Impact case study database

The University of Southampton’s formal modelling and verification technology is providing impact on practitioners, covering industrial software engineering processes, economic impact, benefit to industrial end-users and commercial contracts, and international community impact through an open source toolset and university education.

4.1 ProB for data validation of engineering processes at CLEARSY and Thales Germany

A safety critical system often contains many data parameters which are instantiated differently for each particular installation of the system. Data validation involves checking that all the data values for the installation satisfy safety rules. Data validation for railway installations is an important business area for CLEARSY, a French safety systems and software company who initially used a manual data validation process for this purpose. This typically led to painful, error-prone, long-term activities requiring several months to check manually up to 100,000 items of data against 1,000 rules. From 2014, CLEARSY started using ProB for automated data validation on several client railway projects and this has helped major customers to obtain considerable savings (up to a factor of 100) in their data validation activities while improving the quality process [ 5.1]. Example industrial projects in which CLEARSY exploited ProB are:

• Data validation for Alstom’s URBALIS Computer-Based Train Control system. Data validation has been used for various lines since 2014 in Mexico, Toronto, Sao Paulo and Panama.

• Alstom and SNCF: data validation of European Train Control System (ETCS) Level 1 software in 2018

• ATOS and SNCF: for MISTRAL NG (new centralized command/control rail management system) since 2017

• Siemens Automated Train System in 2018

The Activity Director at CLEARSY testified to the vastly improved validation performance with ProB:

“The formal approach with ProB is up to 100x faster than a pure human verification and a few hours are enough for validating a complete railway project. Furthermore, it removes human errors, as it makes use of certified formal techniques.”

Based on this experience, CLEARSY have integrated ProB into a generic validation tool called CLEARSY Data Solver (CDS) and in 2019 CDS was T2 qualified for use in safety-critical certification according to the European standard for railway control and protection systems (EN50128). CDS has since been used on client projects with Thales Toronto [text removed for publication]. CLEARSY have also integrated ProB with their commercial Atelier-B tool to extend its proof capability.

Since 2014, Thales Transportation Germany have used ProB for validation of installations of their flagship RBC (Radio Block Centre) product line for railway control, achieving significant cost reduction in validation compared with conventional validation [ 5.2]. Thales now express the rules in the B language and use ProB to automate the verification of the rules. Compared with the previous methods used by Thales, ProB provided a more exhaustive validation process of higher quality with better feedback to engineers. This resulted in reduced costs for encoding and checking RBC engineering rules. Thales have built a custom rule checker, called RUBIN, on top of ProB that has been qualified to class T2 of the EN50128 standard. RUBIN is now used routinely by Thales for rule validation on industrial projects including several RBC installations.

4.2 UML-B and Rodin for model-based design process at Thales, AWE, Sandia and Deutsche Bahn.

Engineers in companies worldwide are successfully using UML-B and Rodin in the early-stage model-based design and validation of computer-based control systems. These organisations were already using industry-standard model-based software design methods, including UML, SysML and Statecharts. However these methods lack the formal verification capabilities provide by the Rodin toolset. Our UML-B technology is providing these companies with a bridge between the industry-standard model-based design languages and the powerful verification capabilities of Rodin. The resulting toolchains are helping them uncover potential design problems earlier in the development of new systems, contributing to safer system design and avoiding expensive reworkings.

In 2017 Thales Austria used UML-B and Rodin to verify and validate the Hybrid ERTMS/ETCS Level 3 specification [ 5.3]. ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System) is the EU system of standards for management and interoperation of signalling for railways. Hybrid ERTMS/ETCS Level 3 increases the throughput of trains on a conventional rail network by dividing a physical block into multiple virtual blocks. In parallel with the Thales Austria work, Thales Germany integrated ProB with the Deutsche Bahn field demonstrator rail system allowing a B model of ERTMS to be used as a runtime controller-in-the-loop for in-the-field validation. Both of these formal modelling and validation projects identified issues in the original ERTMS standard and these findings were fed back to the standardisation work, leading to improvements in the revised standard [ 5.4].

