InFocus Digitalisation 2018/1.

Page 1

IN FOCUS Digitalisation

Interviews

Society

2018. 1st Issue Free of Charge

The Effects on the Society

Economy

Transport

Culture

WELCOMING WORDS

1


GET INSIGHT INTO FRONTIER TECHNOLOGIES OF TRANSPORTATION. THE SKY IS ‘NOT’ THE LIMIT!

HUNGARY’S STRATEGIC

CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION

28-29 MARCH 2018

VÁRKERT BAZÁR, BUDAPEST H U N G ARY

think.bdpst.org


Digitalisation

The Effects on the Society

All rights reserved. Articles to be found in this publication are the intellectual property of the Antall Jรณzsef Knowledge Centre. No part

of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording,

or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

WELCOMING WORDS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Welcoming Words

8 -

10 -

12 -

22 30 -

37 41 44 48

-

51 55 -

60 63 67 70 -

Mainboard The Basics of Digitalisation

Interview The Importance of the Visegrad Region: Interview with HE Péter Szijjártó, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade The Digital Agenda of the Republic of Korea: Interview with HE Ma Changhwan Deputy Minister for Planning and Coordination

Society Reforming the Hungarian Curriculum: Interview with Professor Valéria Csépe A Hungarian Success Story: Interview with dr Anita Breuer and Gyula Csitári, Founders of Logiscool South Korea: Connecting Everything Talent Management Dependency or Social Expectation? The Scourges of Progress – Is Social Media Leading Us in the Right Direction? Fake News The AI and its Conundrums

Economy Nested Loops The Effects of Industry 4.0 on the Labour Market Carbon Impacts of Digitalisation Future Services of 5G

76 -

81 85

90 94 -

98 104 107 110 -

Transportation The Foundation of a Successful Railway Automatisation Company in Hungary: Interview with Ferenc Sörös, CEO of Prolan Railway Modernisation in Hungary: Interview with Márton Feldmann, Head of Railway Automation Division, Prolan Self-Driving Vehicles, AImotive

Security Cyberthreats: Simple Scenario or Rough Reality? What’s the Value of Privacy?

Culture Top 5 Ownership is Overrated E-games: The Chess of the 21st century Digitalisation in the Film Industry

118 120 122 -

Antall József Knowledge Centre Introduction The History of think.BDPST in Pictures Programmes New Releases Contributing Authors

126 -

Next Issue In Focus: China

112 114 -


WELCOMING WORDS

Introduction

Lectori Salutem!

I would like to say thank you to the experts who contributed to this issue of In Focus magazine. Industry 4.0 is happening all around us, in all aspects of life, from healthcare to industry and transportation. These profound changes present two choices for us: either we will respond positively to the pace of development, or we will lag behind. If we take Industry 4.0 as an opportunity, then Central Europe, which has a strong intellectual capital, can turn it to its advantage. Therefore, why would not we, the peoples of Visegrad, seize the opportunity to take the lead in innovation in the region? We can only be successful, I believe, if there is social and political interest behind realisation, working through a wide network of partners, such as the Republic of Korea, which I am proud to welcome as the guest of honour country of the issue. The question of how robotisation and automatisation will affect the labour market, especially if we look at the automotive industry, is of particular importance to Central Europe. This issue is released on the occasion of the third instalment of think.BDPST. It is our great pleasure that the conference, which is trying to provide answers to the challenges posed by digitalisation and innovation, is getting more recognition with every passing year. Reflecting on the slogan of the conference, see you there!

The first issue of the third volume of the magazine is focusing on one of the key questions of the 21st century; that is, the effects of digitalisation on society. Technological development has never been quicker and more complex in the history of mankind than in the past few decades. In the next years to come, technology will develop so fast, and not the least reach such a global coverage, that it will compel us to rethink the opportunities available in many areas of life. The fourth industrial revolution (according to some the third IT revolution) can have many advantages, but it is also imperative for us to be aware of its effects and consequences. The real question is then: what will happen to us, humans? How will we handle the effects the technological boom has on our jobs, health, leisure time, social relations, and social processes? We have smart devices, but how smartly can we use them? To be able to answer these questions, we invited economic actors and experts to share their insights on the topics at hand. I would hereby like to say thank you to all authors for their contributions. The current issue is released on the occasion of the third instalment of think.BDPST, an international event and Hungary’s largest conference on innovation. Issues of the magazine are also available in digital format under the page www.ajtk.hu/infocus.

Veronika Antall-Horváth

Head of think.BDPST conference

Deputy Director, Antall József Knowledge Centre

Ádám Kégler

Editor-in-Chief

WELCOMING WORDS

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Piroska Szalai

Mark Szalay

Tamás Pecsérke

Piroska Szalai

Mark Szalay is a PhD student at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He is a member of the High Speed Network Laboratory in the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics. His main research interests include Hardware (Router/switch/NIC) design, Network programming, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Mark has been working in the research field of 5G for more than two years.

Tamás Pecsérke works as a project manager at Prolan. He is responsible for the development of safety-relevant applications of ProSigma.

received her degree in engineering from the

University of Veszprém

OUR GUEST AUTHORS

in 1987. She was the

editor-in-chief of the CEO Magazin and worked for her own management

consulting firm. Between 2012 and 2014 she was the Commissioner for

the Improvement of the

Labour Market Situation

of Women at the Ministry of National Economy of Hungary. Currently she is Chair of the Board of

the Budapest Enterprise Agency.

THE EFFECTS OF INDUSTRY 4.0 ON THE LABOUR MARKET page 63

FUTURE SERVICES OF 5G page 70

GAINING A DEEPER INSIGHT INTO CURRENT PROJECTS page 83


Péter Kozma

Árpád Takács

Arnold Velansits

Péter Kozma received

Árpád Takács received

Arnold Velansits is an

in physics at Eötvös

mechanical engineering

software developer,

his master’s degree Loránd University. He obtained his PhD degree in

nanotechnology at Pannon

University. Before

joining AImotive, he

was a researcher at

Research Institute for

Technical Physics and Material Sciences, Budapest, and

Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical

Engineering, Potsdam. He also worked

for Robert Bosch

Ltd, Budapest and

Stuttgart. His fields of

expertise are sensorics and optics. Currently he is a research

engineer at AImotive, working on lane keeping.

SELF-DRIVING VEHICLES page 85

his mechatronics and

modeling degree from

the Budapest University of Technology and

indie video game and and a hobbyist video game critic.

joining AImotive, he

E-GAMES: THE CHESS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

assistant at the Antal

page 107

Economics. Before

has been a research Bejczy Center for

Intelligent Robotics

at Óbuda University, where he obtained

his PhD degree in the topic teleoperated

systems. His fields of

expertise are analytical mechanics, control

engineering, surgical

robotics and machine learning. Currently he is an outreach

scientist at AImotive, leading technology

communication and public relations. SELF-DRIVING VEHICLES page 85

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DIGITALISATION

PRE-HISTORY

1ST GENERATION 1ST GENERATION 1940–56 1940–56

ND GENERATION 2ND2GENERATION 1956-63 1956-63

Evolution of Hardware

PRE-HISTORY

Evolution of the Internet

THE BASICS OF

GENERATION 3RD 3RD GENERATION 1964–71 1964–71

4TH

MOORE’S LAW

FULLY MECHANICAL,

PLUGBOARDS

PUNCHCARDS,

KEYPUNCHES, PRINTERS

MAGNETIC TAPES, KEYBOARDS, MONITORS, COMMAND LINES

Evolution of Human–Machine Interaction

HAND-DRIVEN

ONE JOB AT A TIME

MULTIPLE TASKS


Mac OS

IO

N

AI?

5T

CDS, COLOR SCREENS

JOBS SCREENS TOUCH

E VOIC

NI OG C RE

H

H ATION 1971– G E N4ETR GENERATION 1971–

Moore’s law, which is not a physical law, rather a rule deduced from observation, is based on a prediction by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, which says that the number of transistors per integrated circuit—and consequently, chip performance—is to double in roughly every two years. So far, the conjecture has described chip evolution quite accurately, and it continues to do so, although doubts has always arisen about its future viability.

s stem g sy input n i t a per guage n re o n io Futu tural la anizat a • n self-org •

Inte rnet o Big f Thing s, Dat a

HUMAN2HUMAN

BIDIRECTIONAL,

G

COOPERATION,

E

PARALLEL

WEB OF CONNECTION,

N

AND

WEB 2.0

E

CONTENT,

ON

MONODIRECTIONAL

TI

DISKS, MOUSES, GRAPHICS, WINDOWS

READ/ WRITE WEB,

RA

WEB 1.0

EN OU G EN H O LE IN U F G H AR OR IN N M AN FO FR AT O I R A LY MA M ON TO Z T E I ON TO

READ ONLY, WEB OF

SEMANTIC, MACHINE READABLE WEB, WEB

WEB 3.0

OF THINGS/ THOUGHTS, MULTIDIRECTIONAL, MACHINE2MACHINE COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICATION

T

E IK N -L IO AN CT M A HU TER IN


INTERVIEWS

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VISEGRAD REGION Interview with HE Péter Szijjártó, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade

One of the priorities of the V4 Presidency is the development of the north-south transport and transit route. What is the current state of this process? By now, Central Europe has without a doubt become the engine of the European economy, which has allowed us to further reinforce economic cooperation between the Visegrad Countries – in addition to the already tight political and cultural ties. However, this makes the development of the north-south routes indispensable: currently, one of the key aims of the V4 is the establishment of a high-speed railway connection between Budapest and Warsaw, an investment which is in the best interest of all affected countries. The Hungarian government has signed off on 1.5 billion forints for development studies. What are the potential effects of the new Chinese Silk Road—One Belt One Road Initiative—on Hungarians and the country’s logistical development? Hungary’s goal is to not only be China’s main export partner in the region, but to ensure that the majority of Chinese investments in Central Europe also end up in Hungary. One result of the One Belt One Road Initiative is a series of highly important infrastructural development projects. One of the most important is the renovation of the BudapestBelgrade railway, thanks to which the fastest freight route between Southern and Western 10

INTERVIEW

Europe will cross Hungary. This investment will lead to an increase in our country’s profile in the region, and will produce duty revenues and further logistical investments, resulting in more jobs for Hungary. How long do you think it will take before an electric car can travel from Budapest to Warsaw before worrying about recharging? If someone is planning to travel between Budapest and Warsaw, they will probably greatly appreciate the supercharging station that Tesla is establishing in the city of Győr. They can also rest assured that Hungary has the highest numbers of electric car charging stations in Central Europe. We’ve also taken a number of steps that will promote the sale and wider adoption of electric cars. In a broader sense, Hungary has become a manufacturing centre for the automotive industry in Central Europe, employing about 175 thousand people. That said, it is clear that the industry is on the brink of a new era, and thus Hungary’s goal is to become, in addition to a manufacturing hub, a research and development centre in the field. Looking at the developments of the past couple years, it is safe to say that we are on the right track, since nearly all of the jobs created thanks to investments in the automotive industry have high added value and technological standards. This means that companies today are no longer bringing only manufacturing but often R&D


processes – jobs for engineers – to our country as well, providing jobs with competitive wages to and increasing number of highly-trained Hungarian professionals. How do you see the Visegrad Region’s foreign trade potential unfolding in the near future? The Visegrad Countries represent a market of 65 million people, where economic growth exceeds the European average. The strength of the V4 lies in the fact that the four countries have adopted reasonable policies that have made our region the safest and most competitive in all of Europe. It is a telling detail that trade between Germany and the V4 is 55 percent higher than between German and France. This clearly shows that the axis of Europe’s economic performance has shifted toward the countries of Central Europe and that this tendency will only continue in the future, as the Visegrad Countries are increasingly becoming the hinterland for German automobile manufacturing, which represents the backbone of the European economy. What opportunities does the Danube Region Strategy offer in the field of Hungarian passenger transport and freight services? Hungary acts as a bridge between the southern and northern, as well as the western and eastern countries of the Danube region. Annually, approximately 1,2 billion tons of goods are transported in the region. Countries along the Danube recognised that energy security and transport connections are the common denominator in making the economy dynamic. This offers significant opportunities for Hungary too. In line with the strategy accepted, developments of road and railway infrastructures are being realised. Furthermore, the number of border crossing points will considerably grow in the eastern part of the region.

when it comes to self-driven cars. Moreover, numerous large German enterprises look upon Hungary as a centre of development in Europe in this field. For this reason, the construction of the Zalaegerszeg test course for self-driven cars is crucial, as it enables Hungary to have the largest independent test course in the region. As for so-called smart city developments, a world-class 5G test environment is being established in our country, which will be capable of developing and testing self-driven vehicles, e-mobility, and intelligent solutions. In terms of automation, do you consider job losses a short-term danger in the field of engineering, with special regard to the automotive industry? Many of the global economic actors are working on interconnecting production and digitalisation; there is a fierce battle for development projects among countries. Therefore, workplaces will not cease to exist but will require a different set of skills. Due to the government’s economic policy, Hungary has the most attractive environment for investment among the EU member states. Concurrently, our country has practically reached full level of employment. In the upcoming period, those actors will triumph who will be granted the most modern investments and simultaneously will be able to train skilled workers needed for such investments. We are in continuous consultation with global companies coming to Hungary; we are aware of their needs, and we shape our vocational training and higher education systems accordingly. The number of people working in Hungary is 750 thousand higher than it was in 2010. Therefore, we can see the fruits of our work. We are still working on providing an avenue for everyone to move one step ahead from time to time.

This issue is focusing on the effects of digitalisation on society. What do you think are the breakout points for the Hungarian economy in the field of digitalisation? The biggest breakout point is definitely the automotive industry. We have many references INTERVIEW

11


THE DIGITAL AGENDA OF THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA Interview with HE Ma Chang-hwan Deputy Minister for Planning and Coordination

What are the 2018 goals of the Ministry of Science and ICT? The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), as a core ministry that responds to the Fourth Industrial Revolution and science & technology innovation, is responsible for three roles: R&D (research and development) of science and technology, promotion of ICT industry, and coordination of national R&D. Regarding R&D of science and technology, the Ministry is responsible for basic science and core technology development, R&D in big science policy including space, nuclear energy, nuclear fusion, support of government-funded research institutes, and fostering future talents. To promote ICT industry, the Ministry oversees ICT policy and the Fourth Industrial Revolution and implements policies for promotion of ICT industry including SW (software), information protection, broadcasting services, industrial promotion, and communication services. Regarding the coordination of national R&D, the Ministry is responsible for overall policy of science and technology, comprehensive coordination, planning new growth engines, allocation of R&D projects budget, coordination and evaluation, and R&D system. MSIT has been working on the completion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as the integrator and coordinator of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and innovation growth. In November 2017, I-KOREA 4.0 was announced as a core 12

INTERVIEW

policy brand. ‘I-KOREA 4.0’ refers to promoting the people-centred Fourth Industrial Revolution through intelligence, innovation, integration and inclusiveness, and interaction. The Ministry’s core policy tasks in 2018 are as follows: 1. Reinforce data, network and AI (artificial intelligence) 2. Innovate national R&D system 3. Improve the quality of life of the people. Firstly, we will build a leading industry base for innovation growth such as smart factories, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and drone by strengthening data, network and AI. To this end, we will implement policies including the world’s first 5G commercialization in March 2019, promotion of data distribution, transaction and utilization, early securing of AI core technology, and spread of block chain technology in a speedy manner. Secondly, we plan to transform the national R&D strategy from the fast follower strategy to the first-mover strategy in accordance with the Fourth Industrial Revolution era, and to fundamentally innovate the national R&D system based on researchers. From the long-term perspective of planning 2040, we aim to identify major implementation tasks of all ministries for the next five years and promote efficient R&D investment. In addition, we will provide researcher-centred support, enhance the capacity of the governmentfunded research institutes and universities, strengthen regional R&D base, spread research


results, and reinforce global cooperation on core technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Thirdly, we will build a system for solving the problems of people’s life that the people and the scientific and technological community participate in, so that the achievements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and innovation growth ultimately lead to services that enhance the quality of life. We also plan to expand investment in science, technology, and ICT to improve the quality of life of people, such as disease, fine dust, and natural disasters, and to foster creative and convergent talent, and to create science, technology and ICT jobs. May I ask you to introduce the e-government initiative? The Ministry of Interior and Safety oversees the e-government initiative in Korea, however, I would like to briefly explain the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) as it technically supports the e-government. Under the vision of ‘ENJOY your e-Government’, the Korean government established e-government 2020 Master Plan in April 2016 with three goals: citizen experiences, intelligent government, and a digital new deal. The e-government 2020 Master Plan provides the following five strategies: 1. re-design government services 2. achieving cognition and predictionbased intelligent administration 3. creating a new e-government ecosystem that co-exists with industries 4. expanding trust-based and futureoriented infrastructure 5. taking the lead in the global e-government order. Firstly, MSIT plans to complete the paperless administration service, ‘All Digital Zero Stop’, in all process of civil service through a strategy re-design, and provide the necessary public

I-KOREA 4.0 ‘I’ symbolizes Intelligence, Innovation, Inclusiveness

and Interaction, which are aimed by the Ministry of Science and ICT, as a core ministry that responds to the Fourth Industrial Revolution and as a control tower of science and technology innovation.

“KOREA IS WILLING TO COOPERATE WITH OTHER NATIONS WHOA REQUIRE KOREA’S SUCCESSFUL EXPERIENCE IN E-GOVERNMENT.”

service according to individual situation and demand (activation of on-demand public services) assessment, and implement the DIY (Do it Yourself) public services where the public participates in the entire process from planning to feedback. Secondly, the Ministry aims to develop optimal alternatives and policies by field through intelligent information technology with the strategy of realizing intelligent administration based on cognitive prediction, and realize O2O (Online to Office) administration without limitation of time and space, and designate or manage master data commonly used by the government. In order to create an e-government new ecosystem coexisting with industry, MSIT will foster a new digital industry that leads the public sector by providing the e-government service using AI and drone, and support sharing economy by sharing tangible and intangible resources of the public and private sectors, and nurture creative digital talents. MSIT will establish a hyperconnected e-government platform by expanding trust-based and future-oriented infrastructure, and build a risk-aware self-security infrastructure and build a cloud-based next generation administrative information infrastructure. Korea’s e-government is recognized globally, as it ranked first for the three consecutive years in 2010, 2012 and 2014 by UN E-Government Survey. Korea is willing to cooperate with other nations who require Korea’s successful experience in e-government. INTERVIEW

13


Where can we locate South Korea in the global competition and what is Korea’s strategy in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Major nations around the world recognize the Fourth Industrial Revolution as opportunities to address national problems or identify growth engines, and continuously strengthen technology innovation in the fields of economy and society, and commonly regard intelligence and convergence as the key strategy. Germany leads in responding to digital economy and smart factories through Industry 4.0 (2011.4) along with further developed Platform Industry 4.0 (2015.4), Digital Strategy 2025 (2016.3). The United States of America emphasizes securing AI competitiveness and strengthening social benefits through AI R&D Strategic Plan (2016.10), Artificial Intelligence, automation, and the economy (2016.12). Japan addresses technology, innovation, economy and social problems in all sectors through Artificial Intelligence and Industrialization Roadmap (2016.11), New Industrial Structure Vision (2017.5). China regards AI as the next generation growth engine through AI Action Plan (2016.5), Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (2017.7), while seeking to resolve economic and social problems. Korea set up the Fourth Industrial Revolution Committee directly under the president in September 2017, and established response measures in November, concentrating its national capabilities on implementing the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The strengths of Korea include a worldclass network, ICT capability, manufacturing competitiveness and excellent human resources. As such, Korea has the potential to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, there is a lack of preparation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which calls for an overall paradigm shift in the economy and society, and the core technology such as AI has a 2.3 years technology gap with world’s top-level countries. Therefore, in the situation where Korea is in the inflection point of the Fourth Industrial Revolution where opportunities and risks coexist, Korea aims to nationally respond to the Fourth Industrial Revolution by creating new services that are led by the private sector and supported by the government. 14

INTERVIEW

“THE STRENGTHS OF KOREA INCLUDE A WORLD-CLASS NETWORK, ICT CAPABILITY, MANUFACTURING COMPETITIVENESS AND EXCELLENT HUMAN RESOURCES. AS SUCH, KOREA HAS THE POTENTIAL TO LEAD THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.” Based on Korea’s global science, technology and ICT capabilities, MSIT will create new industries and services through world’s first 5G commercialization, AI core technology development, data utilization promotion, etc., thereby driving economic growth and job creation. Korea endeavours to make the Fourth Industrial Revolution as an opportunity not a risk based on its experience of economic development resulted by successful informatization (Third Industrial Revolution), although it was late in the past Industrialization, which is the Second Industrial Revolution. In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, global cooperation based on open innovation is crucial, thus, MSIT expects to expand global cooperation with countries with excellent science,


Strengths

Weaknesses

• Global science, technology and ICT capabilities

• Weak competitiveness of core technology

- Total R&D investment of USD 58.3 billion (6th in the world, ‘15)

Technology

- 4.23% of R&D investment to GDP, 2nd in the world (OECD, ‘15)

- No.1~2 in ICT Development Index (‘16-’17, ITU)

- Intelligent technology: 70% level of world’s best (IITP, ‘16) - Lack of innovation competitiveness in science and technology (IMD: 3rd in ‘09 ~ 7th in ’13 ~ 8th in ‘16)

• Innovation limit in SMEs and Start-ups based on intelligence

- 5th place in manufacturing competitiveness (Deloitte, ‘16)

- Lack of industrial and social problem-solving capability of intelligent technology * Convergence level (IITP,‘16): Overseas 40.2 vs Korea 9.8%

- ICT market share (‘16,%): smart phone 22.9 (1), memory semiconductor 57.5 (1), display 46.9 (1)

Industry

• The Fourth Industrial Revolution and new industry creation base

- Big data utilization rate of 6.5% (NIA, ‘16) - 4th in Product Market Regulation Index among OECD member countries (‘13) • Insufficient preparation for job changes

- 2nd in Academic Performance Index among OECD member countries (‘15)

- Lack of 3,290 Intelligent core talents per year on average by ‘22 (IITP, ’16)

