Partners CARIS Research and University of Vienna participated in the Intensive Programme on Information and Communications Security – IPICS2018, that took place on Lesvos island, Greece between 2 and 13 July 2018.
IPICS is a Summer School that has been running since 1998 and has been hosted by several European Universities. This year it was hosted by the Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean in conjunction with the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean and the Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus.
Figure 1 Dr Thomas Schaberreiter, Technical Director of CS-AWARE during his presentation at IPICS 2018.
Figure 2 Mr. Chris Wills of CARIS Research presents the hands-on approach taken for the shaping of the two pilots in the CS-AWARE project.
As Chris Wills, who has presented at IPICS nearly every year since its inception has commented; “The format of a summer school is an ideal way to educate future generations of students, researchers, practitioners and academics. Participants can reflect on a variety of aspects of IT and communications security, that involve both societal as well as technological issues, without the formality that one might expect in a conventional academic programme, or in an international scientific conference.”
For Dr Schaberreiter the experience was useful as “it gave us the opportunity not only to exchange ideas, but to also validate some of the core concepts of the CS-AWARE project with an audience that needed to be convinced of the value that our solutions will offer. In this respect, it was not an easy task but it was a very rewarding and worthwhile task”
There are plans to co-develop training programmes with the collaboration of partners OTS and InnoSec from Greece to offer courses specially tailored to the needs of personnel in Local Public Administrations.
Thomas Schaberreiter further commented: “We shouldn’t forget that the European Commission’s call that CS-AWARE addresses and from which it has been has been financed was about the needs of Local Public Administrations and SMEs.”
Chris Wills concluded: “The CS-Aware project addresses a very real need being faced by LPA’s and SME’s. With meager financial resources at their disposal, LPA’s and SME’s struggle the deal with the issues and meet the challenges emanating from cyber insecurity. The CS-Aware project will develop the means to raise awareness and address cyber security issues it a solutions that will be useful not only bw applicable to the two pilot partners we have in the project (the Cities of Rome and Larissa), but to a much bigger audience of Local Public Administrations and SME’s’
Adamantios Koumpis
University of Passau, Germany
