Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) is an internationally recognized Research Foundation. With its 3,500 square meters of laboratories and scientific infrastructures and a community of over 400 researchers, 140 doctoral students, 200 visiting fellows and thesis students, 700 affiliates and accredited students combined, Fondazione Bruno Kessler acts as a scientific and technological hub. It hosts a lively ecosystem of co-located ventures and spin-offs, actively engaging national and international players in projects and training opportunities.

FBK targets scientific research excellence in the areas of Information and Communication Technology, Advanced Materials and Microsystems, Theoretical and Nuclear Physics, and Mathematics Research. The focus is to conduct topmost research and foster the realization of software systems, experimentation in realistic settings, validation on the field through living labs, industrial applications, and high impact on the market and society. FBK carries out its mission by disseminating and publishing results and transferring technology to companies and public bodies.

FBK was ranked 1st for scientific excellence in 3 different subject areas and because of its economic and social impact, at the last quality of research evaluation. FBK hosts more than 20 companies co-located in its research-innovation-business ecosystem; it has created 26 spin-offs and produced more than 50 patents. Only in 2020 FBK won 43 new H2020 and EIT research projects and 24 projects awarded by national and (other) international agencies and participated in 52 projects with private companies. Its research activities produced more than 200 top-level journal papers and 226 contributions in (peer-reviewed) international conferences.

FBK research addresses significant societal challenges and supports sustainable economic development. It pursues an inclusive collaboration model, engaging with public/private agencies and companies to advance and deploy its expertise (e.g., trustworthy and energy-aware AI and big data) in the development of solutions for, e.g., renewable production, agriculture, tourism, mobility, climate change, sustainable energies, cyber threat intelligence. FBK is part of the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development (ASviS), actively contributing to its working group on Health, Education, and Energy.

FBK participates in the IPCEI-CIS through two of its research centers. 

Digital Society Centre (DigiS – https://digis.fbk.eu), a multidisciplinary group of 100+ researchers and technologists working in areas related to sustainability and quality of life. DigiS embraces the vision that ICT is a critical transformational ingredient towards improving sustainability and quality of life. In DigiS, this goal is pursued by performing advanced research in crucial areas such as AI, Big Data, IoT,  and by exploiting living labs and partnerships with companies to develop and validate innovative solutions meeting critical societal challenges. DIGIS has vast experience in collaborative research, currently participating in more than 40 European and national projects and coordinating 4 of them.  

CyberSecurity Center (CSC – https://www.fbk.eu/en/cybersecurity/) is a research center whose focus is the co-development of digital and cyber security technologies between the various stakeholders through a combination of IT risk management and trust management techniques. CSC's mission is to make these techniques available to the most significant number of organizations. To this end, automated cyber risk assessment support is integrated with trust management towards producing operational suggestions helping ICT solutions designers, developers, and administrators in their daily activities. CSC has a strong track-record of collaboration with companies (IPZS and Cisco Systems being among the oldest ones) while being active on many European-funded collaborative projects.