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Focus and dissemination

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Focus and dissemination

The SENTINELS vision is that the damage caused by security incidents should decrease as the use of computers and networks increases. The Netherlands is primarily a trading nation, requiring technological innovation in security and privacy to support (a.o.) banking and commerce.

SENTINELS focuses on two application areas that are directly linked to the main economic drivers and where most of the increase in the use of computers and networks will arise: (1) security and privacy for ambient intelligence, and (2) security and privacy for e-government and e-business, including vital ICT and telecommunication infrastructure. These two application areas have been selected since they are expected to have the highest impact. This choice is based on a national consensus between Dutch security experts from finance, government, industry, research institutes and universities.

The Netherlands has a strong international position in a number of security and privacy research areas, such as digital watermarking, cryptography, electronic voting, security protocol analysis, smart cards, biometrics and distributed systems security. It is of crucial importance that the Netherlands should strengthen its position to keep playing its role as an equal partner and to avoid becoming dependent on other nations in areas that are essential for the Dutch economy.

The two application areas will be tackled in the eight years that SENTINELS will run. A follow-up program, provisionally termed SENTINELS-II, will also tackle non-technical issues such as legal, organizational and governmental security topics. This follow-up program will be defined during the term of SENTINELS.

SENTINELS will disseminate its results into society (education, industry, government, public authorities, hospitals, etc.) in the Netherlands. Also, it will build a national IT-security community. Other activities are to organize multidisciplinary annual workshops, in which experts from the whole security field (including experts from legal, organizational and governmental fields) are invited to share their views. This guarantees extensive knowledge exchange, resulting in a spin-off which cannot be obtained without SENTINELS. Also planned are a VICI-style professor and a security ambassador, and two brokerage events, kick off events in which universities and parties interested in participating come together to generate and discuss ideas for projects. The dissemination activities will be coordinated with SENTER and the ECP.NL forum.

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