Academy of Finland grants funding for research into advanced AI technology, security and privacy in distributed systems

The Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering has granted 14 research projects a total of 8.5 million euros in funding under the research, development and innovation programme ICT 2023. The funding was granted under two themes, “Frontier AI Technologies” and “Security and Privacy in Decentralised and Distributed Systems”. The success rate of the subproject applications was around 19 per cent.

The ICT 2023 programme is a joint effort of the Academy of Finland and Business Finland providing funding also to Finnish parties of ICT projects that have been successful in international joint calls.

Research Council member, Professor Heidi Kuusniemi, who headed the decision preparations, said: “For the first time, research and business cooperation in the projects was included as one of the review criteria. Business cooperation was presented in about 14 per cent of the sub-projects of the AI theme and about 23 per cent of the sub-projects of the information security theme.”

Examples of funded projects:

Sampo Pyysalo’s and Milica Todorovic’s (University of Turku) consortium project applies state-of-the-art deep learning and text mining methods to the domain of materials science research for materials discovery. The results of the research will contribute to designing better materials for next-generation solar cells and other key technologies for sustainable industries of the future.

Tuomas Aura (Aalto University) develops methods and tools for analysing internal firewall-like isolation policies in modern service and network architectures. The main targets for the analysis are cloud applications with microservice architecture and isolation mechanisms for untrusted smart appliances in local networks. Aura’s project will produce testing methods and tools that make connectivity and isolation between system components visible to security analysts and software developers. Firewalls in computer networks implement isolation and filter connections, and they are usually deployed as part of a defence-in-depth strategy. Many products claim to enforce isolation in such systems, but it is difficult to understand what they really achieve.