An overview of our current and completed research projects since DRAGoN was formed in June 2020. In addition, we also provide regular training and consultancy.

Current projects

Brunel Centre

Project lead: Damian Whittard

Project team:

Partner organisations:

  • University of Bath (Lead)
  • Futures West

Funding: Research England

Project duration: April 2025-March 2030

Project summary: This is a five-year project to develop regional economic analytical capability in the South West, with a strong emphasis on applied policy-oriented analysis, novel uses of data, and working in a regional context.

Community Of Interest in Information Governance

Project lead: Professor Felix Ritchie

Partner organisations:

  • University of Sheffield (Lead)
  • eDRIS (Electronic Data Research and Innovation Service)
  • The Francis Crick Institute

Funding: MRC

Project duration: February 2025-March 2026

Project summary: This is an Interest Group aiming to provide a forum for the discussion of best practice in information governance.

SDC-REBOOT: Automated output checking for TREs including evaluation of AI model outputs

Project lead: Professor Jim Smith

Project team:

Funding: MRC

Project duration: 

  • February 2025-March 2026
  • January 2023-December 2024

Project summary:

The DRAGoN team were funded (with repeat funding) to run a network exploring the issues of output checking and the implementation of SACRO (Semi-Automated Checking of Research Outputs) and SACRO-ML.

Optimising data professional success: Identifying skills, career trajectories, and training requirements for enhanced data service delivery

Project lead: Elizabeth Green

Project team:

Partner organisations:

  • University of Essex
  • Research Data Scotland

Funding: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Project duration: June 2024-June 2025

Project summary: Staff in data services fall between the stools of academic or administrative staff. This pilot project from Future Data Services is developing career profiles, job description, development curricula and contextual material to help UK data services offer clear career opportunities to staff.

Researcher passports

Project team:

Partner organisation: Health Data Research UK (Lead)

Funding: MRC

Project duration: January 2024-March 2025

Project summary: This project aims to develop a working prototype of a researcher/organisation registry. The ambition of the registry is to provide a single point of validation for all users of secure research facilities in the UK.

Wage and Employment Dynamics (WED) - Phase 4

Project team:

Partner organisations:

  • City University of London (Lead)
  • University College London (UCL)
  • University of Stirling

Funding: ESRC

Project duration: 2024-2025

Project summary: The fourth phase of the Wage and Employment Dynamics (WED) project links ASHE (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings) to the Census 2021, integrated with the ASHE-Census 2011 link of WED1 enabling a doubly-longitudinal dataset to be created and analysed.

View WED project website

ADR UK Research Fellowship

Project lead: Damian Whittard 

Funding: ESRC

Project duration: June 2023-June 2025

Project summary:

This is a two-year fellowship to analyse the distribution and impact of 'green jobs' in the UK.

Output:

Data governance for health research in low- and middle-income countries

Project lead: Professor Julie Mytton

Project team:

Partner organisations:

  • Kathmandhu Medical College
  • University of Bristol
  • George Institute for Global Health UK

Funding: NIHR

Project duration: March 2022 to present

Project summary:

This project has three aims:

  1. explore how data governance models developed in the UK can be applied to a large public health project in Nepal
  2. explore how data governance can be usefully taught in LMIC health projects
  3. identify the state of data governance in LMICs

Output:

Qualidata Use and Confidential Knowledge (QUACK)

Project lead: Elizabeth Green

Project team: Professor Felix Ritchie

Partner organisations:

  • ICPSR
  • University of Michigan
  • GESIS
  • University of Mannheim
  • Heidelberg University
  • UK Data Archive

Funding: UWE Bristol internal funding

Completion date: December 2022

Project summary: When research data consists of personal identifiable information, there is a risk that publishing analyses will inadvertently release confidential information about data subjects. Quantitative data has well-established practices to manage this risk. As well as statistical theory, there are widely used practical guidelines and teaching materials. Research in statistical disclosure control (SDC) was mostly sponsored by national statistics institutes (NSIs), which provided both the motivation and the market for the research.

In contrast, there are almost no guidelines for qualitative data. Researchers working with qualitative data must trust to their own judgment and experience, often without any training or mentoring. As well as increasing the risk of confidentiality breach, this is inefficient, as each generation must learn the same lessons for itself.

One reason for this is the sheer range of qualitative data: ethnographic studies, social media analyses, interviews, videos, clinical case studies, court records. Guidelines in one field may be meaningless in another. A subsidiary reason is that there is no equivalent of the NSI network to sponsor qualitative data research. The Qualidata Use and Confidential Knowledge (QUACK) project seeks to scope and develop both principles and guidelines for working with disclosive qualitative data.

Completed projects

Future Data Services Strategic Fellowships

Project leads:

Funding: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Project duration: June 2022 to August 2024

Project summary: Felix and Lizzie were appointed Strategic Fellows by the ESRC support the two-year review into the current state of and future ambitions for data services in the UK.

View project details

St Paul's Carnival Economic Impact Assessment

Project lead: Damian Whittard 

Funding: St Paul's Carnival

Completion date: 2024

Project summary: The DRAGoN team provided an Economic Impact Assessment to help shape Bristol Carnival's future plans.

Wage and Employment Dynamics (WED) - Phases 2 and 3

Project lead: Damian Whittard

Project team:

Partner organisations:

  • University College London (UCL)
  • Bayes Business School
  • University of Reading 
  • NIESR

Funding: ESRC

Project duration: July 2023 (Phase 2) and March 2024 (Phase 3)

Project summary: The Wage and Employment Dynamics (WED) project’s primary aim is to develop a sustainable, documented ‘wage and employment spine’ with the potential to fundamentally transform UK research and policy analysis across a vast range of topics. Alongside the creation of data infrastructure, the project will also generate research findings of direct interest to policy makers. Public benefit will be maximised through the provision of high-quality metadata and training for users.

