GLASS and The Future

GLASS and The Future

Believe in a world without the barriers that falsely divide us, and let our next generation not fall into the traps of our past

The one thing you find about being an academic is the variety of your week. And this week has been so enjoyable!

First, on Monday, I gave my first presentation on car hacking at an excellent UK-India workshop on NetZero with electric vehicles.

Then, Tuesday, was rather busy. First, the running of our AWS Academy for our industry partners (it is fun to learn lots of new cloud computing material — especially for the hands-on elements), and then meeting an amazing 3D printing company with big ambitions to create a research collaboration between France and Scotland (more details will follow, hopefully). Finally, he hosted CrowdStrike for a presentation to our students:

What was excellent about the presentation, was that it mainly hosted two of our first-class graduates who came in and told our students about their work, and encouraged them the apply for posts in CrowdStrike. Their passion for the company and their work was exceptional.

On, Thursday, it was back to student teaching, with the coverage of encryption tunnels, and then off to the Scottish Cybersecurity awards in the evening. Overall, at the awards, it was a great evening with our PhD graduate and new academic (Pavlos) receiving an Outstanding Young Cyber Talent award, and our EU-funded GLASS project received a Leading Light Innovation award:

It is such as great team for our research work in our Blockpass Identity Lab, with several PhD graduations and two new spin-outs evolving (True Deploy and LastingAsset). But, our EU projects have some of the greatest potentials for impact across the world, and the award for GLASS perhaps highlights this.

GLASS — in our DNA

The GLASS project is in our DNA. The GLASS project is in our DNA. Our previous work on citizen focused systems led to our second spin-out company: Symphonic (and who were recently aquired by Ping Identity).

We have worked for over a decade on citizen-focused systems, and to break down the barriers that divide us. Our lab (the Blockpass ID Lab) has a core vision of building systems for trust and identity. For the core GLASS team in the lab, we have: Dr Nikolaos Pitropakis, Dr Owen Lo, Dr Abubakar, Mwrwan, Dr Christos Chrysoulas, and myself. What I feel most happy about these days, is that we are building great teams who have a common purpose, and who have a core focus of translating research into impact.

Perhaps, it’s best that Alice tells you about the core objectives:

Behind this project is the commitment from the EU to provide every EU citizen with a digital wallet, and which can be used to link to identity credentials, such as academic qualifications, a digital driver's licence, and so on.

It is thus the core of building a frictionless world of travel across the EU, and breaks down the siloed world of the past. I deeply believe in the freedom of movement for the next generation, and for them to be faced with the border and boundaries that falsely divide us. And, so, for me, GLASS is the perfect vehicle to build a better digital world. Behind the scene, the partnership has built a new digital wallet, and use the best possible technology to increase security, trust and resilience:

As research should be, it brings together organisations and teams with diverse skills, including Fraunhofer, Uni systems, University of Patras, PDM, Suite 5, EEMA, and Ubitech. Each of the partners plays their role, and has a common vision of creating a citizen-centric wallet that will support the freedom of movement in the EU.

If you are interested, we will be releasing a new whitepaper on GLASS and EBSI in the next few weeks, but here’s a previous one:

Lo, O., Buchanan, W. J., Sayeed, S., Papadopoulos, P., Pitropakis, N., & Chrysoulas, C. (2022). GLASS: A Citizen-Centric Distributed Data-Sharing Model within an e-Governance Architecture. Sensors, 22(6), 2291 [here].

Conclusions

Believe in a world without the barriers that falsely divide us, and let our next generation not fall into the traps of our past.