Project Evolution news
A step forward to bridge the gap between Researchers, Industry and End-users in the Trustworthy ICT field
FIRE publishes a research agenda that matches research priorities and end-users’ needs
Over the last number of years, citizens and European policy makers have recognized that Trustworthy ICT developments in Europe have been delivering outstanding state of the art scientific results which have stimulated interest throughout the world. However, the innovative projects are hard put to reach the market, because the gap between the industry roadmaps and the research activities being performed in institutes and academia is currently too wide.
FIRE aims to reduce this gap and recently issued a Research Agenda, which includes research topics, identifying suggested areas of research that address the main research needs of users. They have been identified by the user community and ICT suppliers and augmented by researchers, who have all participated in the review process. They are aimed at developing forward looking techniques and methodologies that can improve the overall Trustworthy ICT landscape. These topics have been validated by the FIRE Advisory Board and at regional validation workshops with over 150 stakeholders from industry, research and administration.
A total of 38 research topics meriting EC research funding support have been identified, that address six broad categories of user research need across the Energy, Finance, Health, Government, and Mobile Communications sectors. During the review process reviewers were invited to consider themselves as investors and their inputs were used to prioritize the Research Topics: the FIRE project commends the prioritized set of research topics to those generating the future research calls for Horizon 2020. The highest research priorities relate to the protection of privacy, and protecting systems including the Internet of Things. FIRE research agenda outputs have already been supplied to the Network and Information Security (NIS) Public Private Platform Working Groups (WGs), focusing in particular on WG3, Secure ICT Research and Innovation.
In this document, the FIRE project partners have identified key issues that their countries/ regions need to address to enhance their IT security capability and competitiveness, and identified complementarities and gaps between the regions that could form the basis of joint policy and research cooperation. Critical Infrastructure Protection and the new Internet of Things have been identified as promising areas for joint research. The report also identifies Cyber Physical Systems security as a emerging area for international research collaboration
FIRE partners have, when interviewing Industry and Research stakeholders, discussed how EU Programs and their contract instruments are organized, and how they could be improved to help bridge the gap between EU researchers and EU Industry. Recommendations for European Commission stakeholders on changes to EC contract mechanisms and new programme instruments/ actions are identified and presented in the Research Agenda.
The conclusions and recommendations included in this document will presented in the FIRE's final conference on October, the 13th in Brussels. (+ info)