“To sum up, using formal methods improves verification and validation efficiency and helps with detecting design flaws at an early stage of the development.” Thales Austria [ 5.3]

AWE engineers deployed the Rodin toolset on an internal system engineering project during 2014 to 2018. To facilitate this, the Southampton team developed a Rodin plugin called CODA in 2014-2015 which augments UML-B state machines with support for hierarchical communicating components [ 5.5]. AWE report that the use of the Rodin technology, including CODA, is demonstrating a positive impact on the quality of the specifications and designs for their products [ 5.6]. A significant impact for AWE is that potential design problems are being uncovered early in the development cycle thus saving expensive reworking of designs and implementations later in development. AWE have released CODA as open source under an MOD licence in 2017.

Facilitated by UoS collaboration with AWE, engineers at Sandia National Laboratories in the USA have deployed Rodin technology to support design verification. Sandia already used an industry-standard Statechart format (SCXML) for modelling. To enable exploitation of Rodin formal verification capabilities, Sandia and Southampton developed a Rodin plugin in 2018-2019 to automatically translate SCXML models to UML-B models [ 5.5]. This provided the basis for ‘engineer friendly’ formal methods for high consequence embedded system design and verification and has given Sandia engineers access to formal verification without forcing them to abandon familiar concepts and tools [ 5.7]. The Southampton work allowed Sandia to exploit a correspondence between State Charts and Event-B which allowed them to develop sound, usable tools for high-consequence electronic control systems. Sandia confirmed that the development of their Statechart based design method supporting refinement and allowing such rigorous verification was made possible by Event-B and UML-B.

Deutsche Bahn (DB) successfully used UML-B as a route to formal verification of digital Railway Command Control and Signalling (CCS) system specifications during 2019-2020. The CCS specifications were developed using the industry standard SysML language and translated to UML-B. DB evaluated several verification approaches and determined that UML-B provided a very effective route for verification of their SysML models [ 5.7]. Using UML-B and Rodin in this way allowed DB to identify and remove errors and gaps in models, providing formal verification that their railway component specifications are safe and helping to ensure that the implementations of the components are interoperable and fit for purpose. DB report that the use of UML-B provided a very effective route to formal verification of their SysML models [ 5.8].

To support adoption of Rodin tools by industry, since 2014 Butler and colleagues have given training to over 30 industrial users on Event-B, UML-B and Rodin technology to help them adopt the technology. Courses have been given to engineers in AWE, Sandia Labs (USA), Imagination Technologies, Atkins Rail, Thales (Austria, Germany, Romania, Spain), Deutsche Bahn. Leuschel has provided ProB training to Thales (Germany), CLEARSY (France), Witz (Japan) and Aisin (Japan).

4.3 Commercial contracts for ECS Partners

Through ECS Partners, a University of Southampton consultancy company, since 2014 the Southampton team have had commercial contracts with AWE, Cobham, Sandia National Labs, Critical Software Technologies, Thales, Hitachi Ltd, Imagination technologies and Atkins Rail worth a total of over GBP600,000. During 2014-2017, AWE contracted ECS Partners to adapt the Rodin toolset to support their in-house process for embedded system design; their engineers have used the resulting toolset since [ 5.6]. During 2018-20019 Sandia contracted ECS Partners to adapt the Rodin toolset to support integration of industry-standard Statechart models with Rodin [ 5.7].

4.4 Widely used open source tools and worldwide developer/user community

Rodin is an open source toolset. The source code and executables are available on SourceForge and it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is free to use for research, teaching and commercial purposes. Version 3.4 (Jan 2018) has been downloaded over 10,000 times. The top 5 download countries are France, China, UK, Germany and USA. Southampton hosts the main website for the Rodin toolset (www.event\-b.org\) which includes a heavily used wiki providing user and developer support. ProB is available both as a standalone application for Windows, Mac and Linux and as a plug-in for Rodin [ 5.9].

Southampton organised the first Rodin User and Developer Workshop in Southampton in 2009 with participants for a range of European countries as well as Australia, Brazil and Canada. The success of this led to the Rodin Workshop becoming a regular event with the most recent (7^th in the series) being held in Southampton in June 2018. There were 40 attendees including presentations from Thales (Tomas Fischer) and Airbus (Martin Kubisch) [ 5.10]. This Rodin workshop series helps to sustain the international community of Rodin users and developers. The 2020 workshop was postponed to 2021 due to Covid-19 restrictions.