- 17th in Human Development Index among 188 countries (UNDP, ‘15)

Society

• Outstanding human resources

- 46.9% of employees with unemployment insurance among all workers (‘16)

• Lack of preparation for potential dysfunction such as cyber threat

technology and innovation capabilities such as Hungary and V4 nations. Is the government interested in exporting these ideas and technology? Korea is highly interested not only in spreading and exporting technology overseas, but also in cooperation with other nations. In terms of

technology trade, Korea still records technical trade deficits as a net technology importer, however, the deficits are decreasing due to the recent increase in technology exports. In particular, Korea’s strong ICT sector accounts for the largest portion in technology exports. MSIT endeavours to reduce technology trade deficits and ultimately expand technology INTERVIEW

15


“IN ORDER TO PREPARE FOR THE AGEING SOCIETY, THE KOREAN GOVERNMENT HAS IMPLEMENTED BASIC DIGITAL INFORMATION LITERACY AND CAPACITY-BUILDING EDUCATION TO ENHANCE EMPLOYMENT STABILITY OF THE ELDERLY POPULATION.” exports. The Korean government enhances the quality of intellectual property by strengthening IP management in government’s R&D projects, while supporting various policies to acquire core technology and world-class technology through role sharing between the government and private sector. In fields where global cooperation is necessary such as 5G commercialization, our Ministry will advance the timing of service expansion through international cooperation such as joint response to international standards, joint development of convergence service. Is there a tangible effect of these technological reforms on the South Korean economy? What are the greatest achievements? 16

INTERVIEW

Korea has achieved today’s economic development through state-led investment and R&D strategy in science and technology, which is the greatest achievement of the Korean government’s efforts to develop science and technology. Korea has led economic and industrial development through fast follower strategy and I believe this development experience can become a meaningful development model for countries that have similar condition with Korea. Korea established the Ministry of Science and Technology responsible for science and technology in 1967 and established a governmentfunded research institution and has supported improvement of national science and technology competitiveness and industrial development by introducing and spreading advanced technology. In the 1980s, the so-called technology drive policy became a driving force for rapid growth. In the 1990s, Korea focused on strategic technical development and secured competitiveness at the level of advanced nations. After the 2000s, the new growth engine policy was the central axis in raising Korea to the world-class level. The GDP of Korea increased from USD 2.3 billion in 1970 to USD 160 billion in 1990 to USD 1.4 trillion in 2015. The exports expanded from USD 840 million to USD 65 billion to USD 527 billion during the same period. In terms of industry, memory semi-conductor accounted for 11.9% of the total exports and ranked 1st (57.8%) in the global market share and display accounted for 4.1% of the total exports and ranked 1st (48.4) in the global market share in 2015. I regard the effective science and technology policy supported by active investment in science and technology as an important player in overcoming economic difficulties such as Asian Financial Crisis in 1998 and Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Is there a department that is tasked with measuring the social changes regarding digitalisation? The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) analyses and presents statistics on digitalisation every year. By doing so, we measure social change associated with digitalisation and utilize them when developing policies. There is no single


department that is in charge of this job. Instead, each department, depending on its scope of work – ICT industry, improving the internet service or cyber security – measures social change and utilizes them in their work. For example, the department that is in charge of promoting the ICT industry analyses the current state of the ICT industry, tech companies, ICT human resources and export and import; and utilizes these data in promoting the industry and formulating talent nurturing policies. The department that is in charge of the internet system analyses statistics related to the internet, mobile, internet banking and mobile banking; and uses them to improve the internet service. While the department that is in charge of cyber security analyses statistics related to the data protection of businesses and individuals; and uses them in formulating relevant policies. In addition, MSIT posts up-to-date information on the ministry web-site so that people can have easy access to relevant statistics. The ministry also runs separate web-sites including IT Statistics of Korea (ITSTAT) and KISA ISIS (Korea Internet & Security Agency – Internet Statistical Information System) to manage statistics in a comprehensive manner. South Korea is known to be an aging society. In what ways does the government provide assistance in educating the older generation of Koreans? As the Korean society is aging at an unprecedented rate in the world, the working age population is likely to decrease by over 300,000 per year on average from 2020. Furthermore, the aging of industrial field is at a rapid pace and the burden to finance welfare is likely to be aggravated due to the increase in elderly households. As a countermeasure to this, creating and securing stable jobs for elderly population is a key policy of the Korean government. In order to prepare for the ageing society, the Korean government has implemented basic digital information literacy and capacity-building education to enhance employment stability of the elderly population. To address digital divide of the middleaged, the government has implemented basic information training such as PC usage, document writing, and smart phone usage. In addition,

“STARTING THIS YEAR, WE PLAN TO INTRODUCE THE HIGH SCHOOL CREDIT SYSTEM AND FREE SEMESTER SYSTEM THAT CAN RELIEVE STUDENTS OF COMPETITIVE, EXAM-CENTRED LEARNING AND INSTEAD FOSTER CAPABILITIES AND TALENTS.”

the government operates advanced technology acquisition courses so that IT retirees and related license holders can find jobs or establish start-ups related to IT. What efforts are being made to reform the educational system for the younger generations in Korea? Reforming the future educational system for younger generations is one of Korea’s key policies in preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Starting this year, we plan to introduce the high school credit system and free semester system that can relieve students of competitive, examcentred learning and instead foster capabilities and talents. To foster creative, interdisciplinary INTERVIEW

17


individuals equipped with key qualities required in the future society, the government is making efforts to reform the educational system by promoting convergence education, realizing customized education and advancing digital education. To realize convergence education needed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution era, we plan to roll out the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) curriculum in elementary and middle schools and improve college engineering education. For customized education, the government will analyse and diagnose academic levels and patterns of learners to provide an environment for intelligent customized learning and share various educational contents to establish a contents platform available to everyone. As for digital education, we will promote SW and 3D printing education, roll out digital textbooks, expand wireless infrastructure and strengthen SW capabilities of schoolteachers to foster creative individuals equipped with problem solving abilities. What are the positive and negative impacts of a digitalised school environment for young Koreans? The Korean government continuously promotes the school digitalisation policy, which includes the construction of information infrastructure in elementary, middle and high schools, informatization of special education for students with disabilities and rollout of digital textbooks. Digitalisation of schools helps foster creative thinking and problem-solving skills among students by providing a customized learning environment and various educational contents. Digital textbook usage ratio: 77.1% (2016), Korean Massive Online Open Course (K-MOOC) course registration: more than 260,000 (April 2017) On the other hand, the adverse effects of digitalisation include excessive exposure to harmful websites, overdependence on digital devices (e.g. smart phones) and privacy leaks. Exposure to adult contents via internet: 46.7%, late-night (midnight~6 am) usage of online games via smart phone: 20.6%, cyber violence: 7.7% (3rd most common type of violence) (2016) To realize customized learning and promote interdisciplinary education, the Korean 18

INTERVIEW

government is committed to building on the positive aspects of school digitalisation while minimizing its negative effects. What methods does the government apply in order to provide cyber security? The Republic of Korea has advanced IT infrastructure and is in conflict with North Korea. These make Korea an easy target for cyber-attack. In an effort to respond to growing cyber threat, three government agencies are sharing responsibility in the private, public and national defence sectors while the Office of President has general oversight of them. MSIT is in charge of the private sector formulating and implementing policies, and one of its affiliated organisation Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) undertakes cyber security tasks. The National Intelligence Service which is the chief intelligence agency of Korea is in charge of the public sector while the Ministry of National Defence is in charge of national defence. These three agencies prepare prevention measures, and take an emergency response when presented with serious cyber threats; in such a case, they report to the Office of President, engaged in consultation and coordination under set rules and issue a warning alert. Are there policies for promoting the welfare, quality of life and physical safety of Koreans based on digitalisation? In preparation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Korea is pursuing policies to improve welfare for the socially disadvantaged, enhance the quality of life and address safety issues. To provide smart welfare to the socially disadvantaged, we plan to build an AI-based smart welfare system that can eliminate welfare blind spots by supplying assistant robots and intelligent dementia management services, while pursuing the mutual growth of next-generation welfare projects. To enhance the quality of life, we will address fine dust and water pollution through fine dust precision forecasting and smart water and sewage system based on IoT (Internet of Things) water quality measurement and management to improve the living environment of Korea and


support the creation of new industries that address environmental pollution and climate change. For national safety, we plan to develop an intelligent safety system that comprises of IoT facilities maintenance through an abnormal movement detection & forecasting system based on IoT sensors and deep learning, intelligent CCTV for identifying missing children or suspects, a high-speed maritime communications network and smart maritime navigation for charting optimum safety sea routes. Based on this system, we plan to respond to safety accidents and everyday crimes, prevent accidents, minimize damage and ultimately lead the smart disaster management market.

The interview was conducted by Emese Schwarcz and Ă gnes SurjĂĄn. INTERVIEW

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WELCOMING WORDS

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REFORMING THE HUNGARIAN CURRICULUM Interview with Professor Valéria Csépe, Ministerial Commissioner for Digital Education, former Deputy Secretary General of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

As an introduction, we will start with a wider question: what is the difference between knowledge and literacy? Knowledge is a complex term. By definition, it has two integral parts: learning – more precisely its methodology – and competence. The what and the how of knowledge. Competence means that I am able to apply and use what I have learned in various situations and branches of science. That is what we call competence. Literacy means merging and organising multiple knowledge sources and using them in various contexts. In the classical approach, literacy is primarily knowledge-oriented. This concept was prevailing in the old – but unfortunately most of the time also in the current – system of education. The knowledge-centred approach in education also means that knowledge accumulates over the decades in conjunction with the expectation of a particular social group, but the context is neglected. For example, the knowledge I acquired in secondary school has been expanded through the years. It wouldn’t be a problem, if there was an interconnection between all of these sets of knowledge, and the ability to use them. In some scientific areas, the number of facts and data that we learn are continuously increasing, but there is little – or no – connection between them. Thus, no knowledge network is formed. Today’s literacy expectations are different than before, because they don’t include only classical knowledge. This doesn’t mean that children shouldn’t be familiar with the most influential works of, for example, ancientliterature, but these pieces should be processed and placed in the curricula in a more approachable way. Today, competence includes both natural science and art literacy, as well as practical 22

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usability of different types of knowledge. Of course, literacy is a much wider term. It also incorporates digital literacy which encompasses a broader range of skills: from computer competencies to digital citizenship, this area is considered to be an important part of general knowledge. Today, literacy is beyond the classical teacher-centred knowledge transfer and learning approach. The 21st century literacy has to go in the direction of practical, applicable knowledge which is in accordance with social and economic expectations. Is digital education both the goal and the tool to accomplish the above mentioned? Yes, digital literacy is the goal, and digital education is the tool. This is an opportunity that will help to achieve, and maybe also force, the necessary changes in education: to shift the emphasis from teaching to learning and from teacher to pupil. Many examples from across the world prove that this approach presents great results in the learning process and in acquiring new, practical knowledge. Our developments also have a particular goal and expected results. One of them is the professional usage of digital skills. The other goal is implementing the so-called multicomponent teaching into the classical school system. It consists of three parts: textbooks, the traditional as well as the “smart” ones, digital learning tools, and computer-based systems, such as smart games and many more. One of the basic conditions to achieve is that of a good infrastructure: server, Wi-Fi, laptop, tablet, and educational programmes which follow the principles of pedagogy. There is a dual goal: to provide the necessary tool and the programmes which will help to accomplish the


so-called learning by doing, self-study experience. The role of the teacher is also of key importance, his or her active participation and interaction. Without the necessary digital competence of the teacher, there is no moving forward in learning. The paper-based textbook will not disappear but its usage will depend on the age of the students and the scientific field involved. There are different ways to gain knowledge, and some of them are not accessible for the student’s inception and imagination. Digital learning programmes provide thousands of different opportunities. For example, we can see and move around in a world that had existed long before our time. Would teenager’s interest in learning history change if they had the opportunity to replay – maybe even to change the outcome – of the Battle of Mohács? With the help of digital learning programmes, we can look into different 3D worlds which are hard to imagine for many. Biology can get more interesting: we can see how organs work and the motion of molecules and follow different functions inside the body such as the circulatory system. It is not only a simple animation programme, but a way of learning through exploring various digital opportunities. In the digital programmes, the achievement and the experience are more important than the final grade. The potential within the usage of digital programmes in education is still waiting to be explored, especially regarding experiments: we know, for example, that the boiling point of the water changes with altitude. There is a computer task (Geomatech) which helps us measure the different altitudes, while heading to the top of a mountain, and also collects all of the data in a chart. Why is this learning method better than only learning the definition by heart? Because, in this way, we get clear, practical knowledge which we remember much longer than the definition itself. If I gather different data – be it a definition, fact, or a theory – and just place them beside each other without any logical bound, it will be like white pages in a telephone book and only stay in my short-term memory.

“TODAY, LITERACY IS BEYOND THE CLASSICAL TEACHER-CENTRED KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER AND LEARNING APPROACH.”

We often hear that creativity is perhaps the last uniquely human trait. How does creativity appear in the above-mentioned areas, how and with what kind of techniques can it be developed in the future? Creativity has been, for a long time, one of the central questions in psychology. We tend to think that we need a certain level of intelligence in order to achieve it. But in fact, creativity and high IQ are not correlated. Creativity has a certain material implication. Think about a childhood without any toys, or the possibility to make toys out of something. That kind of an environment would certainly kill the creative expression of the individual. But a children’s room crowded with toys, with no opportunities for creative self-expression, is not the best environment for imaginative thinking either. The adults – teacher, parent – and the environment – school, family etc. – also play a crucial role in this process. A creative teacher is not only teaching but also provides the students with various learning techniques, and uses interactive and interesting methods which help them develop their individual styles of creative expression. Basically, creativity cannot be taught, but we can provide certain conditions that are optimal for creative development? Yes, that’s right. Perhaps the teacher is not at the peak of creativity him or herself, but is openminded enough to apply different learning SOCIETY

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methods and help the children in developing their imaginativeness. This kind of teacher answers their questions and applies their suggestions and solutions. It also involves a lot of patience and understanding, because gifted children can often be hard to handle. Some of them are hyperactive, ask a lot of questions, or offer various problemsolving ideas. If the teacher is too strict with them and narrow-minded towards their ideas, it can affect their imaginativeness. For creativity to develop, the right circumstances are needed: an understanding teacher, specific goals, and a way to achieve them. Children have fascinating flexible thinking skills which should be preserved and further developed, while also taking into consideration their problemsolving skills, individuality and uniqueness. All these abilities should be nourished separately in order to develop in the right direction. Can you tell us, what are your tasks as a Ministerial Commissioner responsible for renewing the national core curriculum? My main task is to develop a science-based and coherent framework that will serve as a starting point for developing a national core curriculum and all other specific curriculum areas. Why are we making a framework? Because it is a scientific material, a basic document of some sort, whilst the national core curriculum is a legislation. Currently, we are conducting a detailed survey in three big groups involving approximately 70 researchers. On these research results, usually 10-15 experts write a case study which gathers different data, such as what is needed for implementing a new curriculum, what are the risks, which international examples or data could be relied on, how the present educational content corresponds to today’s world. In most of the countries, the national core curriculum includes general goals and tasks, as well as the objectives and core contents of different subjects. Currently in Hungary the curriculum by subjects and academic year is defined in other frameworks which also describe the specific educational programmes. The goal is to develop a more advanced, future-based content for curriculum.

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How do you imagine the digital evaluation in schools in the future? Should we leave paper based evaluation behind? I know from my experiences from other areas that in higher education digital evaluation is showing promising progress. Of course this is not equal to those tests, which we use with fondness, and which are more and more pushing out oral exams. In many countries the contents of a diploma can be looked up online, and checked from one’s mobile phone. But let’s get back to the reality in Hungary and its public educational system! We are not there yet, but we should step up in the evaluation of knowledge and its usability in the next couple of years. Today such evaluation systems exist, which are able to measure competence above material knowledge. Too bad, that part of the exercises doesn’t measure the reflective forms of thinking used to find the answers, but intelligence. The essence of the modern evaluation is not to measure subject knowledge, but the usage of knowledge. Today evaluation is not only better because of the aforementioned reason, but also because it follows the level of knowledge, it signals ahead and appoints the areas in need for further development. Today there are such methods, which in the hands of a teacher serve as a true tool: the teacher can follow where the child currently is, can check and evaluate what needs to be formed in order to reach the given solution on his or her own. So both the process and the final result can be evaluated. Such program in Hungary is the so-called e-slide, developed at the University of Szeged. The measurement is not self-serving; the exam is always just a partial result on the scoreboard of the learning process. The result could serve – at the end of the fourth or eighth year – as an indication of the knowledge acquired, the level of skills the student has, so that the teacher of the next level would know what to expect. This sort of evaluation is part of a well-functioning warning system. The output of the lower lever studies must be established in line with the entry-requirements of the higher level education. If the gap is too wide between them, the failures and drop-outs are guaranteed. Not gaining the necessary knowledge in the lower grades of elementary school already risk the success in the higher ones, without the


necessary base the students will fail and the system will collapse. It is still a problem that most children do not learn to read properly, text-comprehension is problematic, and I am not referring to children who live with dyslexia. I’m talking about simple things, basic skills. The other issue is the type of test required for high school graduation. There is a development called electronic graduation system, which prepares a new method for taking the exam, without changing its content. It must be stressed that simply because we are gathering the data electronically the problem of what and how we are measuring will not be solved. First we have to determine what we want to measure. Secondly, to solve how can we – if possible without an exam – measure the stages of children’s development in their studies. Through an international cooperation we developed a diagnostics method which assesses the necessary basic skills and abilities for reading. This is a computer-based dyslexia test, the 3DM-H (Dyslexia Differential Diagnosis Maastricht, Hungarian edition), in which the diagnosis is based on the quality, quantity and the timing of the answers given by the tested person. The principle is similar to those of computer games, evaluating and analysing the participant while in action. We can use this principle to monitor and follow studying processes as well. These days we have computer equipment which – if linked to an interactive board – allows the teacher to follow the process of 20-25 students at the same time. Cooperation can be reached on a collaborative surface and so the teacher can intervene for each student individually, if they are not on the right path towards the solution. This method of learning by doing gives the students experience and provides motivation. It is also something that can’t be included into frontal teaching. Nowadays we encourage not only projectbased education but also that groups are made heterogenic, consisting of children with different set of skills in mathematics and history for example. This way the sharing of tasks evens the student’s status within their class. The exceptional and those who are lagging behind are not always the same students, thereby establishing acceptance and cooperation among the children. For example, such is the Complex Instruction programme in Hungary.

“THE CULTURE AND ATTITUDE OF PEDAGOGY NEEDS A FAST CHANGE.” The Hungarian education system has to face the long, only partially useful traditions that changed little in the past, despite several previous reform endeavours. The culture and attitude of pedagogy needs a fast change. It must be stressed however, that the teacher’s society anticipates the changes with great hopes. The expectations toward the teachers have grown in the last years and the changes have brought a sense of uncertainty. It is important that we prepare the teachers for the upcoming reforms beforehand. The content of their studies and the degree is vital. Did the freshly graduated educator receive the latest professional knowledge, or did the time stop in the 80s and 90s in some areas? We are talking about a huge system which is hard to move and reacts sharply to any changes. We must proceed with caution. I think that both in the classroom-type education and the education of teachers the smart gadgets will save us. Everything has its goal, content, time, and place in the digital word. So the teaching programs and applications on laptops and tablets must follow this principle too. They’re good not because they are digital but because they take the student’s cognitive and emotional development into account, they provide motivation, create an experience, and stimulate active studying. Naturally, they must also be coherent with regards to the disciplinary content. Such programs allow the children to use their knowledge in practical situations and also help gain the necessary erudition. On paper we’d only see the results and not the steps towards it. We’ll see whether the wrong result is due to an adhesion of thoughts, knowledge, or understanding that hinders the mastering of basic connections. With the use of digital devices even the dislike of mathematics or natural science could be conquered, which would be great as they are more than just lexical SOCIETY

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knowledge. They are tools that promote critical thinking and creative problem-solving as well. In order to accept this, we need to reform our whole perception of literacy. Nowadays we hear a lot about artificial intelligence. One of the directors at Google said that this intelligence is not to be confused with the intelligence of humans, being entirely different. What is intelligence then? Is it – at least regarding the artificial one – just an algorithm created to copy our way of thinking? How should we imagine it? Let’s start with intelligence. We psychologists usually say – with some self-criticism – that intelligence is what the psychologists measure with intelligencetests. It has several components: one part is about the language and the knowledge gathered with the language, called verbal intelligence; the other part which shows how we solve problems, is called performance intelligence. Intelligence is the summary of comprehension, meaningful application and usage, and it is more than the linguistic expression. Our way of thinking has many elements similar to those of a computer: storing and combining data, creating schemes, scenarios, algorithms etc. Artificial intelligence is the mechanic realization of tasks requiring human intelligence, and has numerous definitions. However, while the tasks – search algorithms, learning programs, recognizing systems (face, speech etc.) – are the same as with a human, the implementation is quite different. In many fields computers are faster and better. They learn from the probabilities and the path to the solution while the human brain doesn’t. For example, human brain mistreats odds and probability. Think about how many of us think that after throwing the dice a dozen times without getting a six, the possibility of getting it the next time increases. The possibility remains the same, but is hard to comprehend for us. Few understand the applications which are using artificial intelligence, but it is clear to everyone, that with their help we can solve problems faster than with the slow and inaccurate methods of the human brain.

