December 14, 2007
Q-CERT was a sponsor of the Twelfth Annual Asian Computing Science Conference (ASIAN'07) held this week in Doha. The theme of this year's three-day conference was computer and network security, and there were almost thirty presentations on cutting-edge research by computer scientists from around the world.
The conference program explains the reasoning behind this year's theme: The closely related areas of network and computer security are concerned with mitigating information security risks and preventing disruption, fraud, disclosure, etc. In recent years, researchers have made enormous progress in our theoretical understanding of what security is, and are engaged in a continuing arms race with an underground army of ever more sophisticated attackers intent on bypassing whatever shield protects a system. This makes network and computer security one of the most active fields in today's scientific landscape.
The conference chair was Iliano Cervesato, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Qatar campus. "It was was an honor for us to receive the support of Q-CERT and ictQATAR in putting on this event," he said.
The series of annual Asian Computing Science Conferences (ASIAN) was initiated in 1995 by the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA) and United Nations University's International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST) to provide a forum for researchers in computer science from the Asian continent and to promote interaction with researchers in other regions. Accordingly, the conference moves every year to a different center of research throughout Asia. Since its inception in 1995, the proceedings of ASIAN have been published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.