The Rodin toolset is used for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in a number of universities worldwide. We are aware of it being used in the following universities: Southampton, Newcastle, Bristol, Surrey, Düsseldorf, Aabo Akademi (Finland), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil), University of New South Wales, York University (Canada), National Institute of Informatics Tokyo, IIT Mumbai, IIT Bhubaneswar, University Putra (Malaysia), Prince of Songkla University (Thailand). These universities use the Rodin and ProB websites which include tutorials and training material [ 5.11].

A major rationale for LifeGuide was the potential it offered to avoid costly duplication of effort and resources when developing new digital interventions, enabling researchers to develop web-based interventions more cost-effectively, and allowing them to be modified and reused for other contexts (including dissemination via the public and third sectors) without the need to buy in expensive web programming support. The software platform developed in this research has facilitated a large international community of behavioural scientists and clinicians who have been able to design and trial digital behaviour change interventions at scale. Once demonstrated to be effective, the LifeGuide platform enabled the dissemination of successful interventions through rollouts such as the LifeGuide Social Enterprise scheme and the impact of these successful interventions has been to help established new care pathways which can have benefits both to patients directly, and also the health care service providers in terms of resourcing.

Support a large international community of collaborators

The LifeGuide software has been free to download since 2009 and academics all over the world are currently running trials using the LifeGuide platform, and the ‘LifeGuide Community’ website [ 5.1] which provides support for disseminating LifeGuide software use now has nearly 3000 members who are also using the software to develop interventions, based across the UK and internationally (over 20 countries). Endorsed by Public Health England in 2018 [ 5.2], it has attracted substantial funding in the period 2013-2020. International collaborations include Cigna Insurance, who developed an e-health employee wellbeing intervention that has been rolled out by multinational companies to 20 countries [ 5.3]. A second example is the work carried out with the University of Ulster to develop an intervention to help maximise sexual wellbeing for people living with prostate cancer, in partnership with the charity Prostate Cancer UK [ 5.4]. Our web-based ‘LifeGuide Community’ resources support intervention designers by providing the software for free download, together with wikis, demos and facilities for all members of research teams to comment on every page of the intervention during development. Hundreds of researchers (including postgraduate students) both in the UK and internationally have independently created interventions that we are hosting on our server, and other teams are creating interventions that they are hosting themselves, their research has reached large numbers of lay users and practitioners and increased the efficiency and productivity of their work.

LifeGuide is being used to disseminate an effective intervention to reduce the occurrence of hand dermatitis to all 435,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing [ 5.5]. LifeGuide interventions include preventive interventions for the general public, tackling common, high priority public health problems. For example, the LifeGuide team developed the first online intervention worldwide to promote hygienic behaviour to reduce transmission of infection (such as seasonal or pandemic flu) and reduce the prescribing of antibiotics [ 5.6]. There are also LifeGuide interventions to help patients and health professionals manage numerous common and serious health problems better, including interventions for asthma, dizziness [ 5.7], helping patients carry out rehabilitation at home following a stroke (LifeCIT), interventions to help patients self-manage hypertension, cancer-related fatigue, depression and stress, irritable bowel syndrome and eczema.

Further impactful interventions have included reducing antibiotic prescribing across Europe (INTRO) (299 GPs, 4,360 patients, published in the Lancet) [ 5.8]; promoting hygienic behaviour to reduce transmission of respiratory infection including pandemic flu (PRIMIT) (over 20,000 patients to date, and has also been accepted for the Lancet); supporting self-management of respiratory symptoms (around 2,000 patients to date).

LifeGuide has been part of research collaborations with our team to develop and trial web-based interventions using LifeGuide have attracted funding of well over GBP40 million (from MRC, EPSRC, ESRC, NIHR, EC and medical charities); we have already secured funding up to 2023.There are already published well over 50 development papers and reports of feasibility and community trials based on this research programme.

