When research meets future, new ideas come to life: The CASA RC Trust Summer School 2025 offered participants a space to exchange ideas on the latest developments and topics in their field - this year with a highly relevant focus: AI and security.
From June 16 to 20, over 60 researchers and students brought along their various research topics and discussed them in different formats such as lectures, tutorials or poster sessions. This year's program was organized under the technical direction of the CASA PIs Prof. Asja Fischer, Prof. Ghassan Karame and Prof. Bilal Zafar.
Creative program mixture of exciting talks and practical exercises
This year's CASA RC Trust Summer School once again featured a diverse program consisting of exciting presentations by national and international academics. Guest speakers included Elissa Redmiles from Georgetown University, Chris Russel from the University of Oxford and Marco Lorenzi from Inria Côte d'Azur University. The detailed program and further information can be found here.
In addition to the talks, participants had the opportunity to participate in other activities, such as tutorials and a hackathon. The latter focused on the complexities and pitfalls of AI models. Prof. Bilal Zafar, who organized a CASA Summer School for the first time this year, explains: "In hackathon, we encourage students to try and fool some of these AI models, so they understand how easy it can be. This way, they understand how the process works and how we might want to defend against it."
Interdisciplinarity as a unique selling point
Researchers from all over Germany and abroad also attended the event. "The people you meet here are always a highlight. When you have a common interest and can discover questions, computer scientists - especially at CASA - are very collaborative," says Nele Borgert, who currently works at the University of Bern. Her research at the Chair of the Psychology of Digitalization focuses on the interface between psychology and human behavior in the area of security and privacy.
She is not the only one who appreciates the interdisciplinary topics of the CASA RC Trust Summer School. "I find it particularly exciting how interdisciplinary CASA is. At the Summer School, you get a good insight into what is currently happening in research," reports Petra Welscher, Research Officer at the Cyberagentur in Halle (Saale).
Exchange promotes personal networking
In addition to the numerous exchange formats, the focus also lay on personal conversations. The afternoon program provided an ideal setting for this: During a tour of the Ruhr University Botanical Garden, a barbecue in the nearby Beckmanns Hof restaurant and a pub crawl through the Bermudadreieck bar district, the researchers got to know each other and the city of Bochum better.
General note: In case of using gender-assigning attributes we include all those who consider themselves in this gender regardless of their own biological sex.