GATED participates in SRE 2018

In December Brussels hosted the 2018 edition of the Security Research Event (SRE 2018), organized by the European Commission with the support of the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology. The main theme of this edition was: “Making Europe a safer place - demonstrating the impact of EU-funded security research”. SRE 2018 pooled together about 800 participants representing a broad range of security stakeholders: researchers, industry representatives, public security providers and practitioners as well as a wide number of policymakers from across Europe.

The Security Research Event is the annual meeting where industry, governments and knowledge institutions come together to discuss the state of play and current challenges for security research in Europe, and where EU funded security-related projects are displayed in a large exhibition area. The conference is organised alongside the exhibition.  The conference was opened by the Austrian Minister for Transport, Innovation and Technology Norbert Hofer and by Commissioner Julian King in charge of the Security Union.
The different aspects of the theme “demonstrating the impact of EU-funded security research” were debated during two high-level panels taking place on the 5th of December:

"Making Europe a safer place: demonstrating the impact of security research – Challenges and barriers". The debate in the first panel centred around the challenges of communicating, disseminating and exploiting security research outcomes: How can research address the policy requirement and/or the functional need expressed by the practitioners? How to enable the establishment of appropriate synergies among different research initiatives? And how to engage with public and private investors in view of further uptake?

"Projects Afterlife: From the lab to real life". This second panel looked at the potential mechanisms to optimise the uptake and re-use of research results, including other EU funding and the role of the EU Agencies in supporting direct and indirect uptake of project outcomes.