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Because they are influenced and distorted by emotions? Not only because of that. Of course, emotions do distort but the problem is more due to the structure of our rational and cognitive system. The human brain attempts knowledge transfer, searches for cause-effect connections in stories and our thinking schemes change due to experience. There are plenty of algorithms, and the system of storing and combining data and memories is of a constructive nature. Our brain struggles with understanding parallels, it finds it hard to break away from causeeffect situations. We start to build up something based upon our experience, some of it is correct, some not. Machines are different. Emotions are a whole different story. What we know in psychology is that certain extreme emotions divert our thoughts to a wrong path. This has been proven in several experiments. The memory of artificial intelligence is different. As mentioned above, ours is constructive, we change our knowledge regarding the new information given. This can happen in our memory system as well, it is constructive and the output is sometimes malformed. Machines treat information and data differently, use a different method to build up processes and so on. Nowadays there is a new area of research focusing on human cognitive system and the new relations in information and communication systems. Our digital imprint in the world has unforeseeable consequences. The changes in the world are too fast for the human mind to adapt. Take the smartphones for example which can be described as the Swiss army knife of the 21st century. Our connections are not only to people but to devices: we have smart phones, smart cars, smart homes. And these smart systems can be interconnected, for example our home can be connected to our phone. We started connecting the human cognitive system with the cognitive in-communications devices. The most recent development is that these different devices create one system which can be reached anywhere. People’s social relationships are also moved to the easily reachable platforms. Children send their homework to each other via apps and they take only seconds to search for some information. It is a whole other question if they


understand this information or use it appropriately. These gadgets define our everyday relationships, for children and adults alike. The development of such devices went a long way in only 20 years, but I think the real breakthrough happened in the last 5-10 years. The digital world has accelerated. I also think that the engineering science is much more advanced than the humans who are using it. We are now speaking with one of the most renowned Hungarian researchers of the discipline. So, before we start worrying too much and talking extensively about singularity, we should learn to use our smart devices cleverly, shouldn’t we? That’s right. And those who are making smart devices should start by looking at people and how they function. I will offer you one simple example, the touch screen. Gestures required to handle it aren’t in the human behavioural repertoire, but they are logical, as they are coded in our motoric functions. Undoubtedly, things either grow or reduce in size. This is one of many examples engineers have to keep in mind. They should have the required information on human functioning. They have to know human perception, what perceptual illusions may cause, human concentration and its splits and selectivity, and how memories and thinking are structured. And, of course, how it works depending on situation, age, and gender. For instance, how women and men orient themselves spatially. The majority of women orient themselves differently, probably for evolutionary reasons. There could be an application based on this orientation difference, which would not be suitable for women for its pink colour, but for the fact that it takes into account that women’s spatial orientation is different. This is just one of many examples. Yes, and I have the increasing feeling that women will be more suitable for certain programming tasks in the future. They can split focus and their tolerance for monotony is higher. Not to mention the fact that, if we look at it from a social perspective, there were many jobs only men could do, as they required lifting and drilling. This is disappearing.

This also surfaced at the time power steering was invented. It did not require much physical effort for us to drive big cars, if it came to that. Don’t forget that we talk in averages. It means that when we say women or men, we say, without adding anything else, that the majority of women or men at a given age. This doesn’t mean the principle of a given function cannot be anything else; that is, that there is no woman with good orientation skills or that a woman is unable to fly a huge aircraft. But it isn’t the general case. Physical obstacles no longer hinder that many types of work. Women feel comfortable in the digital world also because they can complete tasks from the place they are required to be as young women and mothers: home. We would like to undertake more than our role taken in the family, which affects the labour market too. It is interesting to see what trades open up for both genders. I’d love to see more Hungarian men becoming kindergarten or school teachers, thereby ensuring that more equalised role model alternations are available in our kindergartens and schools. Back to the topic of the digital world, conquering, while also understanding, the digital space would be the way to do this. Yes, the catching-up of women is progressing. This will also help remove those entrenched norms and rigid social demands that restrain our creativity, thereby impeding the country’s innovation performance and the creation of a knowledge-intensive economy and society. The digital world is more than that! It is the new platform for learning, making contact, obtaining information, and practicing democracy. Young people today are not digitally indigenous; they are digital citizens. However, for that to happen in today’s digital world, learning to use the devices should start in childhood, including the ethics and etiquette of use, the awareness of its dangers, safety, and knowledge on the consequences of unlawful usage. Many people, not exclusively the young, are barely sensitive to danger. They post everything on the internet, including private, confidential details. Information regarding data handling should be provided at a very early age, as smaller and smaller children receive smart phones. Originally, the internet was meant for a different use. But today not only people with good intentions use it. It is vital that it appears, to realise that e-governments and SOCIETY

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e-diaries operated by countries make our life easier. That we become – it does not sound as great as e-Estonia – e-Hungary. Members of an e-nation do their tax declarations, construction logs, and ID card change appointments digitally. We should realise that, while it makes our life easier, there are rules to follow, even on the internet. However, it is bound to social changes, which are slower than the technical ones, meaning we should wait for the impermissible style, rude comments, and the many forms of the abuse of freedom to disappear from the digital space. We should not forget that the rise of a society is also dependent on the ways in which we are able to transmit digital knowledge, as any other knowledge, to those having drifted, for some a reason or another, to the periphery of society. Instead of equal opportunities, we can now talk about equal access opportunities, and one of our main principles in knowledge transmission is fairness. To bring an example from sports: in case of some people, you shouldn’t set the bar higher, you should help to jump the bar. For that to happen, you have to set a height; that is, a goal everyone can reach. This is a height you can score above but not below. It can be brought into education as well. In the long run, it will reduce social inequalities. Big plans? Yes. Too optimistic? Maybe. Many say they will not be carried out, as it cannot happen in Hungary. I am committed to success, and I believe that the only way to rise is through modern and proper education. One element of it is how wisely we will introduce our children into the digital world. Very much depends on the fact whether we consider education as a strategic sector, a grounding stage which determines the future. What would be your advice for kids born today on which type of school to attend? What should they learn? For those born today? Nothing. I wish them good parents. I wish they have a well-functioning Kindergarten by the time they reach age 3. a kindergarten providing the best resources in staff and equipment. According to the regulations in force, those kids born today will reach age 6 by 31 August 2017 will go to school in 2023. If hopes regarding renewal are fulfilled, they can go to any school and receive quality education. 28

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“LEARNING TO USE THE DEVICES SHOULD START IN CHILDHOOD, INCLUDING THE ETHICS AND ETIQUETTE OF USE, THE AWARENESS OF ITS DANGERS, SAFETY, AND KNOWLEDGE ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF UNLAWFUL USAGE.” At the same time, when parents ask me what kind of school they should choose for their children, I always tell them that children should go to the one close to their home, because this is where they will make friends and meet kids they know from playgrounds. However, when choosing a school, it is not about the school itself but the first teacher, which is more important. If he or she is a good pedagogue, the elementary school teacher starts building basic skills comprehensively. The child learns to write, read, and express him or herself by the fourth grade which will show in his or her writing, oral presentation, communication, and knowledge about the world. He or she learns to count and gets familiar with English. English literature refers to the playful acquaintance with a foreign language as “linguistic bath.” I wish that kids born today have advanced basic skills, pleasure in learning languages, education in arts and about healthy lifestyle, and the conquest


of the digital world. Our task as experts, is to provide a good school, available for all. Schools should serve as stepping stones towards lifelong learning. Only few understand the essence of it, therefore I try to outline it simply. We should choose a school where children are taught how to learn, as learning how to learn is the key to success in today’s world – because we cannot tell what the world will look like in 12 years, what trades will emerge, and which one will disappear. The world is undergoing fast and intensive changes, and children should be prepared for it. They should acquire not only problem-solving skills, but a full repertoire of thinking techniques. We should accept that learning how to learn and the “it is I who shape my future” attitude are of key importance. Thank you very much!

The interview was conducted by Ádám Kégler and Enikő Jancsek on 17 November 2017. SOCIETY

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A HUNGARIAN SUCCESS STORY Interview with dr Anita Breuer and Gyula Csitári, Founders of Logiscool

As the founders of Logiscool, could you introduce the institution and its activities? dr Anita Breuer: There is a common misconception that Logiscool is a foreign, international company which came to Hungary. And we are very proud to explain, that no, that is not the case, this was our own idea. Back in 2013, a thought came into my mind about developing a programming school for children. I wrote an e-mail about this to Gyula, who was abroad at that time, and he wrote me back “Ok, we will talk about it over the weekend”. Gyula Csitári: It turned out to be much more than one weekend. dr Anita Breuer: It really did turn into manymany weekends and weeks. The preparations lasted from spring 2013 to January 2014, when 30

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we organized our first course in Budaörs, a town in Pest County. It started out as a pilot project, but as it was very successful – more than one hundred children registered – we continued our work, and since then the number of pupils is continuously increasing. How old are the children who attend Logiscool? dr Anita Breuer: “Kids and teens” is a very good expression for our target group: we teach children and teenagers between six and eighteen years of age. With younger children the teaching process is somewhat slower, but still we can achieve great results with them, and with teenagers we are able to work the upper level programmes. Between eighteen and


“ONLY ONE YEAR

AFTER OUR START, WE ALREADY HAD

SIX SCHOOLS, AFTER TWO YEARS THERE

WERE SIXTEEN, AND

CURRENTLY WE HAVE

50 SCHOOLS IN EIGHT COUNTRIES.”

twenty-something years of age there is not a big difference in learning methods, but currently Logiscool is a programming school for pupils. In which language are the classes conducted? dr Anita Breuer: The classes are conducted in the official language of the given country. There are some countries where we have English classes, though the pupils are Germans or French, but these are exceptions. We also have courses in English language in Hungary, but since our pupils are still children, we think that it is better for them to learn in their mother tongue. Anyway, the language of programming is English, so sooner or later they will have to switch to English. When and how did the franchising start? Gyula Csitári: Because of the high demand, it started really soon. Just a few months after the opening of the first school, we already had interested parties. The demand is growing ever since. Only one year after our start, we already had six schools, after two years there were sixteen, and currently we have 50 schools in eight countries. And there are many other contracts waiting to be signed. Among our first partners there were parents whose children attended Logiscool, others read about our programme, found it interesting and contacted us. In this way we can grow and

develop, we have the opportunity to get in touch with many different people who are interested in our work. This is a great long-term opportunity for idea exchange and network-building with people who share the same passion. dr Anita Breuer: These are all success stories, successful businesses. And, as Gyula already mentioned, they are all very proud to be part of it. Are there some plans to involve other age groups, for example students, in the Logiscool programming activities? dr Anita Breuer: Regarding the future, we can imagine just about anything. Logiscool has turned four in January, we still don’t have a decade-long experience. The world is changing from one day to another. We, and also some of the national economies are facing various challenges. There is a shortage of labour force all over the continent: Hungary is lacking twenty-two thousand and Europe couple hundred thousand IT experts. This is an ongoing problem in other parts of the world too, so there is a great need for these types of training. Some of the parents – majority of them is not in the IT business – want to learn something about programming also, in order to understand what their children are learning. Gyula Csitári: We already have the technical support for it, whereas the past two years we are using our own learning platform. At the beginning, we used other programs that are available on the market, but later we developed our own learning platform, called Scoolcode. This is an incredibly good system, suitable for teaching different age groups, from visual programming for children, to written program languages for teens. The program is easy to use for everybody. There is no obstacle to reach many children and teens who are eager to learn. In January, we have been at the world’s largest education fair taking place in London. In the same month we have been invited, through the European Parliament’s initiative, to take part at the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition, which was dealing with digitalisation and how Europe should respond to arising challenges. There my wife, Anita held a presentation about Logiscool. After all the experience we gained in programming and education, we have the relevant knowledge and SOCIETY

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could give some answers to questions regarding these topics. How does the curriculum development process work? In the ever-changing IT world how often do you need to adjust it? dr Anita Breuer: Constant development is needed in many areas, and most of them we can do ourselves in our company. For some of the programs – for example in the case of our summer camps – we hire external teams. The basic pillars of programming do not change. Cycles were cycles ten years ago, and they will stay the same in the upcoming twenty years. We get feedbacks from our pupils and try to update the curriculum regarding their opinion. We have classes that got good marks from all of the pupils, so obviously, we don’t change these. But, if the feedback shows that a particular task was too difficult for the kids, we make some changes to it. This is the so-called fine tuning. Also, our curriculum is constantly growing, so we need to make it interesting and have to use various new program languages. Gyula Csitári: For our summer camps we always try to come up with something new and interesting. In comparison with the regular school system – where you need at least two years to implement a new curriculum – our material for the summer camps is changing yearly. That is why we are always up-to-date with the constant changes occurring in the IT world. Can you tell us something about the summer camps? Who can participate, is there some kind of application form, or do your regular students attend it? What is the agenda in the case of these camps? Gyula Csitári: Anyone can apply, that’s why it is a challenge to always come up with something new and different than our regular classes. Our regular courses are extracurricular activities, the pupils come once a week from September to July, during the school year. During summer we have to have topics that are interesting for newcomers and for those who attended the regular course, but also for those who didn’t go to the course, but were at the summer camp the previous year. That is why we have to be very 32

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creative and always have something new and interesting for everyone. dr Anita Breuer: We have different, very popular programs. For example, we have Minecraft camps, which is not taught during the school year. It’s not only a game, children learn serious programming through these activities. Our video editing camps are also very popular, because even 10-year-olds want to be big YouTube stars. They can also learn how to make a webpage, and we also have robot courses in the camps, but also during the school year. There is a huge variety of different activities, they can do just about anything. Every year we have to filter the content, to decide which topics we will work on, because the digital world is enormous and it is full of surprises. When opening a new Logiscool, what is the biggest challenge for you? Finding the right teachers, the right space, or the promotion of the school? dr Anita Breuer: It is a challenge to find the ideal franchise-partner. When we have one, through different trainings that we provide, they are capable to launch the school. We started a lot of schools, our experience in this field is very broad. Those are the advantages of franchising. Gyula Csitári: The main task is to establish the school, but the most important thing is the question of our partner. We usually say that we can provide everything: the know-how, the IT system. But the practical part of the work has to be done by our partners, and they really need to be passionate about it. Without that, it just can’t work. dr Anita Breuer: There are some stereotypes regarding franchising, we always mention this. The first one is: no boss – no stress, I don’t have to work a lot. But, this is not true. I am not referring to the stress, but to the part about not working. If you want to have good results, you have to work, we cannot do that instead of you. The best moment is when the school is already working, and you see all those kids come out after class or the summer school. They are so happy, and cannot stop talking about all the new things they have learned. Than you know that it is worth it.


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In your opinion, do you have an influence on their later career choice? Gyula Csitári: We had a pupil, who started our school during high school, sometime later she was already teaching at Logiscool, and currently is attending ELTE Faculty of Informatics. Before that, she wasn’t that much involved into programming. dr Anita Breuer: Not everyone who attends our school will become a programmer, that is not the goal. Algorithms, logical thinking and all other things that we teach are applicable in different life situations. So basically, later by working in any profession you will have the opportunity to use the knowledge gained in Logiscool. But, some kids that are with us since their fourth grade and are now in high school, they are seriously considering some professions related to programming or mathematics. So, yes, there are more and more children who are positively influenced by us. One of the goal is to give them good basic knowledge on which they can later build on. They have a great time here, for example, we teach them to make their own computer games, so they really learn through playing. We obviously do not say to the kids: “you should come and learn programming, because that will be very good for you in the future”. For them, the opportunity to create something gives a great sense of achievement. That is why we have a saying, that Logiscool is an fun-based programming school. Are some age groups more interested than others? Or is this individual, depending on the person? Gyula Csitári: Kids between eight and twelve are most eager to learn. dr Anita Breuer: They make the majority of our pupils. Gyula Csitári: Those who come to our school at that age are big enough to be persistent and willing to learn. They really enjoy it, it is a pleasure working with them. Of course, other age groups also like to come to Logiscool and learn, just everybody expresses it differently. For example, for a sixteenyear-old it is cool, but they wouldn’t say it.

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From your experience, what is the most important when it comes to teaching children? dr Anita Breuer: There are a lot of skills and qualities which are important for a child. For example, to be a team player and be able to adapt to others. To think logically, algorithmically, and if he/she makes a mistake, to know how to find it and learn from it. I am not talking about school subjects, but about skills and abilities which can be developed. Through programming, they can find it all in our school. These skills will surely be very useful for them in the future. We are living in a digital world where the number of machines and smart devices is increasing every day. They make an integral part of our lives. It is of key importance to know how these devices work. In 10-15 years those who do not follow these trends will be in great disadvantage. If we look at the Hungarian public education, it is not really digital and it doesn’t seem as it will become one in the forthcoming period. In your opinion when and how will this change? Are they going to implement it in the existing curricula, or will it be an additional part of the educational program? dr Anita Breuer: We know exactly what the situation in the Hungarian education system is, since we live here. But the reality is that many other countries which also have decades or century long educational tradition and experience are struggling with the same problem. It is hard to quickly switch from one to another. Hopefully, this will change in the future. But, while some educational programs – like for example math or language – do not change so quickly, this field changes more frequently. To apply all these changes in the educational system and to always have enough trained teachers, that is a big challenge that every country – including Hungary – will have to deal with. Nevertheless, there will always be a need for schools like ours, because even if they implement it in the curricula, it will never be so detailed and so thoroughly taught like we do it. We are very positive and openminded about the possible changes in the future. If programming becomes part of the regular school program, it will be available and liked by even more children. This generation grows up with smart


devices in their hands, and it is very important to teach them how to use it smartly. It used to be popular to attend different extracurricular activities, such as language, sport, music or dance. Is it similar nowadays with informatics? Are pupils more interested in learning it? dr Anita Breuer: Children should of course do sport, be active, and learn to play some instruments or languages. Programming is still opening up in Hungary and nowadays we are starting to have competition. But, we do not think about them as rivals, because with all of our experience we are far ahead. Nevertheless, children have limited amount of time and extracurricular activities can be too much for them. Some of them say that one and a half hour per week is not enough, they want to come more often, but we don’t want to overburden them. They can practice at home any time they want, because they have access to our online platform. They would use the computer anyway, so why not use it for something constructive. When it comes to programming, there are so many possibilities, and it is similar to language learning: the longer you practice, the better you know it. How does the system work? How can someone get into Logiscool? Is there a limit on the number of participants each year? dr Anita Breuer: Throughout the year there are three application periods: in September, in January-February when the second half of the school year begins, and for the summer camps. We also have three-day-long camps during the year, which is a practical solution for parents who work during the autumn or winter school holidays. In Hungary we already have 36 schools, with an online application possibility through our webpage. We recommend parents to choose the closest school to them. That is the best solution for both the parents and the child. Gyula Csitári: The number of pupils depends on the capacity of the school. Some have two classrooms, some six. In one classroom there are maximum twelve attendees, that is the optimal number of students for one teacher. We

have several hundred students in one school and several thousand in the whole network. dr Anita Breuer: For the past four years more than ten thousand pupils attended Logiscool. That is a quite significant number. Do you try to establish an alumni network? dr Anita Breuer: Yes, but it is a long-term goal. It is very good when someone who started in Logiscool later, as a faculty student, comes back to teach. We have young teachers, many of them are still students. That works out very well, because there is not a big age difference between the pupils and the teachers. Children tend to think that someone younger is better in programming, than for example, an elderly informatics teacher. Of course, we don’t want to generalise, but this concept works really good. We provide basic training for our teachers and later they teach according to our curricula program. They like working for us, we get very good evaluations from our employees. The good feedbacks and the positive vibe they get from children works as a great motivation mechanism for them. This is a win-win situation: the children want to come to the classes – it is not obligatory – so their motivation is better, and for the teacher is also good, because the teaching groups are smaller than in regular schools. What would be your advice to the children who are born, for example, today? What kind of school should they attend, what is worth learning? Gyula Csitári: That is a hard question. We talked about the digitalisation in education. That is a very wide area that covers various fields such as programming in school; digital education; as well as methodology. In my opinion, the most should be done in the field of methodology, it should be adapted to today’s world. The lexical knowledge is constantly increasing, and they are trying to put all those information in children’s heads between the age of six and eighteen. I think that sooner or later we will have to change this approach. It would be much more important to seek for the knowledge and the skills. When you get a job, no one expects you to know everything by heart, but to know how to solve the problem. We believe in project- and funSOCIETY

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based learning, where children are learning, but at the same time you can see how much they enjoy it and love it. In contrary to a traditional learning situation, where the teacher expects definitions. If we don’t make some changes in that, there will be a huge gap between the real world and the things taught in school. You can find everything on the internet, but you have to learn to adapt, to search for the right source, and distinguish false from true information. To think in a project or within a team, those things are unfortunately not present in most of the schools. There are some initiatives and this is only part of a bigger picture, of course. We are not a regular school, but some of the feedbacks from pupils say it would be great if we would be one. It tells us that we are heading in the right direction. dr Anita Breuer: If a child makes a mistake, or the program that they have made has a mistake, that is not a problem, you are allowed to make mistakes. We will find and solve the problem. There is also a sense of achievement and happiness when we find and correct it. Gyula Csitári: We do not grade the children for being able to solve some test in 20 or something minutes. That is nonsense. It is ridiculous to give marks for being able, or not being able to concentrate in that particular time, neither of us are machines. We find the cause of the mistake and we move on. dr Anita Breuer: When parents search for a school for their child, for them it is also very important that the teacher is good and focused on the pupils. Gyula Csitári: We have a nice example for this: in the beginning, we had six elementary school teachers who attended Logiscool for 2-3 months, after which they programmed the digital tasks for the classes. They made very playful math and language exercises and the kids loved it. Those where interactive tests without paper and pen, with for example whistle blowing after giving the right answer. That is called gamification, to make a game out of something that you are obliged to do, to make a challenge out of a test. We are making challenges now, and we can call it exams or simply tasks waiting to be solved. It is a thin line between the two, but the effect is very different. In order to always be one step forward, 36

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we are also engaging specialists from the field of game design. What are Logiscool’s plans regarding the future? dr Anita Breuer: We see that Hungary is very Budapest oriented, but for us the business possibilities in the capital are almost “full”. We have quite a lot of schools in Hungary, in total 36, and with the other seven countries we have 50 schools at the moment. In the forthcoming period, we want to expand internationally. The world is at our feet, and we have a great product to offer. The brand of the company is innovation. We are constantly evolving and developing our methodology, our concept and web platforms. This is an ongoing process. We are heading forward. We have a lot of plans, far more than we can currently accomplish, especially regarding the development. Can you imagine, there is a lack in developers within the Hungarian labour market. That affects us too. We are teaching and have taught in total more than 12 thousand children. Why not teach over a million around the world? We have the knowledge and equipment for that. We would like to become a Hungarian success story. Until now there hasn’t been a Hungarian, internationally successful franchise system, and we want to be become one. Thank you for this interview. We wish you all the best in your future endeavours.

