Digitalization touches many aspects of our lives and simplifies daily communication, connectivity, and market reach. However, it entails risks in the security domain with increasing transfer of key data and infrastructure to the digital or online medium. To address the threat to society and the business environment, the Swiss government is collaborating with scientists and experts from industry and the technological domain. At the forefront of this collaboration is the initiative by the Federal Office for Defence Procurement (Armasuisse) in tandem with the scientific expertise of EPFL.
EPFL is committed to support Switzerland’s efforts in the area of cyber defence. Toward that objective, a section of the Swiss government’s Cyber Defence Campus was set up at EPFL in 2019. The initial focus is on areas such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and data analysis.
The objective of the Armasuisse project is to identify, at an early stage, the risks associated with new technologies and develop solutions to ward off such threats. It also aims to assess existing products and applications to pinpoint vulnerabilities. In that process, artificial intelligence and machine learning will play an important part.
While developing methods to identify trends in the Swiss industrial and technological landscape, we intend to create embedding representations for entities and concepts that support diverse search and inference tasks. The embedding models are inferred from currently available and future heterogeneous data collections related to technology, research, innovation, and companies from Swiss and global sources. In order to tackle the heterogeneity of the data considered, we will employ recent advances in heterogeneous network representation learning.