The theme of the EIT Digital PST Summer School held at the Trento Co-Location Centre was “Security and Privacy in Digital Life (SPDL)”.
The school focused on the four use cases dealing with the privacy and security aspects of
- e-identification and strong authentication,
- e-health,
- smart energy systems
- mobile devices and systems
The main objectives of the school were to demonstrate the importance of data security and privacy for ICT applications in everyday life, to point out the business and innovation challenges and technical solutions, and to teach the students how to transform the gained knowledge into innovative business ideas and turn these ideas into concrete business proposals. The school was attended by 54 students, selected out of 82 applicants.
During the two weeks of learning and team working, students attended classes on cyber security and privacy and basic and advanced cryptography, delivered by top experts from academic and industrial world, intertwined with classes on business and entrepreneurship and pitch presentations. They also visited the Security Operations Centre of Reply in Milan and Telecom Italia Lab in Trento.
Each of the nine student teams addressed privacy and security challenges in one of the four use cases, helped by the technical and business support of lecturers and tutors. “It is really impressive how the students, many of which without security background, managed to create useful innovative business solutions and learned how to present them effectively,” - says Jovan Golic, the Action Line Leader for Privacy, Security & Trust.
“I just want to thank you for the opportunity and for the time invested in us. It was a great programme, really intensive, but worth it every single minute. Thank you and keep up the good job!” – said one of the students.
At the end of the school, students presented their business proposals, pitching their ideas in front of a highly qualified jury, which selected the three winner projects:
- 112 HELP, best entrepreneurial team/project, about using real-time audio-video data in emergency calls, in order to provide faster and more accurate emergency communication by the ICT system designed in order to guarantee high security and privacy standards
- Schedulacy, second best entrepreneurial team/project, about scheduling appointments in a privacy-preserving way by using sophisticated secure multiparty computation protocols, which prevent leakage of sensitive data from personal calendars
- Intellitest, third best entrepreneurial team/project, about using real-time audio-video data in a secure and interactive way in order to enable fully compliant remote online exams.
The gallery of the school will be available soon.
