The University of Manchester will collaborate on a new £6.2 million programme, TREvolution, to advance the development of key technical requirements and capabilities for UK Trusted Research Environments (TREs).
The programme will be jointly led by five leading research institutions in the UK: the Universities of Dundee, Manchester, Nottingham, Swansea and West of England, and will address challenges associated with enhancing data access and analysis within TREs - secure environments where approved researchers can access sensitive data for research to benefit the public, such as national public health and population-level surveys.
The eScience Lab in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester is leading the TREvolution approach to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and transparent analysis of sensitive data. The eScience Lab is expanding on its effort in the federated analytics programme in Health Data Research UK, building on two decades of experience providing computational analysis and data infrastructure to internationally support open research practices in life sciences and other disciplines.
The programme was awarded £4.94 million from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the DARE UK (Phase 2) Transformational Programme.
TREs in the UK are internationally renowned for establishing the Five Safes framework, but they have some limitations for researchers. The manual application processes and disclosure checks make it challenging to keep up with today's scientific needs, like federated learning, analysis across sectors and research domains, and large-scale correlation studies.
TREvolution will address these challenges to evolve UK TRE capabilities across three themes:
- TRE reference architecture and implementations: Standardising UK TRE architectures to enable seamless interoperability.
- AI and semi-automated output checking: Enhancing research output review processes to ensure non-disclosure of personal information.
- Federated analysis: Enabling secure analysis of datasets stored in multiple TREs located across the UK.
The work will be delivered in collaboration with NHS Scotland, Lancashire Teaching Hospital, Durham University, Lancaster University, University College London, University of Queensland, University of Basel and University of Cape Town.
It builds on existing work done by the delivery partners, with experience across the themes, as well as the DARE UK (Phase 1) Driver Projects, which developed initial versions of some of the key components of TREvolution.
In the first collaboration, The University of Manchester established Five Safes RO-Crate: a mechanism of structurally documenting the evidence of computational processes, along with the chain of human reviews for legally accessing sensitive data. Five Safes RO-Crate is based on open Web standards and wider community efforts and has been adopted by several research projects in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) including EOSC-ENTRUST, and forms the basis for the common metadata standard of TREvolution.
TREvolution is the first of three initiatives under the DARE UK (Phase 2) Transformational Programme, advancing the further development and testing of core TRE components and capabilities developed in the first phase of the DARE UK programme.
Further funding will also be provided to support the early adoption of these capabilities by UK TREs and data services and to demonstrate their application through real-world research exemplars. The goal is to showcase the potential for a connected and efficient national network of secure data infrastructures.
DARE UK Interim Director, Professor Emily Jefferson, said: "TREvolution marks a step change in our efforts to transform the UK's secure data research ecosystem. This important work will ensure that key capabilities-such as federated analysis and enhanced output checking supporting the training of AI models-are not just theoretical advancements but practical, real-world solutions that enhance the UK's ability to do impactful research. We look forward to working closely with the TREvolution team to advance these innovations and drive meaningful progress in how sensitive data is accessed and used for the public good."
The TREvolution team will work closely with the DARE UK Delivery Team and early adopter TREs, fostering stronger collaboration and synergy as these critical capabilities are integrated into the UK's secure data research infrastructure ecosystem.
