The AIT Center for Innovation Systems & Policy, together with the Institute for Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has been supporting the Austrian Parliament for several years in the science-based addressing of important future issues. Parliament receives regular monitoring reports and takes advantage of the opportunity to commission individual studies on particularly relevant future issues. Now, two further studies have been requested that deal with path-breaking issues of the future: Blackout Prevention and Cybersecurity, which will be available by mid-December of this year.
Study on Cybersecurity - Potential for Austria's Economy and Society
With the advancing digitalisation, networking and automation of many areas of society, from transport to supply, production to the service sector, the risk of being exposed to cyber dangers is also increasing. The study on Cybersecurity is intended to provide an overview of the international state of research and innovation in order to sound out future research needs, education and training challenges, but also new opportunities for Austrian providers of Cybersecurity services and technologies. "The challenge is no longer to develop cybersecurity by a few actors in government, science and business alone, but to shape it in cooperative multi-stakeholder processes" says project leader Anna Wang. Another focus of the study will be the positioning of Austrian actors in European RTI activities. The Center for Digital Safety & Security is also supporting the project with technical expertise.
Blackout prevention and protective measures
The risk of a blackout, i.e. a large-scale failure of the power supply network over a longer period of time, increases with the growing demand for energy supply, the complexity of the energy sector and the associated social dependencies. The ITA-AIT study for the Parliament asks how Austria would be optimally prepared for regional power failures and nationwide blackouts and sets out to identify knowledge gaps, challenges and future needs for action. Further objectives are to investigate the interaction of central actors at different levels and the course of action in the event of an emergency, in order to be able to derive meaningful measures to increase resilience.