About Us
Mission & People
The HGI, Research Department of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), is one of the largest and oldest institutes in the field of IT security in Europe. The institute was founded in 2002 at RUB to address the Europe-wide deficits in public research on IT security.
Currently, around 160 scientists from computer science, electrical engineering, information technology and mathematics as well as the humanities and social sciences are conducting research at the Research Department IT Security.
Our research is driven by these goals and values:
Our Working Groups and Members
The interdisciplinary environment of our Instituts covers nearly all aspects of IT security, from basic research in cryptography to internet security, security for the Internet of Things, usability and data protection:
Working Group SicherDigi
SicherDigi (Security Production in the Digital Age) is an interdisciplinary research group that explores the topic of IT security from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences in close exchange with the technical sciences. SicherDigi investigates dynamics and processes of change at the intersection of the analog and the digital with a view to the question of how a need for IT security arises and what desired and unintended effects result from guaranteeing it. One focus is on empirical examples with a regional reference to the Ruhr region, which are used to concretize global developments. Both producers and consumers of IT security are taken into account. SicherDigi currently brings together RUB researchers from media science (Tuschling), philosophy (Weydner-Volkmann), law and criminology (Golla), social science (Sørensen, Galanova) and contemporary history (Goschler, Böick, Kirchberg).
Gender Sensitive Communication
The HGI attaches great importance to equal opportunites. Outstanding science can only arise in an open culture and a way of thinking that goes beyond the boundaries of gender assignments. This is not only expressed in funding measures and collegial cooperation, but also in the way we communicate.
Within the HGI we have thus agreed on various linguistic techniques to enable gender-sensitive communication.
The Genderstar
To express the diversity of the sexes in language use, we use the so-called "gender star". This asterisk is located between the (german) feminine and masculine gender of the word. It is a symbolic placeholder for diverse and open gender.
Sometimes, however, we use explicit gender attributes, for example when it comes to the concrete fundings of women. We always imply in these cases everyone who consider themselves belonging to that gender, regardless of their biological sex.
In some places, we mark this with a standard formulation among our contributions.
- “In case of using gender-assigning attributes we include all those who consider themselves in this gender regardless of their own biological sex.”
- In other places we use a "consecutive gender star" ( eg in female*researchers), where the asterisk refers to all those considering themselves belonging to that gender.