The interview was conducted by Veronika AntallHorváth and Enikő Jancsek on 17 November 2017


SOUTH KOREA: CONNECTING EVERYTHING Ágnes Surján South Korea is a country where you are greeted by guide robots at the airport, can buy your snacks in cashier-less convenient stores, stream movies in the subway and also order delivery food to the park through mobile applications. South Korea, home of the world’s fastest internet, also possesses a population where more than 90% of the population uses the internet. It is simply a part of the culture to communicate with others using the cute emoticons of KakaoTalk, a local messaging application used by 93% of Korean smartphone users. The digitalisation of Korea is a growing part of everyday life and Koreans do not plan to slow this process down. In recent decades, South Korea has transformed into an economic heavyweight and world leader in information and communication technology by systematically focusing its resources on research and development. While not rich in natural resources and limited in agricultural and manufacturing capacity, South Korea has found it essential to promote technology and innovation to be globally competitive. Young technologists, educated overseas, return to South Korea with a sense of how to enter overseas markets, and construct products for not just Korean consumers. Furthermore, there is a growing international interest in investing in South Korean companies with local smaller businesses and entrepreneurs on the rise, challenging the large family-controlled corporate groups, the chaebols. The South Korean government has been on the forefront of the development of advanced e-government services and has recorded high levels of digitalisation since the 1960s. The government has focused national efforts on digitalisation as a presidential agenda item, and invested 1% of the national budget in the cause. The Korean e-government now offers a public portal service, called “Minwon24”, where Korean people can reach public services 24/7. It also offers a cloud-based business process system

which helps civil servants communicate and work together across organizational boundaries. Furthermore, the Korean e-government system offers an immigration e-clearance system, a postal logistics information system, an e-tax administration system, a national disaster management information system, a business process management system for government, an e-patent administration system, and the list goes on. With the emerging hyperconnectivity revolution, the Korean government is planning to further develop its e-government services by focusing on communication services using mobile devices and platforms, interconnection and integration. To promote sustainability and environmentalfriendly practices, Songdo International Business District (Songdo IBD) was built from the ground up; 65 kilometres southwest of Seoul, it is connected to Incheon International Airport by a highway bridge. Songdo IBD was designed to be a smart city. Computers are built into the buildings and streets, and sensors are constantly gathering information of the energy use and traffic flow. Collected information is then converted into alerts informing citizens and notifying authorities. Lighting, heating, air conditioning and more can all be controlled by the push of a button in homes. Drinkable water is not wasted in showers and toilets. Garbage is disposed or recycled through the pneumatic waste disposal system, where instead of garbage cans on the streets, garbage transported through pipes which suck the garbage underground. Universities are also joining the digitalisation, making campus life easier for both students and professors. At prestigious universities like Yonsei University, mobile applications make campus life more convenient by managing and providing all the information that are created within the campus. Through the official university application, students may access their personal calendar with not only information about all their classes, but also listings for all the academic and cultural events happening SOCIETY

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on campus. Also, by entering the classrooms, student attendance gets registered by sensors scanning students’ smartphones, which keep track of students being late or missing class, therefore making professors’ work easier. The library is also connected to this system, thereby speeding up the checkout/return process and making it easier to reserve seats in study rooms. Students can check the daily menu and the availability of seats in student cafeterias, and the schedule of the campus shuttle bus and online bus ticket reservation are also features of this app. Additionally, professors can easily record and share their lectures, and also outside online lectures are available through the system too. An anti-plagiarism system checks all uploaded works both in English and Korean. Furthermore, there is an emergency service system on the whole campus, and people can alert the security team through the application if something dangerous happens, therefore making it easier to avoid getting hurt or being attacked. Many other parts of everyday life are also already digitalised in South Korea. Transportation is one of them. The use of public transportation and taxi services is made easy through the T-money system: people can charge their T-money card and take the subway, buses, and taxis and also even pay for goods in convenience stores with the same, one card. There are applications with up to date information about the subway and bus system, which contain route planning functions which tell people through which door to exit the subway for a faster transfer. Furthermore, there are locationbased taxi booking applications, where people can share their location, choose the destination and the closest taxi will pick them up. Travelling longer distances is also becoming very easy in South Korea: there is an official application and system for booking bus tickets. People can book a ticket, pay for it through the application, and be provided with a barcode they can use when they are taking the bus, therefore eliminating the need to arrive at the station earlier, to stand in lines or even to print tickets. In South Korea everything is about convenience, efficiency and the “palli palli” (hurry hurry) attitude to everything. No one wants to waste time, stand in lines or interact too much to get stuff done. That 38

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is probably the reason why things like cashier-less stores and internet-only banks are on the rise in the country. The local supermarket chain opened cashier-less stores recently, where customers, after registering, can enter the store using a card, pick up what they need and pay at self-service kiosks by scanning the bar codes of their items. These kiosks also automatically reject products that are past their sell-by dates. Internet-only banks like K Bank and Kakao Bank are gaining popularity, since users can open an account very easily with only a phone number and an ID card, without having to deal with outdated security programs that many other online payment sites may require. With no need to visit offline branches, these banks can function with a minimum number of employees, further saving the cost of banking services. South Koreans are already avid consumers of digital media; mobile devices are part of their everyday life. In the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ era, Internet of Things (IoT) services are being introduced in South Korea too. The country’s three major telecom companies have been developing and commercializing IoT services in cooperation with electronics manufacturers. Life in South Korea is going through major changes. An example – people are now living in smart homes too, where all devices are connected and people can remote control not only a wide range of home appliances, but also door-locks, gas valves, lighting, electric controllers, etc. Also, advanced health care systems provide smart health care and wellness services, and IoT gadgets keep track of their users’ well-being. Meanwhile, cities are getting smarter as well. While paying more attention to taking care of the environment via energy, water and waste managing systems, cities are also providing a safer life for citizens by improved security and traffic systems. Management, control, and monitoring systems are all being reformed and interconnected with agriculture and manufacturing too. Within a conversation about digitalisation, information and communication technology, South Korea cannot be omitted. Though a small country of only 50 million people, the South Korean mentality, work ethic, knowledge and professionalism has made them leaders in digitalisation and smart technology in only a few decades.


Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea SOCIETY

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K AK AO

“CONNECTING

EVERY TH ING”

supermarket. Recently, Kakao has teamed up with taxi companies, and now it offers a location-based booking service. Users can provide their current location,

choose their destination, and the closest taxi will pick

them up. This function also provides information about

the taxi and the driver and further safety features. Kakao has more navigation-related features too: applications for the subway and the bus systems, a navigation and map application, and even a service for booking drivers. KakaoStory is a picture-sharing platform, where users can see other users’ everyday stories. Kakao Cheese is

a built-in camera function with various features. Melon,

one of the biggest music streaming applications in the country is also a part of Kakao. All these features are linked to a person’s Kakao Account so as to provide

a more personalized experience. Furthermore, Kakao

introduced KakaoBank, a digital-only bank where users can open an account with their mobile phone number

and ID card, which avoids having to visit a conventional

bank branch. Also existing is KakaoPay, where users can transfer and receive money directly from KakaoTalk to their account. Moreover, since the KakaoAccount is

linked to a mobile phone number, registering anywhere

with one’s number means that they can get personalized information of different services: from sending packages The opening page of the app KakaoTalk

Launched in 2010, KakaoTalk is a free online instant

messaging mobile application. Within the app users can

share calls, texts, pictures, videos, voice messages, location, contacts and much more. But why is this particular application important in the discourse of

digitalisation in South Korea and why do more than

90% of South Korean smartphone owners use it? Kakao began as a messenger application, but quickly transformed into a platform connecting many different

features, services, third party content and other apps. Users can play different online games, read the latest

news, buy cute emoticons for chatting, and even follow bigger companies so as to receive their latest offers and sales through the plus friend function. Kakao also

has made sending gifts to friends much easier. From

various chain cafes to all kinds of different shops, people can choose the item they like and just click on the person from their friends list to send a gift coupon

to them. Furthermore, through Kakao, users can order

food delivery from different restaurants and even get groceries delivered to their homes from a local chain 40

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through the post, booking tickets online, to collecting points and coupons in shops. Users can get alerts and

an incredible amount of information through KakaoTalk.

Kakao Friends are the official characters of Kakao; they

all have names and backstories, and shops, cafes and even a museum are dedicated to them. Since KakaoTalk

is part of the Korean culture, these emoticons are also part of everyone’s daily life. They are not only in every chatroom, but also on clothing, accessories, household items and even transportation and bank cards. Kakao is

an application that connects almost everything in Korea,

making everyday life more convenient and comfortable. The features mentioned above are just a short list of

what Kakao has to offer, possessing many more services, such as Kakao Mini the AI speaker, the list of services Kakao provides to users just keeps growing every year.


TALENT MANAGEMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE Eszter Zborai

The practice of talent management, which covers different tools and methods in discovering and developing talented students, has a long history worldwide and in Hungary particularly, due to the care teachers have given to gifted children ever since the establishment of the school system. Of course, the efficiency of this area is closely dependent on the general quality of education, and the development of education has been at the heart of pedagogical and psychological research recently. Educational systems, based on old principles and goals, are already in need of reforming, not to mention the challenges and opportunities schools, including the area of talent management, should meet because of digital development. In this article, we try to address these challenges and give an overview about the general environment for talent management in Hungary. But what do we mean by talent? Earlier, a number of theories were created by specialists and psychologists to rank children according to their mental abilities. Students with high scores according to these scales share general characteristics like a desire for knowledge, intense concentration, excellent memory and quick problem solving. This definition covers a kind of general talent and intelligence, which, as the models developed, put a larger focus on genetic determinants and environmental factors as well. At the same time, it is well-known that everybody possesses some talent that is worth exploring within the general educational curriculum, which should also help to unfold it. For example, artistic talent is understood in a specific field of activity, and these special skills are usually nurtured most effectively in art schools and in special classes. One of the most exciting question in many aspects is how will education and talent management be affected in the technology-based society? Experts agree that digital devices provide a great deal of opportunity, but their inappropriate

use can counterwork its benefits. Digitally-adapted pedagogy increases the student’s motivation and thus promotes effective learning. It is very important, that through different digital devices (tablets, and smartphones), students learn about the use of the internet and develop competences which are necessary for succeeding in the future. The biggest challenge here is to make students use the internet actively, not passively, and show them how they can transform the virtual world for themselves and become content creators. At the same time, it is also important that children should be protected from digital danger and violation. Foreign experts and influencers alike agree that the most important guiding principles of the digital education should be the following: make learning interesting, respect individual talents and promote development. As Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin and a number of educational experts noted, today’s educational system was created during the industrial age via a method to drive efficient factory work and consumption, and consequently fuel the engine of economy. In the new digital world, however, people will succeed at the workplace with skills like adaptation, creativity and the “think out of the box” attitude. The main question is: how have schools worked so far and how should they work in the future? Experts often criticize the conservativism of educational systems, their fear of digital devices, and the lack of teacher motivation and entertaining education. The first place in the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test was achieved by Estonia in 2017 (after long years of Finland’s reign), where this result was a consequence of a continuous 10-year long development in education. In 2015, thanks to the E-stonia program, the entire education system was transferred to an electronic platform. This is in part due to the fact that in recent years Estonians have focused much of their EU funds on education, and the teaching profession has SOCIETY

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gained much more respect. Since the invention of the e-platform, teachers, students and parents can exchange homework on internet platforms, agree on meetings or give feedback on the tasks more efficiently. Though the system is not perfect yet, it is clear that years of consistent work has paid off and Estonian education can meet the challenges of the digital world. These measures have created an educational environment in Estonia that also promotes talent development. In terms of talent management methodology, enrichment is one of the most commonly used methods in European countries, meaning that talented students can get extra tasks (lesson differentiation), or may deepen their knowledge in the specific subject with study groups. Depending on teacher’s capacity, these methods are widely used in Hungarian schools as well. At the same time, individual problem-solving and small group projects are still not used in Hungarian education, and the school system must make a big leap in this area. In more developed countries it is known that small group tasks based on cooperative learning and individual project work develop creativity and determination. The positive impacts of social facilitation, multi-faceted problem-solving, and debates are all advancing talents. However, these 42

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methods are typically missing in a classroom’s frontal education. Another common method is acceleration, which means that one or more years are missed out in school, and the talents learn in higher classes than the others of the same age. In Hungary, this method is used very rarely, and only in private schools, although it is a common practice outside of Hungary for talent management. Unfortunately, the rigid system prevents this acceleration and hinders the advancement of exceptional talents. At the same time, in the middle and higher education, we are among Europe’s top players in the field of national and international study competitions, as there is an extremely active and diverse competition life in the country. In the case of art education, special classes for outstanding talents are the main tools of talent management. Moreover, technological development offers a wide range of new opportunities that can be effectively used for the digital age’s talent management. Based on the latest research, two new methods will be implemented: individual learning with digital devices and individual instruction (mentoring) methods that can be effectively combined with the above mentioned talent management methods. Today’s talent situation in Hungary and abroad are linked at several points. The European Council of High Ability (ECHA) was founded in 1987 as a network to exchange information and bring people together with research and practice experience with talented people. In 2012, Péter Csermely, a professor at Semmelweis University, who has been successfully studying networks and talent support, was appointed president of ECHA, while he also chaired the National Talent Council in Hungary, founded in 2012. This organization has built up the Hungarian Talent Support Network model, with more than one thousand talent points in the country, which are dedicated places for the special education of talented students. The Hungarian Talent Support network aims to coordinate and help these talent points (mainly public schools) with information, professional trainings and books. These talent points create an ideal environment


ONLINE EDUCATION

everyone who wants to learn. In 2016 all MOOC

Online education is the new reality of today. Defined

most online education is administered, had a total of

can now learn using their home computers. One

6859 courses in total. These numbers keep growing

as internet-based educational instruction, students

can study online for just a course or even complete a whole online degree program. This education can

be synchronous, when instructors and students meet in real time, or asynchronous, when they do not.

Online education maximises flexibility for students, allowing them to learn at their own pace. Students can

now adapt their education to whatever specific career,

familial, geographical, or development challenges

they face. Additionally, one can listen to stand-alone

lectures from prestigious universities or notable professors, simply for the sake of knowledge. Online learning is the greatest revolution in contemporary

education by delivering more opportunities for

and conditions for teachers to support talents through efficient methods and enrichment tools. In AJKC’s talent management programs, we try to create an environment for participating students where they can work and learn in a collaborative, creative way. Our programs for high school students include summer camps, trainings for career orientation, company visits and useful activities to do the mandatory voluntary service. We work with a new kind of educational approach, which is based on sharing opinions, common learning, experience and cooperation. Our intern positions, open to university students, give an insight into the life of a think tank, and students can make a productive contribution to the research centre’s work. By recognizing the challenges in the education’s situation and the urgent need to solve shortage in the labor market, like the ever growing need for computer programming experts, many domestic organizations and companies have been involved with digital talent management. Logiscool has integrated coding into school activities, and now already teache programming for children between 6-18 years in 7 countries. Another great example is Skool, a program of the Technology Education Foundation, which offers technological classes for girls between 8-18 years. Also the primary

(massive open online course) sites, through which

58 million students at more than 700 universities and too! Popular providers of these MOOCs include

Coursera, FutureLearn, Lynda.com or TedX. These

platforms include a variety of different lectures from

some of the most elite universities in the world, such

as Stanford University, Princeton University, King’s College London and even École Polytechnique.

Furthermore, different online conferences, i.e. TED Talks, Google Talks or Big Think, must be also mentioned. Adding even more content, they offer free

lectures across a litany of topics. These lectures aim

to bring news of certain topics to a larger audience

in an entertaining and enlightening way featuring experts of the given field.

schools of Budapest School, founded by one of the owners of the most successful start-up in Hungary, Prezi, where elementary students are preparing with a new kind of student and teacher-centered approach for a happy life. Another Prezi-founded platform, Bridge Budapest, offers a program for college students and recent graduates which connects them with internship opportunities at the world’s best companies. Additionally, Bridge Budapest provides training specifically pass on an entrepreneurial mindset to children. A technology-based internet society changes the way expertise will be disseminated: through online training, all knowledge becomes available, the era of traditional top universities expires, and more and more professions will be replaced by robot work. Successful professions will be replaced by creative ones where it will not be enough to be are smart and talented – creativity and adaptation will be also necessary. It is no longer the collection of good test results which matter, but the ability to connect and adapt, which means that should also foster these skills in the future.

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DEPENDENCY OR SOCIAL EXPECTATION? Letícia Csordás

SOCIAL MEDIA HAS BECOME AN INDISPENSABLE PART OF OUR LIVES, LIVES WHICH ARE NOW

UNIMAGINABLE WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA. BUT HOW DID THIS COME TO BE? WHEN DID THIS PHENOMENON OCCURE AND WHEN DID WE

BECOME SO ADDICTED TO SOCIAL MEDIA? WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITALISATION, IS SOCIAL MEDIA MORE A SOCIAL EXPECTATION OR A DEPENDENCY?

The first social media site was developed by Cornell University students Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman. Launched on April 1st, 1995 and called theglobe.com, the site brought people together based on interests and gave them forums where they could post. While not many people used the internet during this period, the page miraculously had 44 000 visitors in the first month. The site became so successful, that in 1997, an investment company, Dancing Bear Investments, invested millions of dollars in theglobe.com, with which it became astonishingly profitable. The growing popularity of the internet also helped. The followers and users of the page grew continuously, and in 1998 the company’s shares were first

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offered and publicly traded. Their success even set a record in the rise of the daily USD rate. In 1997 another site, SixDegrees.com was established, which not only dealt with different interests, but also created a social net, which aimed to map user’s acquaintances and relations. The users could send messages and posts to each other, and also view their contact’s relations. Ultimately SixDegrees.com laid the foundation for today’s social media sites, and was followed by numerous successful sites, such as Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and XING. On August 1st, 2003, Myspace was established, where users could create their own, interactive, personal sites. Via a user’s personal site, one could send messages, blog, in contact with old classmates, meet new people, find love, and even share pictures, videos and music with friends. This was a huge step forward compared to its predecessors, theglobe.com and the SixDegrees. com. Myspace had the most registered profiles in 2005, compared to other social media sites, and was the most frequented page in 2006. Despite a restriction on the registration of children, as Myspace grew, the page realized they needed


to pay more attention to data security and the protection of minors from harassment. The founders of the site, with the help of public authorities, created a data base of persons convicted of sexual harassment and crime, and began checking and deleting these peoples’ profiles. Despite these security innovations, the success of Myspace didn not continue for long, as from 2008 the page started to drastically lose membership. Meanwhile, other social sites with new developments and applications improved the user experience began to grow. One of these sites was Facebook. BUT WHAT HAPPENED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 2000S IN HUNGARY?

Hungarian Zsolt Várady founded the social media site Who is Who, i.e. Wiw, which began operation on April 14th, 2002. Social media sites in Hungary were developed more than one and a half years before they were in the United States of America. The outset of these sites was not joyous, since the Hungarian possibilities were very limited. Additionally, after founding a site, it was hard to find investors and individuals who could help further in operations and development to account for the growing number of users. With the passing of the years and the growth of internet users, the number of registrations also grew and the site found an investor. Based on a vast amount of feedback and suggestion, the Hungarian social site rebranded itself in 2005 under the new name iWiW and introduced new functions. For a long time, it seemed as if there would be no other social page either international or national, that could usurp the leading role of iWiW in Hungary. Finally, in 2010, registered users started leaving the site for the more innovative and function-rich Facebook. What could Facebook know, in order to lure people away from successful sites? Globally, there is a huge community, counting more than two billion active users. Nowadays Facebook, a decisive influence in society, allows anyone to organise events, such as political resistances, protests or even hypothetical revolution, not only locally, but globally too. For example: the demonstration against internet taxes in Hungary, in 2014 or the worldwide #metoo campaign, in 2017. As social sites’ information flow has

accelerated, people living in the far corners of the Earth can now establish contact and look into each other’s lives on economic, social, political and cultural levels. Global mass communication has evolved. It is not a coincidence then that some countries block Facebook, or develop their own social site, like China, Russia or the postsoviet states. TO WHAT EXTENT DOES SOCIAL MEDIA, FACEBOOK MOSTLY, FORM OR CONTROL OUR LIVES?

As the effect of digitalisation increases and smart phone use grows via the use of an everincreasing range of applications and functions, the information flowing towards us demands a more active usage of social media platforms. We developed a feeling of not wanting to miss anyone or anything. We find it most pressing to start scrolling first thing in the morning and end our days before going to sleep with the same routine, so as to know what happened to whom, what they ate, what they saw or which concert they are interested in. Our lives are an open book for everyone and our personal lives cease to exist, because social media has such an effect on it. We started corresponding to the demands of the invisible masses and wish to present ourselves as better than everybody else, therefore masking the reality with the retouched and the filtered, in an attempt to be

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To like or not to like

seen as more beautiful or cooler, in hopes that society might just accept us slightly easier. WHAT TRIGGERS THIS IN US? First of all, there exists a developed perception that someone who is not present on social media does not exist. So, we want be seen, to show our existence, thus we are active ourselves and search the contents of our news feeds constantly and check our friends’ activities. While mentally this gives us a short term sense of happiness, it is followed by a feeling of emptiness. If we don’t receive enough feedback to our shared content, we feel invisible, and generate new content, which we share. Thus a dependency forms in order to show ourselves active. On the other hand, all of this is due to the like button introduced by Facebook earlier, with which our friends can express their liking to our posts and our shared content. The will/wish to receive likes creates a race, where we are always striving to match up/measure up, even with our own friends. This expression of opinion gained four new functions recently and we can now communicate our emotional status on a given topic more accurately too. 46

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WE HEAR IT MORE AND MORE OFTEN, THAT ONLINE COMMUNICATION, SOCIAL MEDIA MOSTLY, AFFECTS JUVENILES THE MOST, ESPECIALLY GENERATION Z. HOW DOES THIS TREND AFFECT THEIR PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT AND HOW WILL THIS AFFECT THEM AND SOCIETY IN THE FUTURE? Today information dumping is an increasingly bigger problem, which reaches us via different communications channels and significantly forms content consumption habits for multiple agegroups. While the Baby Boomer generation (50-69 year olds) prefers traditional platforms (TV, radio), Generation X (36-49 year olds) and Generation Y (20-35 year olds) ranks online media higher. Generation Z (6-19 year olds) exclusively uses online media, mostly are social sites and the accompanying chat programs. For them this is the most natural method to keep in contact with the world. Therefore, this is not surprising, as they were born into this world, and cannot compare. Additionally, they often don’t notice the dangers lurking in the online world, and the related consequences. They don’t consider that they are unprotected on this channel, and easily give out


Z generation in 2018

personal data and information that anybody can misuse. The juveniles this age tend to act and make decisions rashly and on an emotional basis, so one must pay more attention to them and the effect of the world of social media has on them. With the development of digitalisation, Generation Z quickly discovered which social sites satisfies which needs. Among these, Facebook is not present, replaced with Instagram and Snapchat, or popular messaging applications such as Messenger or Viber. Thanks to the development of digital communication, they can communicate quickly and easily with friends. It is important though, that the slang spread on the internet doesn’t turn into their mother tongue and everyday speech, which could affect them in a negative way during their future academic and professional careers. However, the use of picture sharing applications can boost the development and creativity of Generation Z in large ways, as they sometimes spend hours editing pictures or videos, to show the perfect image of themselves. This is also important in discovering their own personality and becoming a more open person, which of course has its negative sides also.

