The findings of a recent meeting of experts to identify projects in which academics and practitioners would partner to address key challenges in cybersecurity are the subject of a new report issued today by Columbia World Projects.

The report is based on Columbia World Projects’ September Forum on the topic, which brought together approximately 35 experts from a range of fields and institutional perspectives to consider cybersecurity-related projects that CWP could implement in the world beyond the university.

“It is urgent that we find effective ways to reduce the profound vulnerabilities and threats inherent in our growing reliance on digital technologies without sacrificing their immense potential to improve our lives and societies,” said Nicholas Lemann, the director of Columbia World Projects. “That is what the projects developed by the scholars and practitioners who participated in the Forum aim to do and we look forward to taking their work out into the field.” 

Columbia World Projects holds Fora several times a year in order to identify projects in which Columbia scholars and researchers can partner with practitioners in government, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, the media and other entities outside of academia to tackle fundamental challenges.

After discussing the nature of the threat and key challenges, participants evaluated concrete project ideas that had been developed in advance of the Forum around several thematic areas: critical infrastructure; privacy; information challenges in social media; standards and best practices; and norms and deterrence.

The report highlights the Forum’s main findings and the project ideas that received the greatest support from participants. Those projects included the development and piloting of an election auditing approach to detect attempts to tamper with results; the generation and implementation of an efficient, secure, decentralized digital identity system in a place where a significant number of people do not have access to official identification; and a laboratory to test measures to mitigate information challenges inherent in social media platforms, such as the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

Columbia World Projects staff are now working with other advisors within the university to evaluate which projects they will further develop.

CWP has thus far held Fora on energy access and economic inequality, reports of which are available online. The organization’s fourth Forum, on maternal health, is scheduled for January 2019.