Digital Futures

Digital Futures operates across the entire range of The University of Manchester’s digital research and aims to present a coherent overview of this research activity to internal and external stakeholders.

The platform also seeks to bring together communities to explore new research areas and address strategic opportunities.

Much of the research conducted across the Digital Futures network is focused into three distinct challenges:

• Societal Challenges focus on real-world activities that are economically and socially important, building on multi-disciplinary strengths within the University.
• Institutional Challenges focus on the potential for digital technology to transform what the University does as a Higher Education Institute and how it does it: how we conduct research, what and how we teach, and how we function as an organisation.
• Cross-cutting Capabilities are digital frameworks, technologies, and methods that are important areas of research in their own right and provide the underpinning for addressing challenges.

The research projects that are tackling these challenges continue to produce outstanding outputs. These projects include the NewMind network exploring how technology might transform the treatment of mental health conditions, UK-HDAN delivering a national strategy for health data analytics research, and the CityVerve Project which helps Manchester City Council improve the way it designs and delivers services for the people who visit, live, or work in Manchester.

Digital Futures supports the 1700 researchers who are involved in these projects by building communities around these multidisciplinary challenges, as well as developing relationships with external organisations and partners in this area of ever-increasing importance.