York to share in £45m funding for digital economy research

THE University of York will be home to one of six Next Generation Digital Economy Centres that are to be created, sharing £45m of funding to support innovation.

These centres will exploit opportunities across sectors of the digital economy including the creative industries, finance, healthcare and education. The Government announced in its Budget book that it will invest £23m, which will be used to leverage a further £22m.

The funding will come through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the other centres will be in London, Swansea, Newcastle, Nottingham and Bath.

The digital economy centres will be home to PhD-level research relating to the digital economy and is focused on real-world applications, which the EPSRC described as how to “connect people with digital technology to radically improve the way we live, work, play, and travel”.

The University of York has previously received several pots of money from the EPSRC for digital economy work, including £5.59m for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in intelligent games and game

intelligence and £1.16m for new economic models and opportunities for digital games, both programmes led by Prof Peter Cowling in the University’s Computer Science department.