris Agreement of the UN Framework for Climate Change [S5.5], and the research that will underpin the next assessment of the IPCC. The next decade will see new challenges in moving from petabytes to exabytes, necessitating further developments in tools and information systems.