On Monday, November 7, 2022, Prof. Dr. Patricia Arias Cabarcos (IT Security) and Jun.-Prof. Dr. Sebastian Peitz (Data Science for Engineering) gave their inaugural lectures in lecture hall O1. Prof. Dr. Peter Schreier, Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics welcomed both professors and the audience at the beginning of the event. "We are very happy to be able to continue this good tradition again after a two-year break due to the pandemic," said Prof. Dr. Schreier.
Prof. Dr. Arias Cabarcos, who has been a professor in the IT Security Department of the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Paderborn since October 2021, kicked off the event. In her English lecture entitled "Designing Security and Privacy for Everyone", she addressed the problems and difficulties that can arise in ensuring a secure digital life and presented the current state of research and technology. Many systems, unfortunately, still do not provide user-friendly cybersecurity technologies, which lead to users still being victims of hacking attacks or privacy breaches. "At some point during my research it felt disconnected from reality. That is why I got more and more interested in working with actual people. What I like most about my research is that it is very interdisciplinary and requires different viewpoints and approaches," said Prof. Dr. Arias Cabarcos.
Afterwards, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Sebastian Peitz gave a lecture on "How we can use data to increase the efficiency of complex technical systems". To keep up with the increasingly diverse demands of today's world, the complexity of technical systems has also increased immensely in recent years. In his research, Prof. Dr. Peitz therefore focuses on data-driven optimization and how to better understand and use it to make complex technical systems more efficient. "The combination of physics, machine learning and artificial intelligence is what excites me most about my research field." Jun.-Prof. Dr. Peitz has already been working at the University of Paderborn since 2013. Starting as a research assistant at the Chair of Applied Mathematics at the Institute of Industrial Mathematics under Prof. Dr. Michael Dellnitz, he took over the management at the Institute of Industrial Mathematics in October 2017. Meanwhile, since April 2021, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Peitz is researching and teaching in his focus Data Science for Engineering at the Institute of Computer Science.
