Databanking is a programme with several open research strands. Three are listed here, each with its own research object and each looking for a different kind of collaborator. The full project outlines are password-protected.
Sandbox security, audit evidence and multi-owner data.
The custody wall is not a feature of the architecture. It is the architecture, and it has to hold against an operator as well as against a requester, prove after the fact what it did, and cope with data that belongs to more than one person at once.
Open questions include the trust model for sandboxed execution, what an audit ledger must record to carry evidential weight, governance of jointly-owned records, and the conditions under which a model may be trained inside a Databank.
From legal norms to verifiable policy.
How can legal and regulatory requirements be transformed into formally verifiable executable policy while keeping the software implementation distinct from the law itself? The strand follows the path from authoritative legal source, through interpretation and formal specification, to runtime enforcement and audit evidence, treating ambiguity, discretion, provenance, certification and legal change as first-class problems.
Databanking is the initial application environment, but the underlying question is broader: any system that enforces a regulatory constraint has to decide what it does when the law runs out.
Placement, orchestration and the output channel.
Bringing the algorithm to the data leaves a further question open: which data, on whose hardware, and at what cost. Databanks may well be heterogeneous, and a single authorised query may span several of them.
This strand covers placement and orchestration of computation across heterogeneous infrastructure, and the communication problem at the boundary, where the result has to carry the meaning the requester needs while remaining bit-scarce.
The full outlines are access-controlled while the collaborations are being formed. To read one, or to propose a strand that is not listed here, write to contact@databanking.org.