Through perfect pictures they show such an idealised, unreal picture of themselves, which doesn’t reflect reality. Among seemingly more extroverted individuals, antisocial tendencies can grow stronger, along with depression and its symptoms, until eventually a false self-image might develop. Juveniles live every minute of their days on social sites, and such a motion-poor lifestyle might increase the chance of struggling with not only to physical, but mental sicknesses as well. All in all, with the development of the digital age and the appearance of online media, social media has many disadvantages and advantages. That is why it is important to learn to use social media thoughtfully, while not becoming dependent. The digital space has made the growth of self-expression more possible, but raises new questions. To what extent do we demand for social media? Is our use of these products a result of its newness and our curiosity? Just how much does social media lead us and form our everyday lives?

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THE SCOURGES OF PROGRESS – IS SOCIAL MEDIA LEADING US IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION? Roland Menyes

The development of the social media industry has set processes in motion which are upending the way we think, restructuring the pattern of our relationships, and last but not least exercising a significant influence on our political choices. Does anybody have any idea how all this will end? If we take into consideration the inextricably linked and too-quickly unfolding processes, the answer is clearly no. There is, however, a continuouslygrowing group comprised – first of all – former employees of leading high-tech giant enterprises like Google, Apple and Facebook. They know very well what they are talking about: many of them had an instrumental role in creating the gadgets, apps and mechanisms that we use on a day-to-day basis, and may not be able to imagine our life without.

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Even though there have been research findings in circulation for some time regarding the harmful psychological and social effects of the use of mobile phones and social media sites, they went mainly unnoticed by the public. This may easily change, however, after the widely publicized recent “coming out” of two high-tech heavyweights, who shed light on the unethical and extremely dangerous practices applied throughout the industry. Within a short period of time, Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of user growth at Facebook, as well as Sean Parker, the ex-president of the company felt necessary to express their honest regret over having contributed to the emergence of many undesired phenomena that threaten to destroy “the social fabric of how society works”


(Palihapitiya). Both admitted that they were part of a system which, irrespective of well-known sideeffects, aims to hijack the attention of the users via the “exploitation of human vulnerability” (Parker). As internet connection became available in most parts of the world through the swift proliferation of smartphones and the comparably fast expansion of the necessary infrastructure, a relentlessly growing share of the world populace came to live in an environment which is dominated by “short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops” (Palihapitiya). The consequences are far-reaching and just partly understood. What we know, however, from tech experts as well as from scientific results, is more than enough to give us the shivers and make us apprehensive every time we feel an irresistible wish to touch, swipe or tap a screen. For instance, have you ever considered how often you interact with your phone? If you have, it is almost certain that you made a huge underestimation. One recent study shows that an average user touches its faithful little companion much more than two thousand times a day and spends two and a half hours engaging in pertinent activities. The sheer numbers themselves suggest the formation of addictive behavioural patterns. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that our brain functions show registrable changes too. As new triggers can arrive at any time – whether in the form of red icons or well-known tones – and we are prone to do various tasks simultaneously, continuous partial attention has become more like a norm. We have to pay the price for it, though: an increasing number of people struggle with focus-deficiency, damaged cognitive capacity, sleeplessness and other relevant difficulties which have a negative impact on their personal and social wellbeing. Yet, before we start to accuse the diamantes of the Silicon Valley of having had evil intentions right from the beginning, it is worthwhile to understand how a highly competitive business environment shaped their incentives. During the early boom of the sector, their pure survival depended on reaching more user gaining more of their time and gathering further information in order to make their project profitable one day. On the one hand, this pressure was advantageous

for customers because it led to the emergence of never seen opportunities in information exchange and relationship management facilitating social interaction. However, business considerations, especially regarding the interests of the advertising industry, encouraged the employment of new practices which kept users hooked in subtle ways. Possibly, the most appalling trait of this milieu was how easily moral concerns were leapt over on every level of the hierarchy if necessity dictated. It seems decision makers were just too driven by profit, whilst developers felt pure enthusiasm to have the chance to solve brand new and hardto-crackle problems. Certainly, the companies which went on to grow at an astonishing speed, and therefore did not have enough time to adapt to the changes they directly or indirectly effectuated, were not in an easy situation. The unfolding network effect allowed for a fast transformation of quantity into quality and gave rise to various emergent phenomena which few were able to foresee. Understandably, under such circumstances vague concepts of responsibility developed. This is the reason why the “We did not know/We should not know…” mantra is so eagerly repeated today and sounds – on the opposite side – quite believable. Surely, on a good day such reasoning could slightly exonerate the implicated participants, but the appealing logic behind it proves to be, unfortunately, rather flawed. According to the information coming from the “dropouts”, nobody can be accused of having been entirely unconscious about the possible effects of their work. Psychological knowledge was expediently abused in a systematic way to create bigger user time coverage and to achieve better market penetration. Developers went as far as working on solutions which expediently exploited mood swings, fulfilled social affirmation needs and created a constant longing for more. The fact that the impressive results the branch has keenly boasted about in the last decade were attained partly at the expense of the users does not seem to have disturbed anybody that much – at least for a while. Nonetheless, as in time the consequences have become more visible even in their own life, many started an honest soul-searching and SOCIETY

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began to express their concerns about the ethical slippery slope the industry was walking on. Beside the already mentioned possible psychological harms, they also drew attention to other unsettling phenomena which affect society as a whole. According to their argumentation, due to the power accumulation of social media service providers, our freedom of choice is gradually shrinking. We are living to an increasing extent in virtual opinion chambers where only similar views are exchanged and – consequently – reinforced. Obviously, this process builds walls between groups and makes understanding each other as well as cooperation difficult. As we are also changing our preferences from fact-based to emotionally filled, and often unsubstantiated information, the fundaments of a new kind of “divide et impera” are already laid. In 2013, Tristan Harris, a former Google-employee, who could not suppress his apprehensions any further, wrote a widely acclaimed memo about the perils of wide-spread manipulating technics, and called for the protection of the user’s private sphere. Even though he was rewarded and promoted for sharing his insights with his bosses and co-workers, after having failed to see attitudes change, he left Google and turned into a vocal critic of any distractive and intrusive method. Harris does not think that tech companies intentionally designed their product to generate addiction. Rather, they just experimented and found effective ways to capture people’s attention by accident. All this happened mainly in response to a growing pressure from the advertising economy where thoroughly elaborated means are put at the disposal of those ready to pay enough. Not surprisingly, accumulated and analysed data on behavioural patterns are also sold at a high price. As expected in a globalized world, the purchaser, who needs a leverage of persuasion to promote its agenda, can be virtually anyone. Considering the role our gadgets play today in shaping our worldview, we do not have to think too much to recognize the significance of such trades. We really do not have to, because a frightening brand new world is unfolding before our own eyes. Democracy, for example, makes less and less sense. It is enough to refer to some surprising or simply appalling political earthquakes from the recent past, like Brexit or the election of 50

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Donald Trump. With regards to the aforementioned, such events do not appear to be accidental or inexplicable anymore. The question is, therefore, whether we are willing to suffer the consequences of the sweeping dynamism of the “attention economy” or we are ready to undertake something to avert a fullfledged invasion of apps and dings which threatens to consume our private sphere and turn democracy into travesty. Time works against us.


FAKE NEWS STRIKES OR THE PERIL OF LIES Ildikó Voller-Szenci

“False and sometimes sensationalist information presented as a fact and published and spread on the internet.” Collins Dictionary Since President Trump reintroduced the expression of fake news during his election campaign in 2016, the rarely used term with origins back in the 19th century suddenly received a hot spot in everyday discussions, while also becoming the word of the year in 2017, according to Collins Dictionary. It is not surprising that as there is no universally accepted concept of truth, there is also no universal definition of fake news, as this term has been used in various contexts. Fake news appears in all types and forms in different communication channels from printed versions to broadcasted or digital ones. It can be an article, but also just a simple tweet. The most important characteristic of fake news is that it is either completely not true, partially true, or distorted. Researchers try to define fake news by reaching out to the literature of misinformation and

disinformation. While in many papers scholars use these two terms as synonyms, I am following Bernd Carsten Stahl (2006) who pointed out that while both misinformation and disinformation mean wrong or misleading information, disinformation is a wilful act, i.e. someone deliberately disseminates false information. Therefore, as Jürgen Habermas (1981) pointed out, spreading disinformation means that there is an intentional “strategy” behind the act. The European Commission uses disinformation (campaigns) and fake news not as synonyms, but actually as two different forms of present day hybrid warfare. However, the Commission is also uncertain the exact definition of fake news and about its possible consequences, therefore, on 13 November 2017, it launched a public consultation and at the same time it set up a High Level Expert Group to gather ideas on how to tackle this phenomenon. The result of the public and high level discussion shall be available in the spring of 2018. It should be noted that in the public call the European Commission has already narrowed down the scope of understanding of fake news, as SOCIETY

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it states that we should draw “a distinction between false information amounting to illegal content under EU or national laws e.g. incitement to hatred, violence or terrorism, defamation, etc., and false information falling outside the scope of such laws, and therefore [considered] not to be illegal”. During a recent conference, American journalist and writer, Fareed Zakaria said that “There’s a great danger that we are entering a world enabled by all these technologies that we love (…) technologies that make no real distinction between truth and falsehood. In fact, it is easier for falsehood to go viral than a truth, because what virality is really dependent on is the sensational nature of the news. And, by definition, a lie is more sensational than the truth.” He added that “the problem [of fake news] is now compounded by technology and the seemingly neutral nature of these platforms. I think we have a big task ahead of us – to find a hierarchy of knowledge. There has to be a way in which someone can distinguish between something that is actually factual and not.” (2017) IS FAKE NEWS PART OF THE 21ST CENTURY PROPAGANDA? Propaganda, originating back to the 17th century, was a daily debated topic between World War I and World War II. Even after World War II scholars like Edgar H. Henderson (1943) had a hard time to define what propaganda really meant, as it was such a “highly subjective and elusive phenomenon.” At that time, scholars considered propaganda as part of the research of (mass) persuasion: the study of attitudes within (mass) communication. However, not only the definition of propaganda was often debated, but also the ethical nature of the dissemination of propaganda met fierce discussions. As Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell (2006) wrote: “in the early 1920s, the experts who were involved in the development of wartime propaganda began to have second thoughts about their manipulation of the public. Some of them experienced guilt over the lies and deceptions that they had helped to spread.” People working for the propaganda industry were aware of their power through means of communication, especially at times when 52

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governments had a monopoly over the sources of communication, so they could systematically attempt to shape the form of perception and manipulate public opinion. As Sheryl Tuttle Ross (2002) wrote, propaganda involves the intention to persuade the critical mass with “an epistemically defective message.” When fake news is intentionally created to mislead, manipulate, and to cause harm, then fake news is part of the most politically or business motivated propaganda industry of our century. Although we are all aware of the fact that there is an immense amount of false information on the internet, naming them part of a propaganda campaign would be an exaggeration. According to HKS scholar, Claire Wardle (2017), we should call a fake news as part of a propaganda only when it has a misleading, imposter, manipulated or fabricated content or a false context.

RELEVANT STAKEHOLDERS – THE FAKE NEWS INDUSTRY It is probably not an overstatement when we say that everybody is involved in the fake news industry: governments, political leaders, companies and individuals from both side of the Atlantic. One of the most intense mass fabrication of fake news happened during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow (2017) conducted a detailed research after the presidential election and wrote about the importance of social media as a source of political information and news in the U.S. Based on the data, social media accounted for a much larger share of the traffic of fake news sites than mainstream


news sites. However, it is a comforting fact that the Americans trust information accessed through social media less compared to other sources. According the study, only 14% of American adults regard social media as their most important source of election news. Allcott and Gentzkow also found out that although there was a specific concern about the effect of fake news on the outcome of the presidential elections, processed data evinced that they had only a relatively insignificant effect on the results. The creation of fake news is rather often related to Russia and the Russian government per se. As Mark R. Jacobson, a professor at Georgetown University and former Pentagon adviser, said at a congressional hearing on “Bolstering the Government’s Cybersecurity” on 14 November 2017, “(…) fingerprints of Russian government sponsored disinformation campaigns have been left on the Russian parliamentary election of 2011 and during the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, and there is some evidence of a Russian hand during the debate over Brexit.” He assumed that besides Russian engagement in U.S. based social media outlets, the Chinese also try to influence operations via the same platforms. One of the most successful fake news industry operates in Macedonia. In an investigative reportage in 2016 BBC revealed the story of Veles, a small town, where a dozen people became wealthy while exploiting the “digital gold rush.” In a country where the average salaries are about 350 EUR per month, young men – many of them still under 18 – can easily earn a fortune. As the rather poor village greatly prospers from this business, the people of Veles collectively do not consider the participation in the fake news industry a sin, rather they are proud of their endeavour. Lately CNN filmed a documentary in Veles again. Today fake news makers say they earn 2500 USD per day. Until there will be no legal consequences, young men do their best to keep their business sustainable. STOP FAKE NEWS! The creation and spreading of fake news are an extraterritorial phenomenon, therefore its widespread footprints can be found worldwide.

Certainly, all the affected countries (including China and Russia, too) are conducting investigations on different levels. In parallel with the help of the research community, state legislators are trying the find the best solutions to define what can be considered a fake news and penalize their creation and dissemination. French President Emmanuel Macron in his new year’s speech stepped up against fake news, declaring that he will introduce a law to ban it on the internet. Astoundingly, he plans to implement this ban only for the times of election campaigns, arguing that especially during elections, democracy has to be protected. The French legislators will oblige content managers to make their sponsored content on websites more transparent, subsequently citizens will have the right to know who finances the content and with how much money. Moreover, content sponsorship will be maximized. Long before the French, the German legislators under the leadership of justice minister, Heiko Maas have drafted a law targeting the social media platforms. The reason for this was the frustration of the German government over certain social media content which was considered racist and xenophobic. According to the “Facebook Law, ” which was finally approved on 30 June 2017, any illegal content, e.g. hate speech, criminal material, and fake news, has to be removed from the social media platform in 24 hours, otherwise the operator can face fines between 5 and 50 million EUR. According to the data, even after this rather harsh legislation, during a 2-week period leading up to the September 2017 German elections, more than 30 000 social media posts and articles contained false information. Although, other governments and expert groups are also in progress of drafting legislations to fight against fake news, some maintain a more reserved approach. In Britain, legal experts maintain an opinion that present laws are providing just the necessary protection against fake news. Since – according to them – there is a very thin line between freedom of speech and censorship, they do not want to undertake further steps. The European Commission’s External Actions Service, established in 2015 a small unit, called the East STRATCOM Task Force. A team of 14 people SOCIETY

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has worked hard in the last two years to challenge Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns. Since September 2017, they monthly publish their assessment called Disinformation Review to make people aware of the fake news cases. Their database contains over 3000 cases where news was intentionally distorted. In October 2017, EUROPOL invited Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft and Uber, together with representatives of the FBI, to talk about their fights against fake news content. According to these social platforms, all information on their websites is considered to be their own property, therefore if someone has a problem with the content, (s)he has to have an acceptable reason when asking for the deletion of these materials. It is important to note that generally a complaint procedure is a long and tiresome process, and since all these sites are under the domain of US Law, it is worth having a basic understanding regarding the rights guaranteed by the First and the Fourth Amendments of the US Constitutions. NATO is the target of fake news and disinformation attacks almost every day. The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (NATO StratCom COE) think tank was fully endorsed in the 2014 Wales Summit Declaration to tackle today’s information war. Among its tasks, it studies the Russian information campaign in the Nordic and Baltic countries, while discovering new challenges in our modern information environment in the context of robot trolling. FREEDOM OF SPEECH OR CENSORSHIP When President Macron introduced the new draft legislation against fake news, far-right opposition leader Marie Le Pen immediately sent the following Twitter message: “Who will decide if a piece of news is fake or not? Judges? The government?” Fighting against fake news is as difficult as fighting against lies. There are more and more citizens of the developed world who only receive information through the internet. So far – as the head of the Kaspersky Lab said it on the 5th annual cyber security conference, the world of the internet – was free from any rules. Now that countries start to realize that the unregulated world of the internet also has its underworld, they started to search 54

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for solutions to fight against illegal content, while at the same time, they try to do their outmost to protect the basic values of the virtual space, as they consider the internet a common good, at least in the case of the democratic countries. According to a recent workshop organized by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and the Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, the state can be either a “negative state” using coercive actions, such as fining, taxing, and imprisoning or a “positive state” which creates institutions and incentives that allow the flow of information on the one hand, while on the other hand honour the moral good. While the participants refuse any direct governmental involvement, or censure, in the fight against fake news, they also realize that to protect the fundamental right of free speech versus fake news is very challenging. After listing myriads of solutions, the final conclusion is that without widespread cooperation within society, that requires it to became a content creator and distributor from content consumer, the state alone is not able to find sufficient solution to the phenomenon of fake news. Our civilization rests upon the freedom of expression as a fundamental right, as well as on moral principles. Today both are under attack. Those who are doubtful think that we live in a posttruth era. In my opinion, this is a rather shallow approach in our sophisticated, interconnected, and interwoven world. In the 21st century, when the scale of actions and its consequences can be measured globally, we are pursuing one of the most important benchmarks of our mindfulness – the quest towards truth. However, we are not just simply pursuing truth, but actually we are using all possible means to find it. Therefore, I am quite convinced that soon there will be a solution that will help to eradicate the destructive phenomenon of fake news. The eagerness to find truth is much stronger in humanity than some might think.


THE AI AND ITS CONUNDRUMS Zsombor Szabolcs Pál

There is little doubt that one of the buzzwords that today is all over the news is “Artificial Intelligence” or “AI.” It leaves us with the impression that it might be some sort of holy grail for the twenty-first-century people. The legions of articles notwithstanding, it is quite hard to get a clear-cut understanding of what AI really is or even to nail down whether it is already among us, or it is still a long way off. However, rather than being a panacea, it is a challenge in many aspects that are still baffling to size up. AI, as all the buzzwords that are overused and becoming vague at the same time, has become an all-embracing idea applied to a great array of things that are rather different in their nature. It seems somewhat plain that however effective an algorithm

might be in playing chess or recognizing images, it is still far away from what we commonsensically think “intelligent,” as, for example, it cannot evoke its memories about its decisions, let alone reflect on them. It might execute impeccably what its creators programmed into it, but it would never come up with novel solutions. Consequently, scientists usually distinguish different kinds of AI. A most straightforward classification is when we mark off Narrow (or Weak) AI and General AI. By and large, the first one is the kind of AI we have nowadays, and what most people tend to call “AI.” It might excel at certain, specific tasks, but these are completely limited to the field it was designed for. This means that you can have a Narrow AI that recognizes all your friends on the images posted on Facebook, but you need a wholly different

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one to play chess with, and there is absolutely no interoperability between the two. General AI, on the other hand, should form an idea of the world and all the problems surrounding it and tell itself apart from other animate or inanimate entities, or distinguish these from each other, which would suggest a certain degree of consciousness or at least, its simulation to a certain extent. It should also be capable of unsupervised learning, i.e., to solve problems it has never encountered before and is not pre-programmed to handle. So, you only need one AI, and it can do whatever you want for you; it can label your photos while you can also play Go with it, but if you are fed up with Go, you

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can switch to anything else, as it can learn it from scratch through its very own experience. Some think there is also a third level, Artificial Super Intelligence, which outthinks any of the finest human brains in every possible aspect. Researchers say there is at least four degrees between present Narrow AIs and General AI. What we have nowadays is mostly reactive machines that respond only in a way they were created every time they face the same situation: they cannot be taught, do not form memories and use them for better decisions, and has no internal representation about the world they exists in or the problem they are to solve. The next step is limited


memory AI, which can carry out observations over time to enhance its decisions or train itself but only in a very limited way and never beyond the scope of its original task. Moreover, it still has no comprehension of the “memories” it uses. Actually, the basic forms of limited memory AIs are stateof-the-art today. The third step would be reaching that AIs have something that psychologist call “theory of mind”—the ability to attribute feelings, beliefs, and behaviours to others and what is more, recognize that each person has its own set of emotions and goals. That would be a key to more human-like human–computer interactions. Finally, the last stage would be creating machines that have not only consciousness but also selfawareness. In other words, they could realize their very own existence and have internal feelings or desires. The problem is that even grasping how human memories, past experiences, and selfawareness work is still further off—which makes the creation of an intelligence capitalizing on all these even more distant. Yet, without these skills, present AIs are nothing more than a perfect labelling machine that might hone the statisticsbased use of its catalogue to perfection but lacks the ability to synthetize through profound interconnected mental representations or make and employ abstractions. Even though computers reaching the third or fourth of the abovementioned stages are still belong to the realm of sci-fi, it is intriguing to imagine that, provided we created them, how could we handle the complex problems posed by these new entities. Assuming that AIs can learn from their own experience and reflect on them means that two AIs of the same type, exposed to different impacts, can greatly diverge over time, which, on the one hand, would be the pinnacle of design but, on the other hand, a great liability when it comes to their predictability. Who is, for example, to blame if a conscious, selfaware AI goes berserk? Its creator, who wrote the original lines of its algorithms? Its user, who might have exposed it to a selection of nefarious experiences? Or the AI itself, as it drew a number of wrong conclusions and consciously chose to act erringly? Moreover, it does not even have to go nuts; a single bad decision is enough to

cause harm—but are we as tolerant to machines when it comes to mistakes as towards people? Finding a minor or major glitch in our devices today does not gives us too much headache. At worst, we dispose of them. But what would mean to dispose of an artificial intelligence? Can we just switch it down without it being able to switch itself back again? And what kind of moral status would we give to AIs anyway? If having high intelligence and self-awareness also implies having the ability to feel pain and suffering, what punishment is not disproportionate to get them on the right track again? These are just a few of the many questions that may arise in the process of seeking to make AIs, but they clearly show us that along the way, there are not just challenges of a strictly scientific nature we need to find answers to. The possible creation of a new form of entity that has never existed before will not only force us to reflect on how our mind works but also upon how our moral values change and react to unprecedented challenges. Designing an AGI seems quite a long way to go and we cannot lay odds we will ever really get through with it, but in the meanwhile, we have an exceptional opportunity to have a closer look at ourselves as beings intellectually defined by their mind and their milieu, and have a more profound understanding of who we are.

