The DUCA project gives individuals, states, or the EU control over the encryption, privacy, access to data, and how and why this data is processed and used. It will also promote international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration through staff exchanges and knowledge sharing.
Walton Institute at South East Technological University (SETU) is delighted to have been awarded a Horizon Europe project within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges (MSCA SE) programme. The main objective of MSCA SE is to help build Europe’s capacity for research and innovation and equip researchers at all stages of their career with new knowledge and skills, through mobility across borders and exposure to different sectors and disciplines.
DUCA - Data Usage Control for empowering digital sovereignty for All citizens
Coordinated by Walton Institute, the DUCA project - Data Usage Control for empowering digital sovereignty for All citizens - aims to promote innovative international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration in research and innovation through exchanging staff and sharing knowledge and ideas. The focus of the project is data sovereignty: transparency and control over the protection, residence, and use of user data. It gives individuals, states, or the EU control over the encryption, privacy, access to data, and how and why this data is processed and used (including monetized) by actors in a value chain.
Data sovereignty is a fundamental pillar to establish digital sovereignty. However, with the digital sovereignty ecosystem rapidly evolving, it is challenging to design interoperable, trustworthy data sharing technologies without forming interdisciplinary collaborations such as the one being developed in DUCA.
Partner secondments
Given the highly interconnected decentralized context of Internet of Everything (IoE), DUCA’s goal is to fund partner secondments to build a flexible and easy to use distributed framework for managing data sharing agreements, which will empower users to control the usage of their data, and to develop and integrate several security and privacy enhancing technologies. This unified framework of security and privacy-enhancing solutions incorporates a set of building blocks to support the development of a modular architecture and reference implementation that will also include techniques for measuring privacy risk exposure, and will be designed to ensure the compatibility of the DUCA framework with the many architectures and deployment models of the IoE.
According to Project Coordinator Jim Clarke, “Through these secondments, DUCA plans to foster industry-academia cooperation and sustain new cooperation among partners in the area of data sovereignty, while also promoting staff professional development by broadening and improving their knowledge and skills through appropriate knowledge-sharing-generation activities, equipment, facilities, and real-life experimentation platforms, while reinforcing and complimenting their own background with active participation in a intersectoral programme enabled by Europe’s MSCA-SE.”
Open to research staff from all DUCA partner organisations
DUCA secondments are open to staff members from all partner organisations including Early-Stage Researchers and Experienced Researchers / Staff, covering researchers at any career stage, from PhD candidates to postdoctoral researchers, as well as administrative, technical, or managerial staff involved in research and innovation activities.
Coordinated by the Walton Institute, partners of the four year DUCA project (2023 – 2026) are interdisciplinary specialists in cybersecurity, privacy, trust, data protection.
For more information
If you would like more information about the DUCA project or secondment opportunities, please contact Jim Clarke at: [email protected]
The DUCA project is funded by the European Union under HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-SE Project reference number: 101086308.