The UK and US governments have announced the launch of two prize challenges to boost privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs).

Competing for cash prizes from a combined UK-US prize pool of £1.3 million, innovators will develop privacy-focused learning solutions that enable artificial intelligence models to be trained on sensitive data without organisations having to reveal, share, or combine their raw data.

Winning challenge solutions will be showcased at the second Summit for Democracy, which US President Joe Biden plans to convene in the first half of 2023.

Innovators from academia, industry, and the broader public can participate in two separate tracks – improving detection of financial crime and forecasting an individual’s risk of infection during a pandemic.

Additionally, participants will be given the opportunity to design one generalised solution that works for both scenarios for broader applicability.

The first track – aimed at transforming financial crime prevention – will utilise tech to tackle international money laundering challenges. According to United Nation estimates, money laundering costs up to $2 trillion each year, undermining economic prosperity and financing organised crime.

PETs can facilitate privacy-preserving financial info sharing and collaborative analytics, allowing anomalous payments to be identified without compromising individual privacy.

The second track, which looks at bolstering pandemic response capabilities, will help with global preparations for ongoing and future public health emergencies by developing privacy tech that can forecast an individual’s risk of infection.

Participants will have access to a synthetic dataset created by the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute, which represents a digital twin of a regional population.

Nadine Dorries, Secretary of State for the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said: “I’m delighted that we are today launching joint UK-US prize challenges to accelerate the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies.

“These cutting-edge technologies can help us to harness the power of data to tackle global challenges like international money laundering and to plan for subsequent public health emergencies, while respecting citizens’ rights. This partnership demonstrates the UK and US’ commitment to working together to address transnational challenges, as well as to ensuring that our vision of the tech revolution – one that is open and democratic – prevails.”

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John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner, said: “Bringing the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) into the start of these prize challenges ensures peoples’ privacy and trust are at the heart of the design process. People can have confidence in the power of personal data to save lives and stop financial crime.

“Privacy-enhancing technologies allow for great innovation when used in the right way. We’re looking forward to supporting these solutions and the final outcomes that will ultimately help the public.”

Planning for the challenges is being led by the UK Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) and Innovate UK, and the US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

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