Impact

In the Services theme, we develop models and mechanisms for systematically designing trustworthy services realized through the collaboration of human and artificial agents.

Our research addresses three core challenges: understanding the social contexts in which services operate, ensuring continuous alignment between services and these contexts, and building complex sociotechnical systems in which autonomous components interoperate effectively. This work is grounded in cutting-edge ontology-driven conceptual modeling.

We focus on two complementary research directions:

1. Models for Service Engineering
We investigate how to systematically design computational domain representations that support problem solving and enable model-driven service design. These results are applied in requirements engineering, enterprise modeling, and architectural design.

2. Mechanisms for Service Implementation
We study interoperability in heterogeneous environments and the use of context data to enable adaptive, “smart” service delivery. By combining capabilities and data from multiple systems, we create richer, context-aware services. This research builds directly on our model-based and ontology-driven approaches.

Our research covers the complete range of steps necessary to develop secure solutions for the real world, starting from the analysis of existing attacks and vulnerabilities and their proper modelling, to the engineering of targeted protection, mitigation, detection, and response solutions, all the way to the implementation of prototypes and proof-of-concepts, combined with extensive evaluation. In each of these steps, we are paying explicit attention to the demands imposed by the socio-economic context and the involved human factor, which can be part of the threat and part of the solution at the same time.

We aim for real, tangible societal and economic impact. To ensure this, our research is very much use-inspired and largely driven by real-world challenges. We focus our research on challenges from three application domains:

• Health and healthcare industry: Patient data and other medical data is extremely sensitive and brings about particular data security challenges, for instance due to its structure, size, and the fact it is typically distributed over many different parties. This makes the health and healthcare industry one of our key application domains.
• Software and Internet industry: Digital data is typically processed by software and communicated and shared via the Internet. Because of this, the software and Internet industry form the backbone of the data-driven economy, which makes it an important application domain for our research.
• Cybersecurity industry: The third major application domain of our research is the cybersecurity industry itself. Since we research existing and develop new security solutions, many of our research questions are motivated by shortcomings of existing security solutions and real-world challenges posed by the cybersecurity industry.

We are committed to perform open and well-documented research to ease reproducibility, reusability, and collaboration to allow for effective knowledge transfer. Key components in this approach are, next to publishing our research at the top security conferences and journals, the release of open source tools and datasets. We follow the well-established guidelines in our community for responsible disclosure of previously unknown vulnerabilities and collaborate with vendors to design suitable patches or mitigations. Furthermore, to ensure innovation lands in society, we support startups in their infancy and also target the creation of new businesses from scratch.