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NESTED LOOPS Ádám Kégler

One of the most-discussed topics in recent years is the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and its expected social impact. Technology has advanced exponentially over the past decades: while a hundred years ago stainless steel, neon lamps, cellophane, and the Ford Model T were the great inventions of their respective era, today IBM’s Watson, neural networks, widely-used smart devices, and nanotechnology are in the spotlight. The complex expansion of digitalisation is perhaps most visible in the business sector. For example, in the 80s and 90s a music fan would first go through various music magazines: watch the ads, read critiques, and when a new album came out, they would order a vinyl record, a cassette or a CD at a record store. Today, this entire process barely takes five minutes.

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When a publisher’s advertisement pops up, it can be distributed through search engines and social media channels to the target audience within seconds, thanks to special algorithms. Fans can see the ad, read some related articles and critiques, pre-listen to the new album on their favourite streaming page, and, if satisfied, they can immediately buy and download it. And it can all be done while, for instance, commuting. This method of browsing and shopping (e-commerce or B2C) is replacing traditional stores in more and more areas: trade hasn’t gone through this kind of transformation since the Phoenicians. In order to keep up with the new shopping habits, products can be purchased through a retail chain’s website and transported to the buyer’s address by their large truck fleet within hours. You don’t have


to wander around for hours in the supermarket, where everything is neatly arranged, with soothing music and different psychological and marketing tricks trying to get you to buy things that are not on your shopping list. In the near future, the role of shopping malls and hypermarkets will also be significantly transformed. They will serve more as a community space and an integrated service centre rather than a traditional store. Why would you want to spend hours in the suburb of the city, shopping in big supermarkets, when you can buy online from the store’s website, with your own profile, shopping basket, and all the available discounts and coupons? Amazon and similar online stores have completely transformed the market. Not only did the shopping process become much simpler and faster but— due to the so-called long tail effect—the supply is also practically endless. For this reason, traditional forms of trade have begun to decline, although not in all areas: FMCG market segments1 still have some open issues.

1 Fast Moving Consumer Goods: typically groceries (bakery and dairy products, beverages, chewing gums), toiletries (diapers, shampoo, toothpaste, detergent), etc.

During the last decades, in the Visegrad Countries hypermarkets have, through different loyalty programs (points, reward cards, etc.), mapped and stored various data about their customers’ gender, age, address, shopping habits and so on. Through optimization, their huge real estate network can be transformed into warehouses and distribution centres at any time. At the same time, cross-country gas stations can be found on all of the busiest nodes: they already have a parking lot, a convenience store, a restaurant, and soon there will also be a post office, public administration service, and a commodity exchange centre. Refuelling currently takes only a few minutes, but an electric car will need much more time to charge, and, for that period, a so-called customer experience has to be created. But let us not forget the possibility of merging the two and having, for example, a trade chain and a large oil company enter into a strategic alliance. According to current trends, this is the most likely scenario. In January, the world’s leading software developers presented their latest proposals at the 2018 NRF Annual Convention in New York, which combine personal shopping experiences

Analyze Hard. Have Fans. Make Profit. ECONOMY

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Die Mensch-Maschine

with personalized digital solutions. With these innovations, using an app and their phone’s camera, shoppers can already virtually place to-scale the desired pieces of furniture in a room which they want to furnish. If we are planning a family meal and send the planned menu to our refrigerator, it will immediately create a shopping list which will be approved by our favourite shopping mall, and, within minutes, they will start the delivery process for the ingredients, drinks, and other necessary products. As digitally-coordinated shopping makes production, stockpiling, and logistics more manageable, chain stores can reduce their so-called sunk costs, buyers get more favourable prices, and, last but not the least, it can greatly reduce the amount of unsold goods (this is a particularly positive development regarding food waste). MCROBOTICS SOCIETY? One of the world’s biggest fast food chains has begun testing the automation of production, ordering, and payment process—traditionally considered “student work”. An important question emerged regarding this example: if students will not have a chance to make some extra money, how will they buy cheeseburgers, one of the most popular foods among young people? Without a doubt, digitalisation provides many useful solutions for education, healthcare, business, and leisure activities, but it is also worth thinking about the short- to medium-term consequences of the digital revolution, which is costing more and more human workplaces, as society cannot keep up with the constant development of technology. In the past, industrial and technological revolutions only generated production processes and work 62

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phases (and still brought about massive social changes), but none were as complex as the current transformation, which could annihilate entire branches of industries, professions, and careers— within 5 to 8 years. But new opportunities will also emerge: more and more people will be able to work from home, the internet’s organizing power could extend and develop digital work communities, digital education will accelerate the process of job change, and there will be no need for 8-1012 working hours per day. People will have more free time, and this may revive the development of human relationships. The process for purchasing albums described at the beginning of the article can have an alternative ending, where the fan plays the new song to his or hers friends and family members, and listening to good music in good company makes them all feel happier. Why not? Before we delve into a somewhat pessimistic vision and possible future scenarios, we should remember one thing: the machine will execute only the instructions given by the human. And the human should only give instructions which will not harm humanity. This is the zeroth law of robotics.


THE EFFECTS OF INDUSTRY 4.0 ON THE LABOUR MARKET Piroska Szalai, President, Budapest Enterprise Agency

The steam engine – illustration form Meyers Konversations-Lexikon

“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different” – wrote Peter Drucker in 1973, while in the 1990s he frequently quoted President Lincoln’s phrase, “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” It is in between these viewpoints we need to redefine our vision on the future of the labour market. According to a 2016 study by the World Economic Forum, in the next five years, five million workplaces will disappear in 15 countries due to the spreading of artificial intelligence and robots. The study also states that it will be the field of administration where two thirds of the workforce will become expendable, thus it will affect mostly women. Will robots truly take human jobs away? It is impossible that jobs lost will cause long-term problems on the labour market due to the extent of labour shortage.

As a starting point, let us look back in time. Despite the fact that every industrial revolution changed the concept of work fundamentally, no successive generation remained without work. It is true, however, that they could not work under the same conditions as their predecessors. The first industrial revolution started with the invention of the steam engine. Most of the people worked in agriculture and the remaining in crafts, namely in the workshops of master craftsmen united in guilds. Families lived next to the workshops or in village houses, which also functioned as family farm centres. Work and private life constituted a unity. Apprentices did not learn their crafts in school, but from master craftsmen; they lived and worked with them until achieving mastery and the master set them free. Often gaining knowledge required travelling abroad to a renowned master. There was no ECONOMY

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need for further education after acquiring the master’s certificate, knowledge was gained for life, as crafts underwent no substantial changes in one generation. The industrial revolution put an end to this structure of employment. The first industrial revolution; that is, the spread of the steam engine (from the 1790s onwards), reformed the craft industry and agriculture. Production with machines increased considerably. Thus, the size of workshops was expanded; whole colonies came into existence around the mechanised manufactures. Through the spread of electricity, the second industrial revolution (from the 1870s onwards and after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in Hungary) further increased production. Shift work and continuous production in factories were introduced, and so was mass production. The number of master craftsmen and apprentices decreased, and semi-skilled workers and unskilled labourers emerged in great quantity, who were only able to perform a small portion of production. A group of people emerged, who Marx labelled as the “working class,” and work was separated from private life. This is the period when labour law

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and employment, as well as trade unions came into existence. The predecessors of such workers were formerly employed in agriculture and lived villages, later they moved to cities to try their luck. Cities began to expand in a quick pace and it was not a certainty that these people could settle in colonies next to the factories, therefore they had to move to suburban areas. To meet the needs of daily commuters, transportation was restructured and public transportation appeared that brought about the swift development of the third sector of economy, services, thereby creating a great number of new workplaces previously impossible to imagine. Besides unskilled people, a need for lifelong learning appeared in high-competence positions. Let us think about Gábor Baross, the “Iron Minister,” who introduced railway office training in 1887 to make sure that the staff at the Hungarian State Railways received the highest quality of training possible. Upon his initiation, only those were allowed to drive the train who continuously took part in and passed trainings. Vocational training was also created at that time, mostly based on big corporations, trade guilds, and chambers.


The third industrial revolution was brought about by computers and automatisation (from the 1960s onward). It increased productivity, reduced the number of people working in industry; real income grew, which enhanced consumption. And the turnover of services in the private sector increased considerably, which was accompanied by a huge demand for labour. For instance, aviation, mobility, communication, and tourism boomed at that time. The need for unskilled labour force declined, as higher and more complex competences were needed, and workplaces requiring low and high competence (assembly plants and development places, respectively) were separated geographically. Thus, the gap between innovation centres and areas being separated was widened. Brownfield belts with high unemployment and innovation centrums, struggling with the lack of professional workforce and applying the refined methods of “brain drain,” were both present. The fourth industrial revolution was caused by cyber-physical systems (from 2010 onwards). Previously, automated systems, with the microprocessor regulating the operation embedded, were used, and humans had to supervise. For example, automation regulating the flat’s heating was set with the temperature control system in rooms. Today, heating can be regulated with a mobile application – so, on our way home, we can signal to the controls system to start heating, as we will arrive soon. With the spread of driverless cars still in test mode, we can direct driverless taxis, instead of our own car, to take us to work. Thus, we do not have to be preoccupied with parking and it will undoubtedly take us on the shortest way possible; and hopefully it will not overbill us. Cooperation between our cyber, physical, biological, and healthcare systems brings changes in our environment that are similar to the ones the internet created in human interaction. Industry 4.0 will probably have as huge an impact on the labour market as the previous three combined. When it comes to driverless vehicles, it is not only the driverless metros already operating in Budapest we have in mind, as other types will soon appear in transportation (railway, public transportation,

carriage). It will also affect industry (movement of ingredients and half-prepared and prepared goods) and agriculture (seeders, harvesters, and other heavy vehicles used in farming). Currently, there is a huge labour shortage in these fields. The position of driver will most likely be reshaped, so one person will be able to control more than one driverless vehicle at the same time. This area will undergo a similar restructuring the banks did thanks to the appearance of PCs, bank cards, and ATMs. The number of transactions in the 1980s multiplied, therefore, the number of people working in the bank sector has not diminished in the past 30 years. They do, however, work with greater efficiency with the computer systems than they did in the era of manual account monitoring. Industry 4.0. is restructuring today’s positions, not only in the private sector; that is, in agriculture, industry, the construction industry, and services, but in the public sphere too. The spheres mostly affected by labour shortage are the social and healthcare sectors. In the world of remote diagnosis and remote surgery, existing medical knowledge can be used more efficiently; patients do not need to travel. Launched in November 2017, the Electronic Health Service Portal will reduce the number of examinations, as earlier results will be accessible everywhere for authorised people. The spread of remotely-operated systems will bring about many atypical positions in the field of SMEs as well. A person with a key competence will simultaneously work for more companies, in a state between self-employment and employment, as does a Google AdWords specialist for example, who handles the online campaign of many companies. In contrast to last year’s forecast by the World Bank, these flexible, part-time (under 36 working hours/week) or home-working positions will provide opportunities for women. Among those who are temporarily unable to coordinate family life and the traditional 40-hour work, there are currently inactive and qualified (in general, women’s level of education is higher) labour reserves that can be mobilised, i.e. those with small children or those tending to family members in need, or those living far away from work who cannot travel far from home. ECONOMY

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To sum up, trades will probably change quickly and significantly on almost all levels of the national economy. We also have to prepare for it on the individual level: it is advisable to learn about the fields most akin to ours, as positions are likely to be expanded in the near future. If we do not have the required competences and we cannot stand our ground, we will risk unemployment and the change of jobs. Certain problems in the areas with a serious level of skilled labour shortage will be solved through technological opportunities presented by automatisation. There are numerous fields where the demand for labour force will increase: i.e. the social sphere – due to the aging of society and the increase of demands – or professional, technical, administrative and management services – as every SME has an accountant or lawyer, they will need other business providers, for example for small, personalised applications. Robots, I believe, will not take our jobs. They will rather take over a number of monotonous tasks that can be automated. This way, our productivity will increase. Demands will grow in many service areas – in service areas outside (healthcare, and social, educational, and public administration areas), and inside of the private sector too (transportation, trade, communication, IT and management services), as well as in fields such as industry, construction industry, agriculture, green economy, and bio economy. The next generations will have jobs, the same way we and our predecessors did. Work, however, will be entirely different in the future. I can only hope that we can create a bigger harmony between that and our family and private life than the generations having lived since the first industrial revolution did.

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CARBON IMPACTS OF DIGITALISATION Cecília Varsányi

At the beginning of a new digital era, the question remains: can digitalisation be a game changer for sustainability? In 2015, 193 countries agreed on the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), striving for a more sustainable future, while dealing more consciously with our resources. But what does sustainability mean in a digital world where we might have to rethink economic, environmental, and social sustainability alongside a radicallychanging global economic model? Digitalisation has a broad impact on different sectors and the energy sector is no different. It has established complex distribution systems which increasingly sophisticated technological solutions to account for the combination of the increasing share of renewable energy, more decentralized energy generation, and an aging and crumbling grid. Some of the market players recognized this change as an unmissable business opportunity, while sooner or later all the remaining companies will need to catch up with the new trends and invest in the digitalisation of the energy sector. The global energy demand is expected to double by 2050, according to the OECD. So how can fossil fuel businesses keep up with this demand without the support of digital technologies? (HOW) WILL THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION TRANSFORM THE ENERGY SECTOR? It is no wonder that the energy sector has been an early adopter of digital technologies, as digitalisation and automation in the fossil fuel industry in general brings greater productivity and increased safety to energy suppliers – it is enough just to think of grid management, or digital technologies for decisionmaking of gas and oil exploration investments. The oil and gas sector benefits from digitalisation mainly through fibre optic sensors, automated drilling rigs, and robots which inspect subsea infrastructure and monitor transmission pipelines. A McKinsey & Co. survey, investigating how much

of the data gathered by sensors on offshore oil rigs is used in decision-making by the energy industry, presents shocking results: after studying sensors on rigs around the world, the survey found that less than 1% of the information gathered from about 30,000 data points was made available to decisionmakers from the energy industry. Independently, research from global consulting firm Bain & Co. estimated that more effective data analysis could help fossil fuel companies boost production by an additional 6-8%. British Petrol’s estimates go even further: they predict that technology could double accessible oil and gas reserves by 2050, while lowering extraction costs by about 25% over the same period. At this point, we might raise the question whether digitalisation can lead to the expansion of reserves and whether fossil fuel prices can be kept low on the long term? How does this interact with the sustainability ambitions of reducing the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix? At least from a technical point of view, several problems of the oil industry can be solved through digitalisation, such as the detailed description of suitable reservoirs. This could aid in maximising resource profitably while also maximising safely and environmental impact. Taking a closer look at the electricity sector, there are several reasons which indicate the need for dealing with collected data in an effective manner. First, the grid system grows older daily. Alternative energy has a growing share in the global energy mix. The need for smart metering is growing as well: consumers are becoming more conscious and want to have more control of their own energy consumption. Global investment in digital electricity infrastructure and software has grown by over 20% annually since 2014, according to IEA. No wonder learning how to capture the immense amount of data produced and use it effectively ECONOMY

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Current state of digitalisation in the energy value chain

is a hot topic! Having a constant, steady stream of data is a basic need for intermittent energy sources. Of the most obvious examples: energy providers can decrease their solar production and crank up their windmills when the provided external data indicates that the winds of autumn have begun to blow. HOW TO HANDLE THIS EXPLOSION OF INFORMATION? Without taking into account a holistic spectrum of aspects, the most significant change for energy providers will be their strategy for handling their data. Extensive volumes of data are being collected across the energy industry, and while the amount

is not the problem, the point is that disparate data sources have to be combined and analysed via the appropriate software. This is the point where companies have to keep up with the latest trends and invest in business intelligence softwares. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that by 2025 the market size for digital technologies in energy will reach $64 billion. Countries with a high share of distributed renewables in their energy mix, that invest serious capital in digital technologies and communication network, may emerge near the top as technology leaders. The table below highlights – along with some developed countries – the top emerging markets for clean energy. Those countries which are

Country rankings for different types of renewable energy investments, capacity additions and production, 2016 68

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Data Centre Full of Rack Servers and Supercomputers

building an infrastructure network and fostering innovation are likely to gain the competitive edge in their respective regions. While utilities are under pressure to decarbonize, we must also ask the question of how the environmental sustainability of the digital revolution can be ensured? Just as the industrial revolution brought huge advantages to humanity, we might appraise the digital revolution as the next Holy Grail of human history – however, this might not necessarily be the case. The global carbon emissions of the „digital ecosystem” is quite significant. It is very difficult to give a precise estimate, but one of the most recognised estimates of the IT sector’s footprint (SMART 2020 study) states that the sector is responsible for 2% of the global GHG emissions. Ever-growing data centres – functioning as “factories” of the 21st century – whether in developed or emerging markets, should use the opportunity to invest in renewable energy, instead of relying on heavily polluting fossil fuels. Most of the environmental problems at their very root are the consequences of business decisions. Digital transformation has the ability to motivate us to use more environmentally-friendly energy sources. As even with our growing need for electricity we can avoid the increasing use of dirty energy – this

usually remains invisible to us, daily users, while at the same time receiving tremendous amount of data into our mailboxes. Most probably, we will not be able to fix our future purely with technological improvements, but it surely influences the way we interact with our environment. Hopefully, digitalisation will mutually benefit our environment better and our daily lives as well.

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FUTURE SERVICES OF 5G Mark Szalay

In the recent past, along with the proliferation of mobile devices, internet access has become available for anybody, anywhere, at any time. Nowadays, more than 85% of the world populace owns a cell phone. In fact, an average person uses more than one smart IT tool. As machine-to-machine communication has also become commonplace, demands for enhancing the performance of the telecommunication networks grew significantly. This is the reason we need a new step in the evolution of wireless generations, the so-called 5G. THE EVOLUTION OF MOBILE NETWORKS Let us take a look at the progress of the internet access evolution to understand the benefits of 5G. The first generation mobile networks were introduced in the 1980s. These systems used analog radio signals and their main technical novelty was the support for multi-cell sites. This means that 1G systems were able to provide connection between two mobile phones without any interruption even when the user was moving.

In the early 1990s, 2G mobile systems were introduced primarily deploying the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) standard. 2G was different from the previous generation as it used digital transmission instead of analog, ensuring higher efficiency than 1G, both in transmission quality and coverage. It was also the first system which supported data services such as sending faxes and text messages (SMS). The advantages of using digital instead of analog signals included less battery power usage and reduced noise in the physical line. Besides, the new technological basis made digital encryption possible, providing safety and security for voice and data calls. Since earlier data services implemented in 2G were limited, in the late 1990s 2.5G emerged which used a new standard, called GPRS, for packet-switched data transmission. Due to this, users could send graphic-rich data packets like MMS, and were already able to utilize internet communication services such as email and World Wide Web access.

1G

2G

3G

4G

1st GENERATION

2nd GENERATION

3nd GENERATION

4th GENERATION

wireless network

wireless network

wireless network

wireless network

• Basic voice service

• Designed for voice

• Designed for voice

• Designed primarily

•Analog-based

• Improved coverage

with some data

protocols

and capacity

consideration

• First digital standards

(multimedia, text,

(GSM, CDMA)

internet) • First mobile broadband

Speed:

2.4

Speed:

kbps

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Speed:

kbps

2,000

for data I • P-based protocols (LTE) • True mobile broadband Speed:

kbps

100,000

kbps


The next generation, named 3G, was introduced in 1998. Around that time people started to widely use mobile phones, and the demand for data services had grown accordingly. Since 2G was unable to deal with the traffic load, networks around the world had to be revamped. The main objective of 3G was to create a standardised single global network protocol and to improve the data transfer rate for new data services. In contrast to 2G, 3G data transmission was based on packet switching instead of circuit switching. This allowed users to enjoy data services which require higher transfer speed, such as streaming of audio and video content. Because of the rapidly growing number of users, further developments were necessary to fulfil the expectations about the data download/ upload speed and other network requirements of online applications. The new challenges were adequately answered by 4G, which is the current generation of mobile telephony. The main aim of the new systems was to provide more available bandwidth to the end users while maintaining high service quality. In 4G data transfer and voice calls are realized over IP networks. 4G enabled new kind of services, for example, mobile web access, IP telephony, gaming services, highdefinition mobile TV, and video conferencing. The figure above shows that the evolution of data transfer speed has been the most noticeable feature during the progress of wireless networks. As a result of the outlined development, people use their mobile devices today mostly for services and applications, which require data transfer, rather than for simple phone calls.

nowadays and to ensure instant communication for future applications. 5G is not a standalone radio access technology, rather a collection of access and connectivity solutions which meet the following requirements:

THE PROMISE OF 5G Although so far an official definition of 5G does not exist (complete specification and standardisation is expected to be finished in 2018), it represents the newest generation of radio access technologies. 5G will be a new network system providing higher speeds and capacity for mobile devices. Another important aim is to achieve much lower latency1 than

• Energy-efficient operation Finally, it seems obvious that the requirements above can only be met at the expense of energy consumption. The goal of the 5G design is, however, to avoid this. The criteria defined in specifications of 5G dictate that energy use should be low, so as to elongate the connected devices’ battery life. Typical applications of previous generations of mobile networks focused on humans as endusers, but 5G will provide perfect environment for machine-to-machine communications too. According to Ericsson, a leading mobile network

1 Network latency is an expression of how much time it takes for a packet of data to get from one designated point to another.