Social Enterprise rollout

A University Enterprise Project has been established with a view to converting into a Social Enterprise company to roll out successfully trialled interventions. This translational research ensures that evidence based health improvements become part of health delivery programmes through NHS, local authority and other partners. So far the POWeR weight loss intervention has been delivered as part of a 3 year contract signed in 2017 by Hampshire County Council and is currently prescribable by GPs to 2 million registered patients in Hampshire [ 5.9]. Solent NHS Trust have made it available to a further 235,000 people, and in 2018 Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council signed a two-year contract to roll it out to all residents in the region – over 100,000 people [ 5.10]. POWeR has been invited for inclusion in the NHS England assessment of digital behaviour change interventions. A further three interventions are now available for roll out through this scheme (Germ Defence [ 5.6], INTRO [ 5.8] and Balance Retraining [ 5.11]). We are working with Asthma UK to create an intervention based on My Breathing Matters for dissemination widely.

Preventing infection is an important method of reducing the need for antibiotics. An MRC funded development of a LifeGuide intervention to promote handwashing to reduce the spread of respiratory infection in the home (particularly seasonal and pandemic flu) was trialled in 20,000 UK adults: the frequency, severity and transmission of infections was reduced, as were consultations and antibiotic prescriptions. This was the first digital intervention worldwide to effectively reduce infection transmission in the home. The ‘Germ Defence’ website was endorsed by NICE as a recommended resource supporting the guidance ‘Antimicrobial stewardship: changing risk-related behaviours in the general population’ (see section 1.3.5 of guidance [ 5.6] ) and it is available free of charge to the general public from the NICE website.

The LifeGuide programme co-led the development of a self-guided DVD/booklet intervention that used breathing exercises to improve outcomes for patients with asthma. LifeGuide was used to offer access to the intervention on publication (in Lancet Respiratory Medicine, 2018) for health professionals and patients and has 3,008 recorded session usages in the impact period [ 5.12]. It has the support of a national charity (Asthma UK) and the Southampton team is currently working with Asthma UK to make the intervention available is a variety of formats, including to young people.

Changing care pathways in the NHS and Europe

Digital interventions for healthcare professionals also have the potential to reduce antibiotic usage. The EC funded development of a LifeGuide intervention to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescribing across Europe. Online training provided GPs with motivation, skills training and resources to engage patients with lower respiratory tract infection in self-management without antibiotics, when appropriate. The intervention reduced prescribing rates by 20% in 246 GP practices (4360 patients) in UK, Spain, Poland Belgium and the Netherlands (see paper in Lancet, 2014). The study informed NICE guidance on reducing antimicrobial resistance and the redesign of the Public Health England TARGET leaflet for primary care patients. The intervention materials are now informing development of interventions to reduce antibiotic usage in UK hospitals (funded by two new NIHR programme grants). Working with the University of Southampton team, the digital intervention has also been provided as a national education resource to Belgium [ 5.10] and has been adapted for children with respiratory tract infection in the Netherlands (by Dr Anne Dekker, trial published in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, 2018). A LifeGuide intervention to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use in hospitals is now being trialled in 36 hospitals and has already been adopted and rolled out nationally by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy [ 5.13].

The Health Foundation has provided GBP500,000 to scale-up the roll out of the cochlear implant home support intervention (CHOICE) to support 800 cochlear implant recipients through over a third of the 22 cochlear implant centres in the UK. This work changes the traditional care pathways for recipients of cochlear implants as well as improving empowerment and patient activation. Roll out of the new care pathway began in July 2019 [ 5.14].

Novel image capture, processing and analysis tools and methodologies developed and optimised through ECS research have had a far-reaching impact on the way multimedia content is published and developed on the Web, the development of innovative ‘big data’ products and services for commercial exploitation, and the management of cultural heritage.

Impact of libVIPS/OpenIMAJ libraries on web publishing, software development and teaching

