CINI Cybersecurity National Laboratory Wins 2021 Best Practices in Education Award
We are proud to announce CINI Cybersecurity National Laboratory as the winner of Informatics Europe 2021 Best Practices in Education Award.
Organised by Informatics Europe and sponsored by Microsoft, the Best Practices in Education Award was presented at a special ceremony on 26 October 2021, during the 17th European Computer Science Summit (ECSS 2021), a hybrid event in Madrid and online. The winning program is CyberChallenge.IT, which was submitted by CINI Cybersecurity National Laboratory from Italy.
Prof. Paolo Prinetto, Director of CINI Cybersecurity National Laboratory, received the Award on behalf of their Laboratory and presented their winning program virtually, “CyberChallenge.IT is a training program for young talents that aims to significantly reduce the current shortage of the IT workforce, being the main Italian initiative aiming at identifying, attracting, recruiting and placing the next generation of IT security professionals. In the 2021 edition CyberChallenge.IT involved 4,900 of the best students in Italy and encourage them to fill the ranks of future cybersecurity professionals, thus making their skills available to the country system.”
“The earliest CyberChallenge.IT was held back in 2017 and it took place every year to this day. Then, due to COVID-19 pandemic, we have set up an online platform for CyberChallenge.IT to deliver lessons and exercises remotely. For each module of the training course, different teaching materials are available: description of the challenge, list of prerequisites needed to solve the challenge, list of outcomes learned after solving the challenge, a public description available for the students with the information to download or connect to the challenge, a list of unlockable hints that lead to the challenge solution, a detailed solution of the challenge with all the instruction needed to solve it and so on. The platform is used by more than 1,000 students and 250 instructors among 33 Italian universities and cyber security centres. Currently, it contains more than 170 challenges, tens of hours of training video, slides and lectures and external materials.”
About winning the award, Prof. Prinetto expressed further for his team, "We are extremely proud to receive such a prestigious award, which repays the effort of all those faculty members who voluntarily spent time and energy to make our advanced training program for young cybersecurity experts possible. The road is marked and we hope that more and more young boys and girls will find in the cybersecurity field new opportunities and achievements."
Professor Jean-Marc Jézéquel (IRISA/University of Rennes, France), Chair of this year’s Award Committee congratulates the CINI Cybersecurity National Laboratory for winning this year’s Best Practices in Education Award. He says, “Their program focuses on technical, scientific and ethical issues related to information security, alternating theoretical lectures and hands-on experiences on various topics such as cryptography, malware analysis, and web security. By combining traditional training activities with a gamification-oriented approach, this program proves to have made a measurable difference in informatics education. We believe it to be widely applicable and useful for the teaching community, and is truly worthy of the title ‘Best Practices in Education’.”
The Best Practices in Education Award is sponsored by Microsoft and carries a prize of 5,000 EUR for winner to carry out further work of their project. “Microsoft was delighted with the strong nominations received for the Informatics Europe 2021 Best Practices in Education Award. We hope the winners’ proposal will inspire other organizations to develop projects and initiatives that leverage a multidisciplinary approach to training and ultimately promote the education of diverse young talent in Informatics”, explains Dr Evelyne Viegas, Senior Director of Global Research Engagement at Microsoft Research. To learn more, visit www.microsoft.com/research
About the Best Practices in Education Award
In line with its mission to foster and promote teaching quality in Informatics, Informatics Europe annually presents the "Best Practices in Education Award". The 2021 edition was devoted to outstanding European Informatics educational initiatives in the domain of Cybersecurity, understood in a broad sense, including related questions such as user empowerment and control of personal data, and digital legal education (right to be forgotten, freedom of speech, anonymity versus trust and security, crowdsourcing versus legacy manufacturing, etc.). This concerns not only students, but also teachers, industry and service providers, citizens of all ages. Visit www.informatics-europe.org/awards/education-award to learn more.
About Informatics Europe
Informatics Europe represents the academic and research community in Informatics (or Computer Science) in Europe. Bringing together university departments, research laboratories and industry, it creates a strong voice to safeguard and shape quality research and education in Informatics. With over 150 member institutions across 34 countries, Informatics Europe promotes common positions and acts on common priorities. Visit www.informatics-europe.org to learn more.