About Trust in Digital Life

Trust in Digital Life Research Community for the R&D of trustworthy ICT solutions

Trust is an essential pre-requisite for connecting people in effective human and enterprise transactions. It builds in our society on the rule of law and stable democratic institutions, as well as elements like security, privacy, transparency, accountability and reputation.

However, with ICT increasingly pervading all human activity we also see worrying developments with respect to crime and erosion of privacy. It is essential to safeguard the European social “acquis” in a future world where many human and business activities are provisioned by complex technology infrastructures and digital services.

European strategy must aim at a strong competitive position in producing innovative solutions that bring new attractive ways of living and working. But in order for these solutions to be accepted by citizens, business and governments they must be perceived trustworthy and strengthen Europe’s social values; and they must ensure an experience of sense and simplicity. Shortly, we must build Trust in Digital Life.

European service and consumer industry is well developed and can play an important role in implementing such a strategy. It is already mobilising itself in national initiatives in the field. Moreover, the cultural and social “aquis” of Europe make it well-placed to build a strong competitive position in trusted services and consumer products, for example in emerging domains such as community building, mobility services, (home) healthcare, and wellbeing, where privacy and trust are key.

The Trust in Digital Life research community is addressing the fundamental societal issues raised by the introduction of digital technologies, by bringing together European public and private stakeholders to promote trust in digital life. Europe has great potential for successful innovation in services and consumer products that take account of culture (social and individual behaviour, law, policies), economics (cost and benefits, innovation, competitiveness), and human behaviour (understanding, usability, privacy, acceptance).

Coordination efforts in this field must go across Member States, industrial and service sectors, academia, public authorities and representatives of citizens to leverage European strength. They must also bring together European efforts and should play a clear role in the ongoing discussions on the Future Internet.

The Trust in Digital Life community will set out a vision and research agenda for trustworthy products relating to information and communications technology, including devices, applications, services, and infrastructures. Central to this vision shall be recognition of the importance of the rule of law, security, and privacy and other core democratic freedoms in contributing to trustworthiness. In the process, the Trust in Digital Life community coordinates with other initiatives as it takes an inventory of emergent digital technologies that can be combined to implement the vision, and it will engage in a broad dialogue. By presenting scenarios, or use cases, community partners will illustrate how combinations of trustworthy ICT-related products can give effect to specific public policy goals.

The founding partners of Trust in Digital Life: Gemalto, Microsoft, Nokia and Philips started in 2009 by signing a partnership agreement with the aim to develop a collaborative open innovation community, i.e. a breading place for spontaneous generation of new idea’s, concepts and project initiatives.

More than 15 partners, industry parties and knowledge institutes, already joined the trust in Digital Life community and the consortium is growing steadily and the community will count at least 40 partners in 2012 working together on relevant content and defining the European vision and research agenda for trustworthy ICT solutions. The binding factors are the shared vision, cross-sector research activities, and communication through shared use cases, experiments, and demonstrations in realistic, complex and scalable scenarios and contexts.

The community is open for all parties that are willing to exchange knowledge and experience, sharing customer & market insights and commitments for joint research and cross sector development trajectories. The ambition is to develop a well-balanced community with contribution of leading edge industry parties, knowledge institutes, law firms, user groups, trade associations, policy makers and local governments. Participants of the TDL community can:

• Influence the European state-of-the-art vision on Trust in Digital Life.
• Share and enrich their knowledge and insights on law, markets and technology with complementary leading edge industry parties, knowledge institutes and policy makers.
• Create promising opportunities for public-private research projects in European framework programs.
• Identify themselves with high quality content and papers.
• Validate and improve their (business) strategy.

To achieve a leading position an advisory group and mirror group is implemented and staffed with international recognised persons who contribute to the quality of the vision, strategic research agenda and international positioning of trust in Digital Life as authority.

The European commission is supporting the Trust in Digital Life community until mid 2012 to stimulate interaction between parties from different member states and execute a comprehensive communication and dissemination program to achieve visibility and awareness in the research community. The commission expects a differentiating and challenging agenda with recommendations for research that will be used as input for the new framework programs (FP8 and beyond).

Trust in Digital Life Deliverables

During the next coming two-year period, the following deliverables will be realized:

• Threat landscape for Trust in Digital Life,
• White papers on several use cases and user stories,
• White papers on technical topics such as data life cycle mgt; data retention mgt,
• Elements of trust,
• Technical requirement for trust,
• Roadmap of trust and authentication architecture,
• White paper on legal prerequisites for trustworthy ICT solutions,
• Models for TDL business logic, addressable markets and technology roadmaps,
• Portfolio of TDL research project ideas,
• Motivation of value of TDL research.

External documents that are approved by the Executive Board, will be published on the Trust in Digital Life Website.

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