In final assessment, the European Commission gives the highest grade to the research project UaESMC (Usable and Efficient Secure Multiparty Computation). The project coordinated by Cybernetica involved the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, Stockholm), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and the Institute of Social Studies of the University of Tartu.
The project developed the statistics software Rmind that is based on secure multiparty computation technologies. The project also designed cost-effective techniques to assist the end-users interviewed during the project in solving their privacy problems.
According to Cybernetica research director Peeter Laud, the UaESMC project is unique: never before had a project coordinated by an Estonian institution received funding from the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET-Open) scheme. He added that the highest grade received from Commission's experts recognizes the world-class research done at Cybernetica.
"The aim of social scientists participating in the project was to identify the societal problems that can be best solved by the technology developed by cryptographers", said Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, professor of media studies at the University of Tartu.
"Successful cooperation of the team resulted from shared desire to understand each other's methods and strengths. The social scientists at the University of Tartu made valuable suggestions to the developers of Cybernetica's secure computation platform Sharemind, which lead to a successful deployment of the system", said Cybernetica's researcher Liina Kamm.
The project UaESMC ran from 2012 to 2015 and received 1 Million Euro funding from the European Commission. The results of the project have been published by IOS Press in the open-access book "Applications of Secure Multiparty Computation".
Cybernetica is a research and development company in the field of ICT, hardware and software systems developer and manufacturer, systems integrator and information security competence centre.
Secure multiparty computation technology has been developed at Cybernetica since 2007 and the resulting Sharemind system has been internationally recognized.
For several years, Cybernetica has participated in research projects financed by the European Commission and the US Department of Defence research agency DARPA.