Plans for 2021

2020 has been a successful year for ICT Institute, despite the challenging circumstances. We would like to thank all clients who decided to work with us, and are grateful that we could do our work remotely.  Hopefully 2021 will bring relief for the people whose life and work has been disrupted.

Giving back to society

ICT Institute is a more-than-profit business. We aim to contribute to society while also being able to support ourselves. We do this via the following means:

• Sharing knowledge in form of articles, free templates and presentations. Our most notable contributions are a GDPR templates for register of processing activities, verwerkersovereenkomst and DPIA.
• Contributing guest talks and lectures, such as this talk on machine learning.
• Helping students graduate by providing thesis opportunities. It has been very challenging for students to keep studying in 2020, with all lectures cancelled and fewer internship places. We tried to help by providing thesis projects and internships based on our practical experience. New topics are welcome, especially for information science and AI students. We work together with the Vrije Universiteit and Hogeschool Utrecht.
• Donating a percentage of profit to good causes.
• Providing advice at limited costs to entrepreneurs and startups. We try to provide options to all entrepreneurs, even on a limited budget. Send us an email if you have IT-related questions and we will do our best to help. We do not provide free advice as that is generally not effective, but have a lot of experience with do-it-mostly-yourself solutions.

Research plans

Students need thesis topics and supervision to graduate, and we try to help as many students as we can. Upcoming research topics include project management for crowdfunded project, the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence and GDPR. We are actively looking for companies that using artificial intelligence for decision making and want to make sure the technology is used responsibly. We can provide training or validate the use through an impact assessment.

Other collaborations are also welcome. We are specifically interested in hearing from law students interested in IT-contracts and IT-law, software engineering students interested in software quality and AI students interested in practical applications. We are also interested in contributing to open standards, such as the previous NPR 5326.

Business strategy

For 2021 we hope to grow out team to provide even more advice to organisations on the topics of IT investment, privacy, information security and artificial intelligence. Specific focus will be on the following projects

• Helping organisations become certified for information security. We have experience with the standards NEN 7510, talk on machine learning and our lightweight alternative Security Verified.
• Provide security officer and privacy officer support as a service.
• Support people involved in legal conflicts by providing expert opinions on IT aspects of legal cases
• Avoid legal conflicts by offering practical contract advice, code reviews and support with negotiation.

If you find this type of work interesting, please apply to our open positions. We hire people at both junior, medior and senior levels.

img by Jude Beck via unsplash