Meet the reinvigorated PETRAS funding and research platform

The Browser team is thrilled to announce the launch of the beautiful new PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity website. 

The website supports PETRAS’s brand identity and modernised visual style, and was developed to better engage with organisations across academia, industry and government, as well as providing a platform that highlights the centre’s cutting edge research in cybersecurity of the Internet of Things (IoT). 

Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the Securing Digital Technologies at the Periphery (SDTaP) programme, PETRAS is a growing consortium of 12 research institutions and 120 industrial and government partners, making it the world’s largest socio-technical research centre.

PETRAS brings together world-leading experts from 12 research institutions, they are UCL, Imperial College London, University of Oxford, Lancaster University, University of Warwick, University of Southampton, Newcastle University, University of Nottingham, University of Bristol, Cardiff University, University of Edinburgh and the University of Surrey. 

The centre collaborates with academia, industry and government to deliver research looking at the threats, benefits and opportunities presented by technologies at the ‘edge of the internet’, such as IoT, AI and Machine Learning. 

Browser’s work on the PETRAS platform further cements its position as a leading digital supplier to the higher education and research sector.

The PETRAS platform’s distinctive UX design was developed using an iterative development approach. This required a process of ongoing user research, feedback and design iteration, which built on the project’s initial discovery phase, ensuring that the end digital product was tailored to its users’ needs.

As well as creating a platform for the organisation to promote its research and funding calls, the new domain was also required to act as a searchable shop window for leading-edge research papers produced by PETRAS. This required the creation of a bespoke CMS with integrated elastic search functionality, allowing for rapid contextual search.

The new site is set to support PETRAS’s growth and to make its mission clear to visitors, helping it achieve its ultimate goal of ensuring that technological advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) are developed and applied in consumer and business contexts, safely and securely.