This capacity building project is funded by the British Council’s UK-Israel Call for Inter-University Strategic Cooperation and brings together two world-leading research institutions in the fields of Telecommunications Networks, Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence. The Smart Internet Lab in the University of Bristol, and the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, will work together along with IBM Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Beer Sheva to identify emerging research areas and discuss security in next generation network infrastructure.

Future digital infrastructures and cyber security are global challenges requiring international government, commercial and academic cooperation to develop and defend public and private infrastructures systems against cyber-attacks.

Academics and researchers across the institutions will engage in a series of collaborative workshops to gain an increased understanding of security issues in open, programable and softwarised networks and identify emerging themes and areas for collaboration. The workshops will focus on ‘Network Infrastructure Security’ and ‘Software and Systems Security’ and activities will centre around the following themes, led by the corresponding experts:

1. Next Generation Mobile Internet (Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou and Prof. Reza Nejabati).
2. Security of Connected and Automated Mobility (Prof. Rob Piechocki).
3. AI/ML for security (Prof Weiru Liu and Dr Ryan McConville).
4. RF Cyber Security (Prof. Mark Beach).
5. Cybersecurity (Prof. Awais Rashid and Dr Thomas Pasquier).
6. Advanced Data Security (Prof. Ofer Hadar).
7. Computer System Security (Dr. Yossi Oren, Prof. Rami Puzis, Prof. Asaf Shabtai, Prof. Yaron Wolfsthal).
8. Usable Security (Dr. Jessica Cauchard).
9. Threat Hunting and Threat Intelligence (Dr. Rami Puzis).

The project builds on the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreed by the two Universities and it is expected to lead the thinking in delivering future digital infrastructures and tackle challenges of national importance.