British and French researchers are teaming up to work on improving the resilience of various technology tools and systems used by critical national infrastructure (CNI) suppliers – including utilities and emergency services – against various security threats.
The technology in scope of the agreement, announced during a state visit from French president Emmanuel Macron, includes positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems that such organisations rely on, and forms part of a wider suite of joint science and tech work being formalised between London and Paris.
From electricity infrastructure to transport to financial transactions, disruption to PNT systems can have significant cascading effects across societies, and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the Ukraine war had shown how such systems have been deliberately targeted with signal-jamming by Russian threat actors.
“France and the UK both have huge ambitions for technology to boost economic growth and strengthen national security,” said science and technology secretary Peter Kyle.
“It is vital we work with natural partners like our French neighbours in these endeavours, particularly as the threat from hostile state actors only grows.
“Today we build on the Entente cordiale with an Entente technologique, celebrating and renewing our longstanding and historic partnership so that together we can face down the challenges of tomorrow.”
GPS backup
One application already being explored by the British government, working with the National Physical Laboratory and private sector experts, is enhanced long-range radio navigation, or e-Loran, which uses ground-based radio towers to provide a backup to global positioning system (GPS) satellite navigation should it become degraded.
E-Loran uses a tried-and-tested technique called hyperbolic navigation whereby a receiver determines its location based on the timing of signals received from various points.
E-Loran can compete well enough in terms of accurate positioning with GPS, and as such is coming to be considered a potentially life-saving backup for the system, which is currently operated by the United States Space Force.
Wider than cyber
The Entente Technologique does not, however, stop at cyber security. Britain and France have also launched a supercomputing partnership between the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing at the University of Bristol – which is home to the Isambard-AI project – and France’s Grand équipement national de calcul intensif, which supports approximately 10,000 high-performance computing and artificial intelligence (AI) projects.
The government said that closer ties between the UK and France’s world-leading computing power and the sharing of AI best practice would build on existing collaborations, turbocharge future breakthroughs and transform public services, building on its AI opportunities action plan.
Three further agreements have also been signed today, during a joint visit by Kyle and Macron to Imperial College London, between Imperial and CNRS Ayrton Blériot Engineering Lab; University College London; the Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique; Oxford; Cambridge; HEC; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; and Université Paris-Saclay.
Alongside the research agreements, a number of private sector companies have also been highlighted. These include collaborations between Synthesia, a London-based AI video specialist, and French sports retailer Decathlon, which are working on an AI avatar lab to enable the latter to communicate with customers and employees, and Darktrace, which is working with events operator GL Events, which played a key role in the 2024 Paris Olympics, among other things.
In the opposite direction, French aerospace, defence and tech company Thales is planning to pump £40m of investment into a UK AI accelerator, CortAIx, while Comand AI, a Paris-based specialist in AI-based defence and security, hopes to spend £35m between now and 2030 to establish a UK base of operations.
