Compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has become a source of concern for many companies. In fact, due to their nature and sensitivity, data protection policies need to be adapted – to a very high level of detail – in each individual case. However, being written in natural language, they often reflect some of its problems, such as ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency.
When it comes to our education, working to obtain a university qualification could be considered as one of life’s greatest achievements. Many students work hard over the course of a few years to obtain their qualification – some up to six years while managing a full-time job and family life. However, as the famous saying goes, “Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.”
In 2017, it was proposed by The Economist that the world’s most valuable resource was no longer oil, but data. In fact, as early as 2006, this shift in our technological activity was hypothesised, including the value that mining and analysing data would hold for us in the future.
Data collection and storage has gotten progressively sophisticated over the last 20 years. Gone are the days of flopping disks and mains powered memory drives, more and more of us are now opting to store our data where we can access it anywhere at any time – cloud storage.
2021 saw Prof. Peter Ryan, head of the Applied Security and Information Assurance Group (APSIA) at SnT, chair the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practical Software (ETAPS). Having been at SnT since 2009, Prof. Ryan’s research interests of cryptography and security are peripheral to the core themes of ETAPS – the theory and practice of software.