• Higher system capacity The expectation about the number of future enddevices is 10-100-times more than in the case of 4G. To support the generated traffic, 5G needs to apply a novel approach for reducing both the cost of packet processing and the energy consumed for packet-forwarding. • Higher data rates Just like in other mobile generations, securing higher data rates between end-devices is also one of the most important objectives of 5G. According to recent estimations, more than 10 gigabits per second would be attainable. • Lower latency Using 5G, the end-to-end latency will be less than 1 millisecond. This may seem unnecessary at this very moment, but lots of new possible applications are in sight. One good example is the control of critical infrastructure, which would enable, for example, driving a smart car from a remote network. • High reliability and availability The maximum switching time allowed for changing between different access technologies (e.g. 2G, 3G, 4G or WiFi) is 10 ms. This satisfies the requirements of critical services such as the safe control of road traffic.

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equipment manufacturer, 5G will revolutionize key industries in the world such as healthcare, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing and media. The most often heard use-cases of 5G are the following:

CLOUD:

Thousands

Data Centers

FOG:

Millions

Notes

• Ubiquitous broadband service and media • Smart vehicles and transport infrastructure • Critical infrastructure monitor and control • Critical control of remote devices • Human and machine interaction - Internet of Things • Sensor networks

EDGE: Devices

Billions

Fog architecture

THE RADIO CHARACTERISTICS OF 5G It was already mentioned that 5G will be an innovative new system which provides higher speed and capacity, as well as a much lower latency than existing cellular systems. As a matter of fact, 5G as wireless access network technology will embody a completely new kind of infrastructure, consisting of networks of small cells, even down to the size of home routers. This contrasts sharply with huge mobile towers in operation today which cover vast areas. To achieve the defined aims, 5G networks will use mostly very high frequencies (above 10 GHz) which meet the requirements for the expected data rate. Due to physical reasons, however, these very high frequencies could be radiated only to small distances (WiFi routers face similar limitations). Therefore, 5G has to use lower bands as well, which can be transmitted much further. In practice, higher frequencies will work as a complement to lower spectrums, providing extremely high data speed and low latency. On the other hand, lower bands (below 1 GHz) will guarantee wide area connectivity.

network in order to remain within the maximum permitted delay margins. One example is a selfdriving car as the end-device and a remote driving algorithm that controls it. Obviously, if the delay was too large between the car and the control logic, the car would react to the control commands too late and accidents could happen. The main novelties which will make 5G services possible are the following:

THE CORE OF 5G NETWORKS To meet the expectations regarding 5G, developments are needed not only in the radio access technologies but also in the core network. For example, to fulfil the expected latency requirements, we need to run applications close to the end-device in a geographically scattered infrastructure. If the connected device is moving, the application has to follow it inside the core

E X T E N D E D CO RE N E T WO RK FO R COMPUTING Internet service providers are working on an innovative concept in the field of cloud computing, called “fog computing”. It is an ideal architecture for one of today’s most important emerging paradigms, the Internet of Things (IoT). The fog architecture is based on geographically distributed small clouds close to the end-users. Fogs contain

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SERVICE VIRTUALIZATION Since network service providers are aiming to serve as many users as possible, they should be able to deploy a wide variety of services quickly and efficiently. One dynamic solution is Network Function Virtualization (NFV) which aims to use virtualized software instead of specific-purpose hardware equipments. The main advantage of implementing functionality in software is that the program code can be run on universal computers, e.g. in remote cloud data centres, and its location can be changed even while it is running. This novel approach allows rapid and flexible deployment of network services.


less computing capacity compared to the big data centres, but they can host applications with strict requirement on response time. For example, fogs could be an ideal platform for remote control of cars (and other vehicles) in the future. INTEGRATED AND UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE Market fragmentation is a result of the existence of many telecommunications network operators, each with a different geographical focus. This makes new service deployment spanning – due to several operators and multiple countries – difficult. 5G Exchange (5GEx) is a 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) research and innovation project that aims to enable a unified European 5G infrastructure service market, integrating multiple operators and technologies. The Exchange will enable operators to buy, sell and integrate infrastructure services. It will also provide the possibility to automatically trade resources, verify the service requested and to clear billing and charging.

are not yet defined, and consequently the official release date of 5G is still unclear, some parts (probably the radio access technology) will be available to the public by as early as 2019-2020. Nevertheless, an early showcase took place at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Korea.

SUMMARY 5G development will radically change our everyday live. It ushers in an ever-connected era, when each device becomes smart and communicates with each another. Our homes will turn into smart systems that take care of our shopping, the heating of the building, and other functions serving our comfort. Self-driving cars and public transportation vehicles will appear along with a new infrastructure built on smart city concept. In healthcare, remote surgery will be just an ordinary daily operation. These examples clearly show that the possibilities offered by the new network generation are almost limitless. Yet, before the advent of a new age, technical obstacles are to be overcome: • Firstly, service providers have to virtualize services and applications instead of using location-fixed hardware. • Secondly, the respective network of internet service providers must be extended via new solutions, for example fog computing. • Thirdly, in order to deploy virtualized services anywhere in the world, there is a big necessity for a global unified system. Though the exact protocols and technologies ECONOMY

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THE FOUNDATION OF A SUCCESSFUL RAILWAY AUTOMATISATION COMPANY IN HUNGARY Interview with Ferenc Sörös, CEO of Prolan

How did the story of the company begin? What made Prolan successful? In 1990 we were all working at the MMG1, which was an influential knowledge base for automation at the time in Hungary—and there were not many of its kind. We did serious work there, with a very capable team of around 70 people, both hardware and software experts who were already dealing with automation solutions in the fields of rail transportation and power supply. However, as the Hungarian Regime Change arrived it became clear that the Russian market would collapse and MMG’s days were numbered, as 50% of its exports were for Russia. I didn’t want this great team 1 Fabric of Mechanical Measurement Appliances (Mechanikai Mérőműszerek Gyára) 76

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to break up, so in December 1990 the best 12 people quit and established our company. The question was what our aim and direction should be. Two key stipulations facilitated the decision-making process: First, we wanted to work on something that will always be in demand, and electricity is such a thing. Second, we had to recognise that for a brand new company it is very difficult to enter a market that has traditionally been ruled by multinational corporations. So we had to start where we already had a good reputation as trustworthy experts. Considering our circumstances, word of mouth was the only opportunity for us to get our company moving. We still had no products except for an electrical instrument, which had been developed in the GMK 2 framework earlier. But how could we enter this market? We had to find a solution to build trust. We decided to acquire SIEMENS hardware, took out the software and replaced it with our own. This company was known globally, so the future risk for costumers seemed to be lower. That was how we operated for a year or two. Meanwhile, we developed our own hardware and began to use it instead of the SIEMENS originals, until every external part had been replaced. By 1993 the first RTU3 had been created, which was already using our own developed 2 GMK was a form of partnership established in the 1980s in Hungary, which could have been run by the members for their own interest, independently of the state. 3 Remote Terminal Unit: Data collecting and forwarding microprocessor-based equipment, which connects the physical devices to the central control unit. It is used at electrical substations in the electric power industry.


INTRODUCTION When it comes to technical experience and

knowledge in the field of railway automation, Hungary has nothing to be ashamed of. The

best example is probably Prolan Process

Control Co. (PROLAN Irányítástechnikai Zrt., hereafter: Prolan), which, over the past 27 years, has gone from an electric control device manufacturer to the developer of state-of-the-art

solutions for the international market, meeting the highest safety requirements.

AJKC researcher Roland Menyes was eager

to find out the secret behind the company’s success, as well as their views on the current

state of railway automation. He talked to Ferenc Sörös, former CEO and current Chairman of the

Board of Prolan, about the story of the company,

and Márton Feldmann, head of Prolan’s Railway

Automation Division, who introduced international and national trends, as well as the technical background of the improvements.

software and hardware. It is fair to say that we entered the market riding SIEMENS’s coattails, but I don’t think it lessens our accomplishments. In any case, by 1995 we already had 5-6 reference projects. Then a tender was launched by the World Bank to bring the technical state of the Hungarian power grid up to the appropriate level so that it would allow us to connect to the western European grid. The project affected the vast majority of the Hungarian electric power industry, but getting in was not easy. Our results and prices were attractive, but Prolan was still a small firm at the time, with a total of maybe 30 employees. Thus, it made sense to ask if we could carry out such a huge task, and what it would mean if we went bankrupt. Despite these concerns, Prolan got in during the last round of the application process, and during the implementation we became a subcontractor of SIEMENS Minneapolis. Just to give you an idea of the scale, the value of the project was 6 million dollars (equal to 800 million Hungarian forints back then), while Prolan’s revenue was only 200 million forints. Therefore, we had a few

obstacles: for example, in the beginning we had no money to purchase hardware. Consequently, we couldn’t provide any guarantees. And finally, since we had not yet developed a reputation in our field of work and were not big enough, we couldn’t get any performance bond. All these obstacles disappeared when SIEMENS gave us an advance of 1 million dollars with no collateral. As a result, Prolan became a 70-strong company, and we ended up fulfilling our own pledge earlier than SIEMENS. Our market share in the electric power industrial substation RTUs increased to 70%. Before 1989 having an entrepreneurial spirit was frowned upon, and individuals with innovative ideas were not welcome because they threatened the hierarchy of the time. How can you explain the prominence of former employees of a big communist company in these two fields? In this respect, the MMG was an odd one out, since there was no shortage of innovation. We were doing work that demanded creativity. Among others, we worked on the control devices of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor 3 and 4. As a result, we were bound to this company and wanted to implement our ideas there. They ultimately didn’t let us, so we quit. Our goal was to demonstrate that a Hungarian engineer could match the quality of the work of a western counterpart under the same conditions. But was it possible? Due to the embargo introduced earlier, the knowledge and technology that could make its way into the country from the West was limited, which must have been a disadvantage. On the contrary. It is very interesting, but working with low-budget methods facilitated our creativity. I’m not exaggerating when I say that our performance in certain cases was world-class. Using far less advanced hardware, we kept optimising processes until we reached the same results as our Western colleagues with their modern tools. It gave us such a huge professional advantage that after quitting we could compete with such multinational companies as ABB from Switzerland and Sweden, SIEMENS from Germany, or Westinghouse from the US.

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Is this the competitive advantage of the company? Without a doubt. We grew up in an environment where neither the contractor nor the client had access to excessive funding to develop solutions. Therefore, frugality and rationality were fundamental considerations everywhere. We intentionally built on the available functioning infrastructure, only making changes where it made sense. We believed that if something had taken a lot of work and money to build should only be fixed if broken. Perhaps the best examples for this are the systems we have provided to the Hungarian railway company. The control panels with buttons, which still can be seen at a few bigger stations used by traffic managers for controlling signs and setting tracks, were replaced by an electronic model while leaving old safety equipment4 intact. This solution was the foundation for our central traffic management system (see below), because it allowed for local devices to be remote controlled by the new panel. In the end, we managed to implement a nearly state-of-the-art system. What’s more, the investment cost of our system was 80% lower than our competitors’ due to the fact that we did not replace the core equipment. You mentioned that MMG was a unique case and the experience gained there played a major role in Prolan’s later success. Graphisoft is also known to have achieved significant successes in the “capitalist economy” before the Hungarian Regime Change, and they managed to maintain their momentum. Do you know any other Hungarian companies who were able to pull off a similarly “successful” transition? Many companies started to grow, but there were only a few who — instead of working with, or trading foreign material — dared to undertake development and use their own creativity to compete.

4 Devices such as railroad switches and color position lights to ensure safe railway transportation. Their task is to prevent collision, derailment, accidents involving pedestrians, etc. 78

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We’ve only discussed the first ten years of Prolan. What happened afterwards? Around 2000 we had to face the fact that the planned upgrade investments had been realized for almost all of the approximately 350 transformer stations of the country. Consequently, the market began to shrink, while the number of our employees kept growing. We had to look for different opportunities where we could utilise our expertise, which is how we came to focus on railroads. It was not a completely new area, since at MMG we had already worked on traffic control devices. Moreover, the energy distribution system of the electrified railway lines and the control system of electrical distribution networks are very similar, so it was natural that we would first start to develop overhead line remote control equipment. Later on we also used the knowledge we had gained at MMG about traffic control. This was not difficult at all, as we all had a love for the rails since playing with model trains as children. The first complex solution we developed was for GYSEV (Győr-Sorpon-Ebenfurti Vasút Ltd.) and enabled centralized traffic management and replaced personnel on all stations connected to the system. We finished the project in 2002, but as it turned out the new field posed bigger challenges than we had expected. Railway operation is a dangerous and complex business, every piece of equipment must be subjected to serious scrutiny prior to being put into service. Although we received a temporary license, it still took six years — with the involvement of several university departments and countless tests — until we demonstrated that we met all safety requirements. By 2008 we became competent enough to get involved in tenders for rail traffic management systems. This achievement should not be taken lightly: Hungarian companies usually do not undertake development projects costing billions, lasting 8 years, and involving a guarantee that the end result will be competitive against the solutions of multinational companies’ offers. For this, you need to have a lot of faith and determination, especially when it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But we ultimately achieved our goal. Today the entirety of GYSEV’s line is using Prolan’s


traffic management systems, in addition to the southern region of Lake Balaton and the vicinity of Szeged. As for financing, I have to mention a solution we came up with in order to tackle the ubiquitous financial barriers to investments: The essence of the solution is that the client can finance the investment from the savings it generates, e.g. in the field of wages. This way, the costs do not appear immediately, and the payback period can be dragged out to 10 years. This practice was in place until 2012, when MÁV (Hungarian State Railways) ran out of disposable money for investments. Prolan was impacted directly, as the company’s revenue decreased by 70% because of cancelled projects. We had to decide how to react to these changes. Being the largest expenditure item, the option of layoffs arose. However, I thought that if I were to let go people who we had worked hard to train, and who put their hearts into this company, it would mean the complete elimination of the affected departments. It’s not a viable way to start to recruit professionals once again when the market returns to normal — it would take ten years for them to gain enough experience! We managed to get the company’s management to accept this idea and we had to dig deeper into our pockets. Wages had to be paid while there was practically no revenue, so in the long run the company’s assets decreased by half. Finally, the solution was to participate in EU-funded projects. Having complete solutions for most issues helped Prolan to get funds which hadn’t been allocated yet but had to be utilized within a short term. The implementation of the central traffic management system of GYSEV was also realized within this framework, which ultimately became the highlight of the company’s work. 27 years of experience was combined in this project, and the feat was recognized with the Hungarian Product Grand Prize.

From the aforementioned examples it is obvious that Prolan has been very successful in Hungary. But what are its chances abroad? Can their solutions work there? Are they competitive outside Hungary? Could such a traffic management system be exported at all? Over the last 15 years we have continuously tried to create export markets, but we had to realise that this requires a new kind of expertise. It is not enough to appear at an international fair, local partners are also needed. We had to recognize that such a complex system requires a lot of local human labour, equipment, and data. We could practically move half of the company to the job site! That’s why we started thinking about something different. We wanted to export a product that can be produced in large amounts and does not require regular local presence. A good example of this is our radiofrequency network controller, which uses our own proprietary hardware and software. It just has to be packaged, shipped, and with the help of the instructions it is easy to install. We achieved a great success with these: 30.000 pieces were delivered to the German E.On last year! However, we do not export systems due to the fact that our routing systems fit into the special Hungarian infrastructure which was built decades ago. Maybe Switzerland is the country where you can find devices similar to the ones used at home, but not elsewhere in the world. Since the “extra development” involves a massive local knowledge and huge labour force, we did it differently: we developed our own safety equipment. Until then, only the central control has been shipped, the equipment of the infrastructure was given to us “ready.” From then on, we could offer a comprehensive solution without the full knowledge of the local circumstances. So, when we find a local installer, the mentioned systems can be exported. Can you succeed at conquering Western markets with these systems, or does your company prefer to concentrate on our region? We primarily concentrate on neighbouring countries, simply because of the short geographical distance on the one hand, and on the other because it is TRANSPORTATION

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easier to satisfy the demand for maintenance. While we were talking about the railways, we did not mention one piece of equipment, the locomotive on-board system, which makes it really easy for laymen to understand what Prolan actually does, as this system is similar to the dashboard computer in cars. The development of the locomotive on-board system started independently of the traffic management systems. The original goal was to prevent fuel theft, but we eventually far outgrew functionalities limited to diesel locomotives. We began to satisfy an increasingly wide range of demand, from the collection of operational parameters to traffic management, until we had covered essentially everything that could effectively help engine drivers and vehicle inspectors. The locomotive system has been installed on all of MÁV’s locomotives and is also being used for passenger information. Based on the information provided by this system, it is easy to determine the location of the train and calculate any expected delays. In the future it could also be used for different tasks: to promote more economical use of energy, for example, it could provide recommendations to the driver to accelerate, slow down, or avoid unnecessary stops. Finally, let’s talk about the business culture. Prolan has recently been awarded the title the “Family-Friendly Company of the Year.” It is necessary to mention that a few years ago, during the time of stagnation, nobody had to be afraid of losing their job. This is very rare today. How did this business culture succeed? Can we detect here a touch of the socialist heritage that we are trying so hard to reject nowadays? First of all, I would say that this approach was not introduced after-the-fact. We had had the same mentality since the beginning and our goal was to preserve the original relationships despite the increasing number of staff. It was obviously not easy, and a lot depended on the staff and its leaders. It is very true that the fish rots from the head down. I just wanted to share what makes me happy and see how it makes others feel. After all, we live to be happy, don’t we? I think we all win if at four o’clock people do 80

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not simply wait to leave work but actually enjoy spending their time on it. At the same time, it is also important that this should not be at the expense of one’s family life. For example, if you are going to put a system in operation during a weekend, your family will also get compensated to help tolerate this workload. However, the new generation is coming in with a different philosophy, which is a challenge for us. They are much more mobile, willing to travel and try their luck elsewhere. Meanwhile, our field is such that if a key person leaves, it’s terribly difficult to replace them. So we must strive to keep young people. We can do it by showing them why Prolan is a very good place to work at. As for the second half of the question, I think there were some good things in the previous system. A sensible person takes the good from everything and uses it to make it even better. There are also some phenomena today that I do not like at all, such as the degeneration of capitalist competition. Competition is good as long as it promotes essential processes and does not become self-serving. The previous system obviously did not work, so it had to be changed. However, taking care of staff members was one aspect that made sense to preserve and pass on. Neither is it true that in the previous system it was not possible to become successful or that if somebody was successful they were inevitably persecuted. I was also successful back then, and I have never been persecuted in my entire life. I was not a member of the party, I got into college without anybody pulling any strings, and later I was allowed to work on the Paks Power Plant. We achieved results that I am proud of. This might have been due to the microclimate at MMG, which was a good company. Who knows? This was my only job, so I have no idea what the general situation was.

The interview was conducted by Roland Menyes on 12 January 2018..


RAILWAY MODERNISATION IN HUNGARY Interview with Márton Feldmann, Head of Railway Automation Division, Prolan

Which direction does the railway’s modernisation follow, and what is the role of Prolan’s Railway Automation Division in this process? Speaking of railway, the main element is the infrastructure which has to be safely accessible and passable. In the case of roads, this means that there must be appropriately painted road surface markings, properly installed road safety barriers, road signs, etc. When it comes to the railway system, this means that the tracks are in good condition, and the infrastructure ensures that two trains cannot be simultaneously on the same rail line. This provides basic safety. But in order to ensure fully safe railway traffic, the vehicles must also be in good shape: furthermore, the staff has to know how to use the infrastructure: what to do in case of red, green or yellow signs. In many cases, we would like to avoid the human factor. That can be done with train control systems which connect the infrastructure and the vehicle. For example, they are able to stop a train in case

of a red light, without any human intervention. The aim of one of these systems – which is under construction in Europe – called ETCS, is to provide the same interface and standardised symbols for a train driver, regardless of the country he or she is working in. The ETCS is basically an interface between infrastructure and vehicle. The products of Prolan is still rather related to the usage of basic infrastructure. The goal is to change the old, buttoned-mechanical panels to computers, and additionally, centralise those tasks which have before been done on each station separately. The trends in the labour market also point in this direction. There is a shortage of railway men all around Europe. Currently at MÁV, there are four hundred traffic-related unfilled jobs. If we centralise the system, the employees could do their job without being overloaded, and they could even manage eight to ten stations at the same time. We are in connection with the ETCS through our product ProSigma – currently still under development – that gathers safety equipment data and forwards it through a high-level security connection to the vehicle. If electronic safety equipment is installed and calculates which colour of which traffic light should be lit up, or in which position the switch should be, our job is made easier, because this data can be easily obtained from the equipment and forwarded digitally. But if we want to implement an ETCS on a track where relays are still active, we have to combine traditional and digital interfaces in the most secure way, and the obtained data has to be accessible for the ETCS. ProSigma is an interface which connects the old infrastructure to the modern one.