Key outputs:

View project website

Guidelines and Resources for Artificial Intelligence Model Access from Trusted Research Environments (GRAIMatter)

Project leads:

Project team:

Partner organisations:

  • University of Dundee (lead)
  • Swansea University
  • University of Edinburgh
  • University of Aberdeen
  • Durham University

Funding: DARE/Health Date Research UK

Completion date: August 2022

Project summary: Researchers from the College of Arts, Technology and Environment at UWE Bristol are part of a consortium awarded £390K by the UKRI as funding for GRAIMatter (Guidelines and Resources for Artificial Intelligence Model Access from Trusted Research Environments) under a scheme run by DARE-UK which is developing a national research data infrastructure for the UK.

This project will investigate what technical, legal and ethical frameworks would enable Trusted Research Environments to safely manage the risk to individual’s privacy when allowing the release of AI-based models learned from the confidential data they host, such as medical records. Such models could have significant value for the public good - for example, diagnosing disease risk.

Professor Jim Smith (Computer Science Research Centre) is leading on technical AI-related aspects with Professor Felix Ritchie providing expertise on procedural/researcher-focused aspects and Dr Francesco Tava (College of Health, Science and Society) on ethical issues.

This project ties into the interdisciplinary DRAGoN which involves a number of College of Arts, Technology and Environment researchers, and which was awarded 100K investment from UWE Bristol's Expanding Research Excellence strategy.

Key outputs:

Semi-Automated Checking of Researcher Outputs (SACRO)

Project lead: Professor Jim Smith 

Project team:

Partner organisations:

  • University of Oxford
  • University of Edinburgh
  • Swansea University
  • Research Data Scotland

Funding: MRC

Project duration: February 2023-October 2023

Project summary: This project took the the proof-of-concept, ACRO, developed for Eurostat, and turned it into a generalised semi-automated output checking model, SACRO, designed to run across multiple environments. It is currently in operational testing across the UK and other countries.

As part of this, the DRAGoN team fundamentally redesigned the theoretical basis for output checking and developed the 'statbarns' concept. The team also led a group building on and extending the GRAIMATTER (Guidelines and Resources for Artificial Intelligence Model Access from Trusted Research Environments) research to provide guidance on producing safety checks for AI models.

Output:

Review of statistical disclosure control options for output tables

Project lead: Elizabeth Green

Project team: Professor Felix Ritchie

Funding: HESA

Project duration: July 2021-March 2022

Output:

Wage and Employment Dynamics (WED) - Phase 1

Project lead: Professor Felix Ritchie

Project team:

Partner organisations:

  • University College London (UCL)
  • Bayes Business School
  • University of Reading 
  • NIESR

Funding: ESRC

Project duration: October 2019-July 2022 (Phase 1)

View project website

EREOSDC (Outputs Statistical Disclosure Control)

Project lead: Professor Felix Ritchie

Project team:

Funding: UWE Bristol internal funding

Completion date: December 2022

Project summary: Data is everywhere. Increasingly the data used for policy and analysis is confidential and needs to be protected. Analytical uses of data are moving to ‘trusted research environments’ (TREs), where users have great freedom to analyse data, but what they produce gets checked before release into the open to minimise confidentiality risks. UWE Bristol is a leader in telling people how to do this, but we are currently fragmented and running to stand still. This project is designed to allow us to

  • strengthen the theoretical foundations of what we do, including public engagement
  • develop re-usable resources for use by us (and others, with appropriate recognition
  • cement UWE Bristol’s reputation as a world leader in data governance
  • integrate and develop IT solutions UWE Bristol staff have built as pilots

There are four strands to output checking:

  • Checking of statistical outputs: UWE Bristol has the field almost to itself and is the leader
  • Checking of qualitative research outputs: an almost completely unresearched field
  • Checking of Artificial Intelligence (AI) outputs and machine learning models: a completely unresearched field
  • Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) for national statistics; a well-established and very competitive field

Advanced ethical models of data governance

Project lead: Dr Francesco Tava

Project team: Elizabeth Green

Funding: UWE Bristol internal funding

Project duration: September 2020-August 2021

Externalities (wider costs and benefits) of data use (subcontractor)

Project lead: Damian Whittard

Project team: Professor Felix Ritchie

Partner organisation: Belmana Consulting (lead)

Funding: DCMS

Project duration: January 2021-March 2021

Output:

Process evaluation and R&D and innovation in data access and governance

Project lead: Damian Whittard

Project team:

Funding: Open Data Institute

Project duration: October 2020-March 2021

Output:

Autumn school in data governance for low and middle-income countries

Project lead: Professor Julie Mytton

Project team: Elizabeth Green, Dr Francesco Tava

Funder: NIHR

Project duration: October 2020-December 2020

The value of data governance

Project lead: Damian Whittard

Project team: Professor Felix Ritchie

Funding: CABI

Project duration: July 2019-December 2020

Automated disclosure control for research outputs

Project lead: Professor Felix Ritchie

Project team:

Funding: Eurostat

Project duration: January 2020-December 2020

Project summary: This project analysed whether and how output checking could be automated, and developed a proof-of-concept, ACRO, a working prototype for Stata users.

Output: 

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