Austria leads the way

High technical quality, a keen sense of the actual needs of the public sector and, in many areas, benchmark status in international comparison – Maria Derler, Commercial Attaché at the Austrian Embassy, raved about the IT companies in her home country during the ‘Spotlights from Austria’ panel discussion. The companies that presented their innovations in e-government showed the areas in which the country is a pioneer in digitalisation in the public sector.

More than 500 applications run in Austria via ID Austria, from change of residence and tax adjustments to queries in health records. The trust service provider A-Trust and the software company Rubicon jointly enable qualified electronic signatures for ID Austria. ‘With 15 million signatures per month, we are the signature service for the Austrian administration,’ said Markus Vesely, CEO of A-Trust.

According to Vesely, 98 per cent of all documents can be signed with a qualified electronic signature (QES) that is equivalent to a handwritten signature. A secure solution: ‘We have 100 per cent physical servers in Austria, nothing in the cloud, nothing outside the EU. Especially in today's world, we realise what a valuable asset this is,’ said Vesely.

Anonymising court rulings with AI

The protection of personal information is also crucial for Frederick Bednar, Senior Data Science Consultant at Ebcont. The IT service provider spoke on the topic of ‘AI-based data anonymisation: How personal content is protected and content becomes usable’ about a project his company is working on for the Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJ). ‘Our task was to anonymise sensitive data in legal documents and make the content usable on a broad level,’ explained Bednar.

‘The BMJ sat on a valuable treasure trove of legal documents numbering in the millions, some of which dated back to 1945. But in order to make it usable, the documents often had to be blacked out by hand,’ said the IT expert. With the help of AI systems, Ebcont was able to categorise, anonymise and pseudonymise the documents while maintaining readability. ‘The accuracy of the results was over 90 percent,’ said Bednar. This earned the company the 2022 eAward in the ‘Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence’ category.

Empowering defence

Oliver Esser, Senior Key Account at M.I.T. e-Solutions, emphasised how important AI and cybersecurity skills are for digital resilience in the public sector. "Everyone needs to know that they are part of the defence. A local authority that regularly conducts cyber drills is like a fire brigade that practises for fires,‘ said Esser. He presented the “LONA” learning platform with more than 200 courses, including on the topic of IT security, and the diggi.skills app, which is already widely used in Austria to promote digital literacy. ’Only skilled employees can guarantee the ability to act. This not only secures systems, but also the trust of citizens,‘ said the e-learning expert.