·         Winnesr of the Ideathon Challenge hosted by State Bank of India felicitated

·         GCCS 2017 set to begin from 23^rd November, inaugural session to be addressed by the honorable Prime Minister of India – Shri. Narendra Modi

An action packed week leading to the Global Conference on Cyberspace 2017, kicked off today with a 2 day Curtain Raiser. The first day of the curtain raiser began with the 36-hour challenge in the Grand Finale of the Global Cyber Challenge called Peace-a-thon, one of the major highlights of the GCCS 2017. The Global Cyber Challenge is one of the major GCCS 2017 event conducted with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Center (NCIIPC), MyGov, Cyber Peace Foundation (CPF) and Policy Perspectives Foundation (PPF) as collaborators.

The open challenge to computer wizards, hosted by top Universities worldwide for competing in a Hackathon and an Appathon had 15 top winning teams and the CTF winners competing for the top honor that would be closed at 2100 hours on the second day (21^st November) of the Curtain Raiser. The open Cyber Challenge has attracted millions of registered users of MyGov, professionals and tens of thousands of scholars/students from Premier Institutions.

As a side event to the Hackathon Grand Finale, the State Bank of India also hosted Ideathon, wherein ideas to strengthen their soon-to-be launched app YONO (You Only Need One) were invited from the participants. The top three ideas were recognized with a prizemoney worth INR. 25,000, INR. 15,000 and INR. 10,000 and two consolation prizes worth INR. 5,000 each. The prizes were transferred to the individual winners’ bank accounts through BHIM UPI App, in the presence of Mr. Sanjeev Gupta, President & CEO, NeGD and Mr. Mrityunjay Mahapatra, CIO, SBI.

Session on Digital Policy - Key Imperatives:

NASSCOM and DSCI hosted a half-day session on Digital Policy that covered topics of relevance from policy angle and deliberate on the role of stakeholders in the changing landscape. The event saw diverse set of speakers and participation from range of stakeholders.

The multi stakeholder discussion examined issues from varied perspectives, allow better understanding and more informed policy decision-making. As a techno-legal-commercial platform, the need for balancing interests of the stakeholders, as well as the tradeoffs that policy making should contend with, the outcome of the deliberations will be appropriately fed into the Plenary and Parallel tracks of GCCS.

The panel panel saw high profile speakers like Ms. Rama Vedasree, CEO DSCI,  Mr. Rajat Kathuria, CE - ICRIER (Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations), Mr. S Chandrasekhar, Microsoft, Ms. Gowree Gokhale, Leader Cyber Law, Nishith Desai Associates, Mr. Vinayak Godse, DSCI, Mr. Bhairav Acharya, Facebook, Mr. Rohan Bhasin, IBM and Mr. Sudhanshu Pandey, DoC while, Mr. Gautam Kapoor, Deloitte moderated the panel.

Digital Transformation - Experience Sharing by Digital Champions:

Digital transformation is described as "the total and overall societal effect of digitalization". Digitization has enabled the process of digitalization, which resulted in stronger opportunities to transform and change existing business models, socio-economic structures, legal and policy measures, organizational patterns, cultural barriers, etc. The session on Digital Transformation - Experience Sharing by Digital Champions, was chaired by Mr. Dinesh Tyagi, CEO, CSC SPV. Besides some heartwarming experiences shared by the VLEs from Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Haryana, the session witnessed some inspirational words from Mr. Shrikant Sinha. CEO, NASSCOM Foundation, Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Dean (Faculty Affairs), Institute Chair Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Powai, Mumbai, Prof Alok Pande- Professor (Accounting & Finance), Lal Bahadhur Shastri Institute of Management, Mr. Krishnamachari Srikanth, Ex-Cricketer and member of the World Cup Winning Team, 1983. While, Mr. Srikant Sinha emphasized on reduction of e-waste and greater focus on re-use, re-furbish and recycle, Mr. Krishnamachari Srikkant called out for empowering the rural India through digital transformation, that provides more opportunities to the citizens belonging to the remote locations to have access to everything what a city dweller enjoys. He also cited the example of M.S. Dhoni, who albeit hailing from a small town, ruled the cricket world.  Mr. Alok Pandey summed up the session highlighting livelihood, education and healthcare as the three basics, which needs to be digitally transformed.

Session on Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security:

As the role of IT in businesses gets diversified with a greater role of digital in global economy, securing the business processes and transactions gets tougher. While the digital economy is creating new business opportunities on one side, it also intensifies the spectrum of attack vectors for both attackers and opportunists to thrive on. A very relevant session by Checkpoint, on Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security, was chaired by Mr. Pavan Duggal, Cyber Law Expert, while eminent speakers and experts like Partha Sengupta, ITC, Mr. R S Mani, NIC, Mr. Pranab Mohanty, UIDAI, Mr. Venugopal N, Checkpoint, Mr. Ramandeep Singh, QoS, Mr. Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu, MD, Checkpoint and Mr. Harsh Marwah, Country Manager, Checkpoint put forward their views on how we have to execute a Cyber Resilience framework by working on:

(a) high volume, veracity and velocity of data for ingestion telemetry;

(b) applying the un-supervisory machine learning models to generate local intelligence from the ingested data in the form of indicators of attack (IOA) & pivot (IOP);

(c) to enrich the intelligence with 3rd global and dark web feeds and apply the Artificial Intelligence through Supervisory Machine Learning models to assign the risk scores to each event.

The Curtain Raiser have 14 events where approximately 1400 stakeholders are participating. Besides this, there are multiple side events in the backdrop of GCCS 2017 that are presenting a unique opportunity for people to engage with delegates present in the conference, particularly on niche topics such as Block chain technology, Internet of Things, Proliferation of Indic languages and Smart Cities.

NNK/MD