The libVIPS library is now a standard open source Linux package, which has been refined and optimised by an international web developer community and the ECS group itself over the impact period. Recognised as the fastest available image processing library, it is widely used to develop websites and systems that can handle very large numbers of images [ 5.1]. Use of libVIPS minimises cloud resource usage; a saving of >50% of CPU/RAM for each burst of image activity reduces server loads, delivers a more efficient service and negates the need for costly upgrades. The libVIPS source code repository on github has an average of 800 regular users and 3,000 unique visitors each month. But the full scale of its impact is realised through the use of libVIPS as a core driver of user-facing web applications and software tools. In 2014, libVIPS was used to create Sharp, a high-performance module for resizing and formatting large images to smaller, web-friendly JPEG/PNG images of varying dimensions [ 5.1]. Sharp acts as a ‘web wrapper’ in that it provides access to libVIPS for web developers by making it accessible to javascript. By the end of 2020, Sharp had reached 1,800,000 downloads per week [ 5.1], while 640 websites are known to use libVIPS via Gatsby, a content management system that helps developers build ultra-fast websites [ 5.1]. While it is not possible to quantify the full reach of libVIPS, the founder of Sharp wrote [ 5.1]: ‘ Over 23,000 open source projects rely on sharp, including most JavaScript-based content management systems. This means you’ve almost certainly visited a website in the last week that used libvips.’

The widespread use of libVIPS is demonstrated through end user case studies. In September 2013, VipsScaler, a wrapper to libVIPS, was rolled out across all Wikimedia and Wikipedia sites [ 5.2]. This allowed, for the first time, the creation of thumbnails of very large PNG files due to significant reductions in required memory [ 5.2]. Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses libVIPS for efficient image resizing within one its main applications, Lambda@Edge – a tool that allows developers to run code in the AWS code without provisioning or managing servers [ 5.3]. This has a significant knock-on impact. For example, libVIPS was used, via AWS services, by the New York Times to overhaul its digital archive and create, store and serve billions of small images for subscribers interested in back issues of the newspaper dating back to 1851 [ 5.4]. Other high-profile users of the faster, more comprehensive image handling offered by libVIPS include Booking.com, AirBnB Engineering & Data Science, the US Food and Drug Administration, the bank Capital One, Braun, Pantene and US and Spanish property listing sites HomeFinder and Idealista [ 5.1, 5.5].

HomeFinder reports that libvips ‘ is fast enough that we can handle all the photo (real estate listings) manipulation on-demand, giving us the flexibility to use any photo size we want on the site, while only processing photos that are actually seen by our visitors’ [ 5.1]. Swiss digital agency Liip uses libVIPS to generate 100,000 images per day for clients that include Migros, Switzerland’s largest retailer and the country’s largest private employer; libVIPS has cut Liip’s response time for rendering images by three to four times and has saved them money by removing the need to scale up their cloud servers [ 5.1]. Slovenian company Hooray Studios uses libVIPS for their personalised children’s books service to process orders faster; the company doubled its revenues in 2019 to EUR27,000,000 and now has subsidiaries in the US, UK, Italy and Germany [ 5.1]. As project partners on the European grants [ G1, G2], the The National Gallery London and The Louvre uses libVIPS. Others including National Gallery of Washington use it to convert their collection to multi-resolution files [ 5.1].

The OpenIMAJ libraries are used by lecturers and web developers across the world, including large companies like Yahoo and Comcast (the former CTO of Comcast contributed to the development of OpenIMAJ through G2) [ 5.6]. They allow developers to quickly create applications that extract information from multimedia data. Around 31,000 code files mention OpenIMAJ on GitHub and it features in 1,461 ‘Maven pom files’, which represent individual software projects by users of the library [ 5.6]. It is a key component of very widely used software, for example the Webcam Capture library that allows webcams to be accessed directly from Java [ 5.6]. OpenIMAJ is used in university teaching internationally; for example, the University of Missouri uses OpenIMAJ in a module on big data analytics [ 5.6]. It is also used as the basis for the code in a number of textbooks on data visualisation techniques, Raspberry Pi and feature extraction [ 5.6].

Impact of new commercial data products on businesses

The collaboration with Ordnance Survey [ 3.5] on new ways to exploit its aerial imagery archives using machine learning has facilitated business innovation in the government-owned company. Before the partnership, methods for creating OS’s data products were largely manual and therefore limited in scope due to the high costs involved. Noting that ‘ commercial success’ would not have occurred without the ECS research contribution, OS cites the key impacts as [ 5.7]:

• Enabling the OS to ‘ efficiently meet some of the challenging new data needs’ of a multi-million-pound contract with the UK Government to deliver the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement – a commitment to opening up access to geospatial data to support the delivery of critical infrastructure and services.

