Bart Preneel is a full professor at the KU Leuven, where he heads the Imec-COSIC research group, that has 80 members. He has authored numerous scientific publications & is inventor of five patents. His research interests are cryptography, cybersecurity & privacy. He is president of LSEC & has been president of the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research). 

Bart has been invited speaker at more than 120 conferences in more than 40 countries. In 2014 he received the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics & in 2016 he received the Kristian Beckman Award from IFIP TC11.

Being a fellow of the IACR & a member of the Academia Europaea, Bart frequently consults for the technology & financial sectors & is involved with several start-ups in the area of cybersecurity.

He warns that while society is becoming critically dependent on digital technologies, governments are exploiting them for mass surveillance. Not only does het think that future citizens risk an erosion of their rights to privacy, he believes they are also facing the proliferation of powerful attack tools & an increased risk of cyber war.

Bart looks at the major trends in information technology & their impact on security and privacy, including the Internet of Things, Big Data, the shift towards cloud architectures & the development of quantum computers. Reflecting on the challenges brought by these new technologies, he discusses technological solutions.