Greetings from Professor Miklós Maróth
President of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network
ICCECIP 2021
3rd International Conference on Central European Critical Infrastructure Protection
“Kinetic and cyber tools in the critical infrastructure protection”
A year ago, we could not have predicted the continuously emerging new challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected almost every aspect of our lives. At the core of the challenges were new security demands related to the urgency of remote or hybrid work. This environment has entailed a new range of issues including targeted cyber threats, data breaches, network, cloud and data risks and related challenges.
There is one thing that remained unchanged and that is the voice of science, which is critical to be heard and respected.
The cyber security of critical infrastructures has gained even more importance and some members of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network have competencies in various fields enabling them to address security related issues. The Institute for Computer Science and Control (SZTAKI) for example, has the expertise to contribute to mitigating risks related to cyber-attacks. SZTAKI has a long tradition of excellence in R&I, they conduct basic and applied research and are active in technology transfer. This past July they also joined the newly launched ’Innovation Cluster for Digital Society’ project as consortium partners, an initiative that concentrates on R&D in e-government and e-public services. Vital for scientific progress, young SZTAKI researchers are piloting innovative solutions in areas of distributed production systems, effective stochastic optimization methods in online machine learning and the application of Fluid Computing in Cyber-Physical Productions Systems.
Equally, other ELKH institutes and their highly skilled researchers facilitate different value-added platforms in this sector. Researchers from the Centre for Energy Research have recently examined the 70-year-old historical dataset of the Hungarian power grid to perform complex network analysis and evaluation. Furthermore, the Centre for Social Sciences, Institute of Legal Studies and the Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of Philosophy are currently analyzing the challenges of cybercrimes, AI, and other critical sector findings.
It is fair to say that ELKH serves as an interface between science and policy and science is undoubtedly a major contributor to protecting our critical infrastructures.
I wish the organizers and the participants of the 3rd International Conference on Central European Critical Infrastructure Protection “Kinetic and cyber tools in the critical infrastructure protection” an exciting and fruitful discussion that may contribute to the tackling of the challenges our critical infrastructure is exposed to.