• Opening up new multi-million-pound markets.

• Identifying opportunities for making up to GBP5,000,000 in annual savings.

• Granting of several patents in the UK, Europe and US.

The document analysis system created for Evolution AI [ G4], which intelligently extracts data from corporate and financial documents, is the foundation of all of the company’s commercial products [ 5.8]. It allowed Evolution AI, for the first time, to automate processes that were previously undertaken manually, bettering human accuracy and reducing the time taken (and therefore cost) ‘ from days to seconds’ [ 5.8]. The impact is demonstrated through client case studies [ 5.8]:

• Saved US analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet 50,000 hours of manual work a year (28 FTEs).

• Saved RBS (NatWest Group) between 100,000 and 200,000 hours of manual work a year and reduced their invoice processing times from 24 hours to three seconds.

• UK asset management firm Unigestion achieved 85% cost savings, increased data accuracy from 30% to 99.5% and halved their data extraction time.

• Made data extraction processes for US analytics firm Fitch Solutions 15 times faster.

Impact of imaging hardware systems on the cultural heritage sector

Fifteen custom-built RTI systems, developed through ECS research [ 3.6, 3.7, G2, G3], were supplied to 12 leading museums and universities over the impact period [ 5.9]. Institutions use these systems on a regular basis to capture images of their artefacts and better understand their collections, which in turn improves the quality of their public engagement. The systems have been used extensively to image cuneiform script; the oldest form of writing in the world (first used in around 3400 BC) distinguished by wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets [ 5.9]. Thousands of tablets have been captured with the RTI domes and logged with the global repository at UCLA: the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative [ 5.9]. Historic England featured Southampton’s RTI dome imaging techniques as best practice in its guidelines for Multi-light Imaging (2018) [ 5.10].

Figure 1: A Cuneiform tablet (left) and an RTI Dome system (right)

Examples of impact on cultural heritage institutions during the impact period include [ 5.9]:

• Since 2014 the British Museum has used their Dome to image objects of stone, paper, jade and metal, including 15th-17th Century metalpoint drawings for a 2015 exhibition.

• The Louvre (from 2015) is using their Dome to image its 20,000 cuneiform tablets.

• The Ashmolean Museum (from 2014) in Oxford is using the Dome to image a wide range of objects, including its collection of 5,000-6,000 cuneiform tablets.

• The Direction de l'Archéologie du Pas-de-Calais (from 2017) uses it to photograph coins, lithics and ceramics; it enables improved technical drawings of the objects.

• The National Museum of Antiquities, Netherlands (2020) uses theirs to image objects.

Europe’s open data market was worth EUR184bn in 2019, according to consultancy Capgemini Invent. Based on its research expertise in transforming access to, and use of, data across the UK, [ 3.1, 3.3- 3.4, 3.6], Southampton researchers, through GBP12m in funding from 2015 to 2019, have led the design and delivery of two pioneering open data accelerator programmes at a Europe-wide scale. These led directly to increased sales revenues for SMEs, the estimated creation of over 896 new jobs [ 5.1, 5.6] and a range of societal benefits arising from new products and services. As a recognised thought-leader in data-driven innovation, Southampton has applied its research on data sharing and privacy [ 3.2, 3.5] to the design of key government policies intended to accelerate the growth of the UK’s data economy.

The economic and social impact of ODINE

The Southampton-led Open Data Incubator for Europe (ODINE) was a series of six-month programmes for start-ups and SMEs across Europe looking to innovate with open data to develop products and services. The consortium included data facilitators and incubators Fraunhofer IAIS and the ODI, infrastructure provider Telefonica, and media partner The Guardian. Over 20 months, the ODINE project provided EUR5.6m (GBP4,200,000) to 57 companies (out of 731 applicants) from 18 European countries. Southampton researchers designed the complex socio-technical framework to facilitate the growth of the ODINE ecosystem and negotiated data sharing agreements between data providers and SMEs. In addition to investment, SMEs received mentoring and incubation support, access to data services and computing infrastructure, and high visibility through articles in The Guardian.

