By Veronica Rogers, Lecturer, ATU Sligo.
In Association with itag and EU Skills & Business, helping address skills gaps in the European Union, the 2nd Annual IEEE Cyber Research Conference Ireland (CRCI) 2023 took place in ATU Letterkenny on Friday 24th November.
Over 60 attendees on the day, enjoyed the keynote speakers’ presentation from Randolph Rosenberg. The CRCI conference contained 3 streams: Education and Research, Human and AI aspects and Infrastructure and Operations.
After the keynote speakers’ talk, stream 1 Education and Research and stream 2 Human and AI aspects got under way. After lunch, a panel discussion took place between both Academia and Industry titled ‘Cyber Research Opportunities and Collaboration for Industry and Academia’.
Virginia Lee, Strategic Head of Cyber Operations in TCS spoke about the opportunities and collaboration from the industry perspective. Dr Seamus Dowling, lecturer in ATU Galway-Mayo and Dr Mamoona Asghar, associate professor from University of Galway, gave their perspectives from academia. The panel discussion had great participation from the floor, with some interesting points and discussions. Stream 3 Infrastructure and Operations commenced after the panel discussion finished and after Stream 3 was over, the awards commenced.
There were 3 awards given out on the day. The first award, sponsored by Cyber Ireland, was titled Best Paper and was awarded to John Haren, Margaret Leahy and Enda Donlon for their paper titled ‘Patterns of learning in the cybersecurity profession: A mixed methods study to understand continuing professional development among cybersecurity professionals in Ireland’.
The award was presented by Veronica Rogers, a committee member for the Cyber Ireland NW Chapter. The 2nd paper was titled Social Impact Award, sponsored by iTag and this was awarded to Fahad Alamazi, Karen Renuad and Irina Tal for their paper titled ‘Understanding the Impact of Dyslexia on Online Privacy and Security’. The last award was titled Best Presentation and this was sponsored by Optum and presented by Clodagh Sammon from Optum. The winner of Best Presentation was James Egan for his paper titled ‘A Method of Assessing Data Quality in Publicly Available Cybersecurity Data Sources for User in Medical Device Cybersecurity Risk Management’.
CRCI 2023 was a huge success and provided opportunities to explore emerging security trends and research whilst allowing opportunities for collaboration with both industry and academia. CRCI 2024 will take place in SETU in November 2024.
