Semantics, Cybersecurity, and Services (SCS)

Digitalization brings many new opportunities for businesses and governments by fostering the development of innovative online services. However, this development also brings new challenges, notably in terms of intelligence, interoperability, security and privacy. The mission of the SCS group is to realize the vision of meaningful computing within trusted digital environments by advancing the forefront of semantic modeling, enhancing cybersecurity, and innovating service design. We work on methods and techniques for ontology-driven conceptual modeling, FAIR data stewardship, requirements conceptualization, architecture design, and model-driven engineering of service systems. We focus on data-driven services that are able to make sense of their context and can reliably and timely react to changing situations. We develop foundational, core, domain, service and application ontologies and service composition frameworks to realize semantic interoperability and meaningful enterprise services. To protect these services against cyberattacks, we research automated methodologies for analyzing systems to identify and mitigate security flaws and to detect and assess potential threats. To stay ahead of possible attackers, we also develop new attacks together with corresponding protection solutions. We design algorithms and protocols that provably secure the underlying IT infrastructure and that are able to thwart or detect attacks. For services that collect and process sensitive data, we build privacy-enhancing technologies and design data protection and anonymization techniques. We apply and validate our results in various domains where data driven innovation plays an important role (healthcare, agriculture, logistics, emergency management, smart cities, manufacturing), and where smart, secure, and privacy-aware services are vital to society.