An independent assessment [ 5.1] by consultancy IDC, published in July 2017, concluded that ODINE ‘ achieved its main objective’ to ‘accelerate (companies’) time to market and chances of success’. It said the ODINE businesses ‘ contribute(d) to the development of an Open Data ecosystem in Europe covering all segments of the data value chain’. It found that the 57 firms gave ODINE ‘ high scores in terms of value-added, with the highest benefits concerning accelerating time to market, improving the business idea, and improving the team skills’. Specifically, 97% said that without ODINE ‘ their time to market would have been longer’. Over the life of the programme itself (2015-2017), ODINE directly created 268 jobs and EUR22.5m (GBP16,500,000) in value through additional jobs, contracts, follow-up investments and efficiency gains [ 5.2]. A key focus of the IDC report was to measure ODINE’s longer-term impact in order to evaluate its sustainability, so it also estimated the economic impact delivered by ODINE up to 2020: EUR110m (GBP88,000,000) of cumulative revenues and the creation of 784 jobs. Average revenues per company by 2020 were estimated to be around EUR1m (GBP890,000), corresponding to EUR55,000 (GBP49,000) in revenues per employee which was described as ‘sufficient for sustainability’. This meant that each euro invested by the EC in ODINE would generate up to 14 euros in cumulative revenues by 2020.

The assessment found that ODINE ‘ succeeded in inspiring and promoting a range of new business ideas’, especially in the fields of geospatial mapping and environmental data. The report identified another priority as ‘ the emerging sustainable or low carbon economy, with several companies focused on energy saving, environmental monitoring, smart mobility’. As an example, Germany-based Green City Solutions used urban air quality data to develop its CityTree, a cross between a bench and a hedge that the company says absorbs as much pollution as 275 trees [ 5.3]. A UK-based company Plume Labs is using open data for hyperlocal air quality forecasts. Since being funded by ODINE in 2015, the company has won a CES Innovation Award (run by the Consumer Technology Association) and it raised USD4.5m (GBP3,600,000) in investment in December 2016 [ 5.3].

Public authorities have benefited too. For example, the City of Delft (Netherlands) is using data on gritting routes and traffic incidents to optimise its winter de-icing strategy. The City’s Information Advisor said “ We have been able to utilise the insights from ODINE to support our own open data opening and use. … Our objective is to be more dynamic in their prioritisation and therefore more responsive and relevant to the needs of our citizens. … We have used insights, best practices and guidance from … ODINE … to support the design of the necessary technical processes, and to assess various aspects of governance. For example, research insights on different types of Open Data (clean and raw) illustrated the value to be gained from opening both kinds rather than only publishing clean data, and this is what we have done. This eventually led to greater citizen engagement with our datasets and prompted opening new ones. Further we have shared these learnings and best practices with 12-16 local authorities in the region collaborating on opening their data. We find the insights generated by ODINE to provide a comprehensive blueprint for cities to begin implementing and gaining value from opening and sharing data.”

Representative examples of how ODINE companies benefited from the programme include [ 5.3]:

• Idalab (Germany), a data science company that helps cities solve zoning problems, said ODINE ‘ allowed us to find product-market fit and bridge the long sales cycles’.

• OriginTrail (Italy) helps food brands build transparency and authenticity through real-time data on where and how ingredients are sourced. It said ODINE provided ‘ the support we needed to start addressing the transparency problem on a global scale’.

• Tilde (Latvia), a language technology service provider, said ODINE ‘ helped us to collect, process and validate massive volumes of multilingual open data in multiple languages … (which) … will now enable us to build even more powerful MT systems for clients’.

Seventy-four articles on the ODINE project were published by The Guardian, averaging 500 unique views and 50 shares, with one article on a new open data standard for the banking industry receiving around 80,000 unique pageviews, 500 shares and 300 comments [ 5.4].

The economic and social impact of Data Pitch

Data Pitch, again led by Southampton, brought together data owners with start-ups to generate fresh ideas for data-driven products and services. In creating this network, Southampton researchers explored the critical factors that were impacting on the way that organisations were creating value from sharing data. They defined and developed 27 data-driven innovation challenges and drew up a legal and privacy toolkit to set the guidelines for data sharing. Large companies that agreed to share their data with start-ups included: Met Office, Konica Minolta, Netherlands telecoms company Altice, and Portuguese healthcare company Jose de Mello Saude. Over two years, 47 start-ups (out of 239 applicants) from 13 countries participated.

