DARE UK Sprint Exemplar Projects findings published

Today, DARE UK publishes a series of reports detailing the findings of a programme of Sprint Exemplar Projects funded as part of Phase 1 of the programme.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) awarded over £2 million to nine research teams to deliver a programme of Sprint Exemplar Projects as part of DARE UK Phase 1. The purpose was to conduct exploratory work to uncover and test early thinking in the development of a coordinated and trustworthy national data research infrastructure, to support cross-domain analysis of sensitive data at scale for public good.

The nine projects have demonstrated initial exploration of solutions that are foundational to future phases of the DARE UK programme, including trusted research environment (TRE) federation, data visualisation, automation of ‘Five Safes’ processes, design and use of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), development of governance and public involvement and engagement frameworks and toolkits, and more.

Funding for the projects was awarded as a result of an open, competitive call for proposals which ran from September to November 2021. The projects ran for eight months from January to August 2022.

You can access the findings and outputs of the Sprint Exemplar Projects via the pages below:

PRiAM: Exploring privacy risk assessment methodology, led by researchers at the University of Southampton
STEADFAST: Education outcomes in young people with diabetes – innovative involvement and governance to support public trust, led by researchers at Cardiff University and Diabetes UK
Creating a federated, cloud-based trusted research environment to facilitate collaborative research between existing institutions, led by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute
Overcoming technical and governance barriers to support innovation and interdisciplinary research in trusted research environments, led by researchers at the University of Edinburgh
FED-NET: Creating the blueprint for a federated network of next generation, cross-council trusted research environments, led by researchers at University Hospitals Birmingham
Multi-party trusted research environment federation: Establishing infrastructure for secure analysis across different clinical-genomic datasets, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge
FAIR TREATMENT: Federated analytics and artificial intelligence research across trusted research environments for child and adolescent mental health, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge
GRAIMatter: Guidelines and resources for artificial intelligence model access from trusted research environments, led by researchers at the University of Dundee
TREEHOOSE: Trusted Research Environment and Enclave for Hosting Open Original Science Exploration, led by researchers at the University of Dundee

What next?

The findings of the nine Sprint Exemplar Projects add important technical, governance and best practices insights to each of their respective domains. In addition, they offer valuable broader learnings to inform DARE UK’s aim to design and deliver a coordinated and trustworthy national data research infrastructure. The DARE UK team will now be working to synthesise and draw together the overarching findings across the nine projects in the context of a coordinated national data research infrastructure. The outputs of this work will be published in due course.

Over the coming weeks, we will also be hosting a blog series on the DARE UK website to showcase the findings of each of the nine individual projects. Stay tuned to find out more about the work undertaken, and what it uncovered, from the research teams.

Find out more about what the DARE UK Phase 1 Sprint Exemplar Projects set out to achieve.