On the end of July, a pilot project launched driverless buses in Tallinn, servicing the route between Mere Avenue (Mere puiestee) and the Tallinn Creative Hub (Kultuurikatel) six days a week. The shuttles are being introduced as part of the Estonian Presidency of the Council of the EU, which considers the development of technology and its impact on society a priority area. The buses will be in service until the end of August.

Tallinn-based NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence welcomed today Mr. Peter Pellegrini, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic for Investments and Informatization. He was briefed on the recent developments in cyber defence and the flagship initiatives of the NATO CCD COE, such as the most comprehensive legal handbook Tallinn Manual 2.0, new elements of the recent Locked Shields exercise and upcoming CyCon conference, one of the annual highlights for the global cyber security community.

There is a lot of talk about the new economy, and how it has changed the meaning of teamwork. Even recruiting theorists are talking about how everything is changing quickly – making it a bad time to bond strongly to one employer. Freedom is sweet, and specialists appreciate it. So, finding the right full time employees can be tricky, and some businesses therefore buy services from independent specialists, who can quickly move between better opportunities.

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The team from Czech Republic wins the largest and most complex international live-fire cyber defence exercise Locked Shields 2017. Estonian team and NCIRC team from NATO take second and third place respectively.

The defensive team from Czech Republic also takes home the special prize for the scenario inject. NCIRC team scored the highest in the legal game of the exercise, German team came out on top of forensic challenges while the team from the United Kingdom achieved the highest scores in handling the strategic communication challenges.

The active phase of the largest and most complex international technical live-fire cyber defence exercise Locked Shields 2017 came to end today. In total 3000 virtual systems and 2500 attacks were included.

“The Blue Teams are getting better every year, making the exercise also more demanding for the core planning team. This year we included more specialised systems to offer the teams new challenges,”said Thomas Svensson, CSO at atsec information security and Deputy Head of the White Team, core planning team of the exercise. “To be successful in Locked Shields the competing teams need to master both technical and soft skills, meaning they must be able to handle media and legal requests while solving cyber incidents.”

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„Comparing our results with previous successful year, we have a lot o learn about,“ summarizes Uptime CTO Raimo Seero, what happened at Robotex 2016. „Our supported teams had not reached to top first three places (the best place was 6th), but nevertheless we have a very good feeling,“ is Raimo fulfilled. „We got some very good lessons.“

1132 teams have signed up for Robotex this year. It is more than the previous Guinness record of 1075 teams at the VEX Worlds robot competition that took place in the United States in April 2016.

Robotex, the biggest robotics competition in Europe from last year, is aiming to be the largest in the world next year, in connection to the 100 th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia.

“Estonia’s success story-to- come will be the extensive robotics skills among children and the youth, which will provide them with interesting and profitable jobs,” says Mart Laul, Project Manager of Robotex 2016. “We will be going for the official world record next year, this year we have concentrated on introducing even younger children to the world of robotics,” adds Laul.