An independent evaluation [ 5.5], compiled by London Economics and published in December 2019, concluded: ‘ Data Pitch enabled data-driven innovation that would not otherwise have taken place and had a positive impact on the commercial performance of the participating start-ups.’ It said Data Pitch had ‘ succeeded in laying the groundwork for a sustainable open innovation ecosystem in Europe’ and had ‘ acted as a demonstrator for data-driven open innovation’. Over the course of the programme, EUR22.4m (GBP19,700,000) in sales, investments and efficiencies were unlocked by accelerated companies and 112 additional jobs were created [ 5.6]. Start-ups generated an average of EUR599,432 in sales and EUR338,862 in investment per gigabyte of data shared with them through Data Pitch [ 5.5]. One year after the 2018 cohort of start-ups had participated in Data Pitch, the ROI on total Data Pitch resources stood at 103% and leveraged investment was 278%, the report said. As an indication of sustainability, the report projected that total annual revenues for all start-ups funded through Data Pitch would increase to EUR35,800,000 in 2022.

The evaluation highlighted representative case studies of how start-ups had benefited:

• Through Data Pitch, Spanish logistics start-up OBBU collaborated with Grenier Packaging, one of Europe’s leading plastic packaging manufacturers; this enabled OBBU to ‘ enter a new industry’ which could lead to ‘contracts with other firms in adjacent industries’.

• Data Pitch enabled German firm Bliq, which offers urban mobility solutions, ‘ to pursue a line of development which they would have been unable to do otherwise’.

• Radiobotics (Denmark) were able to develop their algorithm for advancing musculoskeletal radiology to a stage where they could pitch for investment. This led to additional funding.

Informing government policy to develop the UK’s data economy and AI industry

Based on her Semantic Web and open data research [ 3.1- 3.3], Hall was asked by the Government to conduct a Review on ‘ Growing the Artificial Intelligence Industry in the UK’, alongside Jérôme Pesenti, CEO of BenevolentTech. Published in October 2017 [ 5.7], the first of the Review’s 18 recommendations addressed the need to facilitate data-sharing. It said: ‘ Government and industry should deliver a programme to develop Data Trusts – proven and trusted frameworks and agreements – to ensure exchanges are secure and mutually beneficial.’ In response to this recommendation, Simperl was invited by the Government’s Office for AI and the Turing Institute to share experiences of the EDP, ODINE and Data Pitch projects to inform the design of legal and organisational frameworks for sharing closed data. Simperl and Walker were invited to write a White Paper on engagement models for data trusts, presented to the Office for AI, the Government Office for Science, and Defra . A Policy Adviser with the Office of AI said this had ‘ helped us map out the data sharing landscape and develop our thinking on how to shape the Office for AI’s work stream to explore data trusts (a key commitment in the AI Sector Deal) so that it adds to this landscape’ [ 5.8]. From 2019, Hall and O’Hara have convened a working group with the Royal Society and the Law Society of London to produce standards for data trusts. Hall has been named the UK’s first AI Skills Champion, and Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute [ 5.8]. Finally, a senior advisor on Internet Policy at the Cabinet Office said that “ *the introduction to Kieron O’Hara has been very fruitful. Our conversations with him have significantly shaped our thinking ahead of the expected Spending Review this year, including products which we’re using to challenge departmental thinking and ambition with respect to the geopolitics of internet governance.*” [ 5.8]

O’Hara’s anonymisation work [ 3.5] led to the Anonymisation Decision-making Framework, published in 2016 by the UK Anonymisation Network (UKAN), a consortium that includes Southampton, the University of Manchester, ODI and the Office for National Statistics. Freely available, it can be applied to any data where confidentiality is an issue, but sharing is valuable. It was adapted for Australian law in 2017 and for GDPR in 2020. Books describing the techniques have received 16,000 downloads. The Wellcome Trust commended the ‘ authoritative’ Framework to the Department of Health for ‘ a clear, comprehensive account of what needs to happen to data and the environment in which it is used in order for it to be considered anonymised information’ [ 5.9]. The Medical Research Council also recommended use of the Framework [ 5.10].