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Who are your competitors? Are there similar developments at home or abroad? Regarding the override of traditional equipment via control centre, we have a competitive advantage in Hungary. Elsewhere in Europe the competition is fierce. For example, big producers develop and use their own safety equipment. It is also imaginable that a railway company which uses a various types of safety equipment, announces a tender offer, in which it is clearly defined what kind of interface or solution they need. In this case anybody can apply and implement this specific development. We lose our competitive advantage in Hungary only if the safety equipment is changed during a planned investment, which would cause the big producers to bring their own complex solution. If we are talking specifically about ProSigma, another Hungarian company probably wouldn’t undertake a similar development, because of its high risk. Competitors are usually system integrators, who put together solutions bought from different suppliers. Still, we haven’t seen anybody who could cover all of the necessary station functions using this method. Internationally, there are obviously significant competitors, because big companies can also provide high-level security data collecting and transmitting devices. However, they primarily think about a product that is in accordance with the customer’s demand and applicable in any field of the industry. Multi-purpose is crucial for them, therefore their developments require more money and energy than ours. As for our solution, the opportunity of further development is given, but currently we are focusing only on the railway safety requirements. Let’s talk about the bigger picture! What is the current state of railway automation and digitalisation in Hungary? How do you see the future? What role will Prolan have in the coming investments? If I have to compare the situation in Hungary to the neighbouring countries, I can primarily talk about Austria, where most of the accessible lines are remote-controlled or remotely monitored, whilst this is true only for one-sixth or one-seventh of the same type of Hungarian lines. So, in Hungary there is an opportunity for dynamic improvement, 82

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though I have to say that – due to technical reasons – only a part of the Hungarian stations can be attached to a system like that. Considering the abovementioned, how many of them could be covered by this solution? Around half of them. If we take into consideration both Hungarian and European investments, in your opinion, when will it be implemented? We are lucky, because the central traffic management systems can be self-financing. If we are managing four or five stations from one centre, we can reach up to 80 % resource savings. This is due only needing the same number of employees working in the control centre as in one station now. If the traffic is low on a certain line, then 8 to 10 stations can be redirected to one centre, thus the savings are proportionately bigger. Savings do not mean salary only, but all the additional costs, for example retraining or heating costs. In addition, in many cases maintenance of old devices becomes unnecessary. All in all, I would say that an average investment returns in 10 years. Regarding the reach of 50% coverage, that is a practical limit set by traffic management. The MÁV has to meet the requirements and make necessary changes regarding the passenger and haulage transportation. In order to avoid traffic jams, it is not reasonable to shut down more main lines at the same time for construction purposes. Therefore, these kind of investment projects take 6-8 years to finalize. That still seems too optimistic, considering how slow the railway modernisation is… Yes, it is, but the progress is accelerating. Last year, we automated almost 200 kilometres financed by EU funds. We can compare this to the total Hungarian accessible railway network which is 6-7.000 km long. Regarding the railway traffic, how big of an obstacle is the fact that half of the lines cannot be covered? The traffic on the railway tracks is very concentrated. If we take into consideration


GAINING A DEEPER INSIGHT INTO CURRENT PROJECTS As mentioned in the interview, Prolan is working on a solution - called ProSigma - which would connect widely used relay-based interlocking systems to ETCS. The development aims to achieve fail-safe signal transmission via conventional IP network by using redundant communication channels. Safety is granted by a 2 out of 3 safety architecture score, where all significant parts of the system is tripled and majority voting is applied. High fault-tolerance means that in case of an error ProSigma continues to function for a given time still meeting the highest safety requirements. The solution is modular so as to offer flexible customization possibilities and ensure cost-effectiveness.

only passenger transportation, more than half of the traffic is conducted on one-sixth of the lines. Thus entire coverage is not justified either economically, nor professionally. It is different in freight transport, because there are north-south and east-west corridors, and the investment projects have to adapt to them. The Antall József Knowledge Centre puts a special focus on the Visegrad Group, so I am very interested in how Prolan sees the situation in the region. Are there some expansion plans, or collaborating partners in these countries? The mentioned countries took care of maintaining their railway industry after the Hungarian Regime Change. Poland is a perfect example, because today there are more companies which are competing each other. The situation is similar in the Czech Republic. The only exception is Slovakia, where the production is not significant, yet the rail network density is not high either. So, in the case of these countries, we would enter markets where

the national producers are already integrated, and due to their local knowledge, they already have a strong competitive advantage. If we are looking for new business opportunities, we should take into consideration the Balkans first, however, we would also have to work hard to achieve it, because the railways have been national institutions over the last 150 years. The earlier mentioned ETCS is an experiment which is a step towards standardisation. In our case, we have to adapt to the national systems, know the local standards, recognise the national symbols and create national user interfaces. It is quite difficult to transform a product created for the Hungarian market into one which will be applicable abroad. Additionally, successful adaptation in one country does not mean that the process will be the same in another. Each national system has its own challenges. In conclusion, when the expected 50% coverage is implemented in Hungary, what will be the next task for Prolan? While the implementation of the systems is ongoing, TRANSPORTATION

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maintenance is getting increasingly significant. Obviously, that’s one of the most important tasks. The others are not defined yet, but they are getting clearer. The progress made in digitalisation, for example, helps us gather more information about passengers, goods and the location of trains, which is used for statistics and various traffic management purposes. Beyond that, analysing the exploited data (“big data”) from traffic control systems is also a business opportunity. The question could also be: why should the self-driving be implemented on the road instead of the railway, where the advantages of rails are given? All in all, the opportunities of digitalisation are infinite. For example, the possibility to see in realtime the location of each train which is in motion, is provided by the Prolan’s engine board equipment, and these functions can easily be extended. I would also like to mention the simulators used in education which help the future traffic managers to get familiar with the commands, and practice without the risk of traffic accidents. The 50% coverage would be an excellent result, but the opportunities in improving the railway could be even greater.

The interview was conducted by Roland Menyes on 12 January 2018.. 84

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SELF-DRIVING VEHICLES Dr Péter Kozma and Dr Árpád Takács

Every year, more than one million people lose their lives on the world’s roads. About 90% of these accidents are the result of human error. To put that into perspective: if 10 Boeing 747 airplanes crashed every day, the number of deaths would still be lower. Therefore, increasing road safety is the primary objective of emerging self-driving technologies. There are, however, other significant benefits regarding the quality of life. Based on calculations, optimally driven cars and optimally organized traffic would save humanity more than one billion hours per day. This would lead to lower carbon dioxide emissions and make travel more comfortable and less stressful. As a result, selfdriving is one of the most important research topics currently. Designing truly self-driving cars, i.e. autonomous systems to fully replace human drivers, is a huge engineering challenge. Beyond accurate and reliable detection, correct interpretation of detected objects and robust control in all

circumstances, the problem of decision-making must be solved. Several advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) functions are already available on the market. However, systems such as adaptive cruise controls, traffic jam pilots, lane keeping assists, lane departure warnings, etc. are still far from full autonomy. WHERE ARE WE NOW? Several current self-driving prototypes use expensive light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors as primary sensors. Lidar is a laser-based sensor that works similarly to radar. It creates a 3D point cloud, which is a detailed distance map of objects in the vehicle’s surroundings. This allows advanced localization in a pre-mapped world, but carries numerous scalability issues regarding data processing and storing. LIDAR only provides information regarding the distance of objects and the reflected intensity of the laser light. This means that additional sensors, e.g. a camera, are

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Figure 1: Road traffic deaths by number and type of road user (WHO 2015).[1] Note how vulnerable road users are in greater danger in less developed regions TRANSPORTATION

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needed to gather missing information, such as signal lights. Another approach is to rely primarily on visual information provided by a camera-based surround view system. This seems to be the straightforward choice, as current worldwide traffic infrastructure is built up of visual cues: signs, road markings, traffic control and the way we communicate our driving intentions. All essential information can be extracted from our environment by today’s algorithms, including a list of dynamic traffic participants, their speed, distance and intentions. Moreover, a few hundred cameras can be bought for the price of a single LIDAR. Radars, ultrasonic and various other types of devices are also used in most prototypes as secondary sensors to reach higher safety levels and redundancy. The consequence of the extremely high variety of devices is that there is no uniformed setup or a best solution for setting up a car with a specific combination of sensors. Current production vehicles are, by default, equipped with ADAS functions that represent the state-of-the-art use of computer algorithms in commercially available cars. These systems, however, strongly rely on traditional algorithms, primarily computer vision (CV). In other words, they do not use machine learning or any form of artificial intelligence (AI) in general. For existing ADAS functions, traditional CV approaches are sufficient. Nevertheless, when extending this technology to a fully autonomous level, CV algorithms do not scale well. AI-based methods are far superior for autonomous driving. Instead of hand-coding every building block of the software-stack, AI is capable of learning from examples and can perform in a more robust manner. AI-based algorithms have already surpassed classical methods in many fields of development. However, they are computerintensive and need high-performance, i.e. AI-optimized acceleration hardware. AIMOTIVE TAKES A ROLE IN ALL For some time, it was commonplace to say that the first company to solve perception would solve the complete problem. Today, dozens of industry players provide decent stacks for recognition and 86

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Figure 2: a typical “vision first” sensor setup primarily relies on cameras and is completed with radars and ultrasonic sensors.

Figure 3: AI-based segmentation of cars, trucks, drivable surface and obstacles (upper inlet) and AI-based distance recovery of objects (lower inlet)

Figure 4: a self-driving vehicle prototype according to the “vision first” concept. 11 cameras are mounted on AImotive’s car in order to create a full surround view of the environment.


environment reconstruction. Ironically, instead of straightening the path to full autonomy, ‘solved’ perception has highlighted more imminent challenges in development. Companies dedicated to providing a single building block have been desperately waiting for lists of requirements from car manufacturers, while manufacturers are struggling to find best solutions that are suitable for their needs. This paradox has brought a new era of self-driving car development: full-stack systems supported by development tools and processing hardware providing solutions from perception to vehicle control. The Hungarian self-driving technology company, AImotive is pioneering in several aspects. In contrast to the widespread LIDAR-heavy approach, AImotive cars primarily rely on cameras aiming for globally deployable AI-based technology. Furthermore, AImotive develops a complete ecosystem of self-driving by conducting research in all relevant fields of autonomous vehicle technology. In detail, the company has three pillars, i.e., three core products; aiDrive, aiSim, and aiWare. The algorithms of aiDrive fuse sensor information and carry out object recognition and classification, localization, decision making, trajectory planning and vehicle control. The photorealistic simulation environment, aiSim is a unique approach to training and verifying AI algorithms. It allows full software-in-the-loop testing of new aiDrive features. Before driving on real roads, the actual capabilities of aiDrive can be evaluated in the customizable driving environments of carefully crafted scenarios, various weather conditions and accident simulations. aiWare is AImotive’s application-independent and universal AI-optimized hardware. It extends the possible uses of AI through its 20-times more power efficient processing capabilities than other leading AI acceleration hardware solutions currently on the market. Since it was founded in 2015, AImotive has grown from 15 engineers to over 170 employees. The company has offices in Budapest, the Silicon Valley, Helsinki and Tokyo, and has received permits to test its autonomous vehicle technology with its own prototype cars on public roads in Hungary, Finland, California and Nevada.

AImotive partners with Tier 1 companies, who are the original equipment manufacturers, and with innovative global technology companies. WHAT CAN BE EXPECTED? AImotive has the potential to leave an important footprint in the history of self-driving. The race to achieve full autonomy is, however, heating up day by day. The million-dollar question remains unanswered. When will commuters be able to buy a self-driving car with no pedals or steering wheel? Current ADAS functions demand the continuous supervisory attention of human drivers and can be used only at one’s own risk. However, an accident caused by a malfunction within the driving assistant unit is crucial and can throw back years of development. Carmakers are very cautious when it comes to integrating new functions. The continuously changing and improving regulatory landscape, and the slowly adapting automotive industry and market tend to be unavoidable obstructive factors. An increasing number of technology and software companies are strenuously working to hit the grandiose target. The technology will probably be ready in a few years and numerous prototypes will roam the streets of the world’s cities. However, self-driving technology will mature and become generally accepted only in the next decade.

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CYBERTHREATS: SIMPLE SCENARIOS OR ROUGH REALITY? Dr Kinga Szálkai

The concept of cybersecurity often appears in the media – and, as a consequence, it is several times completely bereft of clear and meaningful content. The aim of this brief article is to shed light on the nature and possible implications of threats in the cyberspace and the most important questions revolving around their understandings. Cybersecurity has no universally accepted definition, but is conceptualised in several different and sometimes conflicting approaches. The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE ) confirms this with its statement claiming, “there are no common definitions for Cyber terms – they are understood to mean different things by different nations/ organisations, despite prevalence in mainstream media and in national and international organisational statements.” The Oxford English Dictionary uses a very concise definition for cybersecurity: “The state of being protected against the criminal or unauthorized use of electronic data, or the measures taken to achieve this.” The Joint Technical Committee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has a concept that is even

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shorter: “Preservation of confidentiality, integrity and availability of information in the cyberspace.” According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “cybersecurity is the activity or process, ability or capability or state whereby information and communications systems and the information contained therein are protected from and/or defended against damage, unauthorized use or modification, or exploitation” (ENISA), or “prevention of damage to, protection of, and restoration of computers, electronic communications systems, electronic communications services, wire communication, and electronic communication, including information contained therein, to ensure its availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality, and nonrepudiation” (CNSS). While NATO uses a very similar definition, the EU claims that cybersecurity consists of five different dimensions: Communications Security, Operations Security, Information Security, Physical Security and Public/National Security. The International Telecommunication Union, a UN specialised agency, in the meantime, uses the following concept: “The collection of tools, policies, security concepts, security safeguards, guidelines, risk management approaches, actions, training, best practices, assurance and technologies that can be used to protect the cyber environment and organization and user’s assets.” Departing from the differences among the mentioned definitions, it is little wonder that some voices are highly critical when the concept of cybersecurity comes into question. For example, Herr and Friedman (2015) describe the notion of cybersecurity as an “often abused and much misused term that was once intended to describe and now serves better to confuse.”


In this sense, the range of possible cyberthreats is even wider than the already extended mental space where the different notions of cybersecurity collide. NATO, for example, claims that cyberthreats “can be political, technological, legal, economic, managerial or military in nature, or can involve other disciplines appropriate for the particular risks.” ENISA, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security lists the fifteen most important cyberthreats in its yearly Threat Landscape Report. The latest report (of 2016) contains the following list of threats: malware, webbased attacks, web application attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, botnets, phishing, spam, ransomware, insider threat, physical manipulation/damage/theft/loss, exploit kits, data breaches, identity theft, information leakage and cyber-espionage. Although the list of possible cyberthreats is relatively longer than may be expected, and it is obvious that such threats bear the potential of doing great harm, it is also true that so far that there is no known single cyberattack which could factually threaten a society or state as a whole. Yet even claiming this, again, depends a lot on our perceptions of cybersecurity. The most significant danger stemming from cyberthreats occurs when these threats have strong links to other, more traditional security challenges and threats. a telling example for this is the fact that the number and intensity of cyberthreats have recently increased significantly in those areas where tensions, conflicts and warfare are present.

WHAT CAN QUALIFY AS A CYBERTHREAT? Let us discuss the categories of cyberthreats in a more systematic way. Several concepts are used in this field, but if we want to highlight the most widespread ones, cybercrime, cybervandalism, hacktivism, cyber-espionage, cyberterrorism and cyberwar could be the keywords. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), cybercrime “includes unauthorized network breaches and theft of intellectual property and other data; it can be financially motivated, and response is typically the jurisdiction of law enforcement agencies.” Cybervandalism is often related to juvenile hackers and their intention to make some mischief and prove their abilities by attacking computers, networks and websites – which may be an extremely dangerous activity, if they, for example, target critical infrastructurerelated facilities. Hacktivism may be similar, if the nature of the attack is concerned, but this category is more related to political activism and aims to further a clear political or social objective. The most well-known example of hacktivism is the Anonymous group, which uses distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to draw attention to certain issues. Cyberespionage deals with “classified or proprietary information used by governments or private corporations”, and the main aim of cyberspies is to “gain a competitive strategic, security, financial, or political advantage” (CRS). Cyberterrorism, again defined by the Congressional Research Service, “can be considered the premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers

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and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives, or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives,” while cyberwar “is typically conceptualized as state-on-state action equivalent to an armed attack or use of force in cyberspace that may trigger a military response with a proportional kinetic use of force” (CRS). Cyberthreats may also become intertwined with networks of organised crime. These categories, however, are rarely strict legal concepts, and they are very often used in a vague way or even interchangeably. Therefore, it is not easy to determine whether an act in the cyberspace is to be considered a crime, and what kind of authorities are responsible for dealing with it. The fact that the identity of the perpetrator is not easy (and several times almost impossible) to determine, further complicates the question. WHO CAN COMMIT A CYBERTHREAT? Actually, anyone with a computer and internet access can pose a cyberthreat to a wide variety of targets. These individuals are not always clearly identifiable, and they are also not easy to associate with a certain organisation or state. As for their motivations, they can endanger cybersecurity for several reasons, such as pure entertainment, political activism, criminal aims, terrorism,

subversion and disinformation, or outright stateagainst-state warfare. It is important to mention that cyberthreats may offer invaluable assets in asymmetric or guerrilla warfare and insurgencies, as they are less costly and risky than using other weapons. In this way, cyberthreats enable the fight against a supreme power having seemingly invincible capabilities in terms of military power. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that the United States, Russia and China pay specific attention to cybersecurity and allocate significant sources for the development of this field. WHO (AND WHAT) CAN BE THREATENED BY A CYBERTHREAT? The most structured way of describing the possible subjects of cyberthreats is to focus on four different levels: 1) individual, 2) organisational, 3) supply chain, 4) societal (EP). If we talk about cyberthreats on the individual level, questions such as personal privacy, freedom of speech, access to services, and financial or physical security may occur. In the case of the organisational level, confidential information on products, services, or means of production may be in danger, but there are also more intangible subjects like trust or reputation. Concerning the supply chain, again, confidential information may be leaked, but the issue of the protection of the

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critical infrastructure also comes to the forefront. This issue is also present on the societal level, where providing the essential services for the population is of key importance. Cyberthreats may also concern governmental activities and offices, state secrets, the democratic and/or legal order, and the national security itself (EP). Propaganda and disinformation may also cause disruptions in societies. As there are several possible targets and the tackling of these would sometimes necessitate radically different reactions from each other, it is very important to determine different responsibility categories for different categories of targets. WHO COULD ACT AGAINST A CYBERTHREAT? As there is a wide range of possible cyberthreats, relevant authorities do not only have to identify the sources of threat in the cyberspace, but also the actor’s motivations and its targets in order to determine whether it is to be considered a real attack, to give an appropriate response, and to decide whether it is a question of state security or not. In the case of the majority of cyberthreats, individual users and the anti-virus industry are responsible for data protection, and the involvement of the state may even be counter-productive. In the case of businesses and enterprises, the situation may change, especially if the concerned company

constitutes an important part of the national economy or is related to the critical infrastructure or telecommunication systems of the state. There are, though, issues that unambiguously and inevitably belong to the realm of state security, such as intelligence systems, state institutions, the bureaucracy and the military. It also has to be taken into consideration that there is another, more superior level where cyberthreats may be addressed – the level of the international community, where states and other international actors work together for the establishment and the development of norms in the field of cybersecurity. SUMMARY Overall, it should be emphasised that the realisation of cyberthreats in the majority of the cases only causes minor or major inconveniences for individual users and business-related actors – at least, so far. However, the possibility of facing destructive and disruptive cyberthreats manifested at the level of national security is unambiguously increasing. The nature of Russia’s and China’s manifold information warfare capacities and the tendency of the widespread application of cyberactivities in conflicts all over the world warn us that the often-described scenarios of cyberattacks shaking the very core of liberal societies may easily turn into reality in the near future.

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WHAT’S THE VALUE OF PRIVACY? Elina Herédi

Today there is a greater level of digital interconnectedness than ever before. It is human nature that we do not want to bother wasting time with security checks whenever we book an appointment at the GP, check the map, connect with friends or order food online. We want to get things done and done quickly, so much so that most of us prefer to trust the service provider with our personal information without questioning the security. However, services that seem to be free, like Google and Facebook, might charge a high price for catering to our pressing need for information: our digital privacy. Often the user is required to give away personal information before accessing a website or a service. With the development of technologies, operators are capable of collecting big data which can be used later for predictive and user behaviour analytics. The first step in the data value chain is the collection of raw data. Once the data has been consolidated from different sources, restructured and analysed, the exposed information becomes extremely useful for the digital profiling of individuals. The further use of this digital profile for marketing purposes is extremely lucrative. Thus the value of the raw data multiplies through the process. But how can we trust service providers with our digital lives? Besides the collection of digitalised data, hacking into operators’ systems has also developed into an illegal, albeit very profitable business. In 2016, the application-based low-cost taxi company Uber chose to conceal a data breach which affected 57 million users worldwide. Hackers demanded a ransom of a $100.000 to delete the stolen data and the direction of the company judged it better not to disclose the incident to the public. The biggest breach of 2016 was the Adult Friend Finder case - where confidential and very sensitive records of more than 300 million users were disclosed. Equifax, a consumer credit 94

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reporting agency, announced a cybersecurity breach in September 2017, four months after the incident took place. Approximately 145.5 million consumers’ personal information was disclosed including their social security numbers. Companies often prefer paying ransoms and keeping quiet about the data protection breaches that can affect the lives of millions. In today’s digitalised world, businesses are facing not only the traditional threats of competition or bad management, but also the threat of a cyberattack. Companies can go bankrupt in seconds if they cannot rebuild consumers’ trust quickly enough after a breach. However, the future is not so gloomy. Europe has arrived to a turning point in personal data regulation. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will replace the old Data Protection Directive. The old directive came into effect in 1995 following the nonbinding OECD guidelines. The implementation of the directive’s guidelines varied widely in the member states. After more than 20 years, the renewal is long overdue. The GDPR, adopted in April 2016, will take effect in May 2018, and has many differences to the old directive. It will not only greatly affect European citizens’ rights but also many of the largest companies all over the world. In contrast to the Data Protection Directive, the GDPR will standardise EU law and will be binding in all the 28 member states. This will create an integrated digital economy across the European Union. Therefore, a unified understanding of what consists as personal data will be applied. According to the current EU definition, personal data is “any information relating to identified or identifiable person”. Political views, religious beliefs, health information and sexual life are referred to as sensitive personal data. The design of the GDPR will prioritise European citizens’ rights; the processing of the data collected


DEEP AND DARK WEB Many of us, typical internet users, identify the “World Wide Web” with what some of the huge online platforms like Facebook or Google let us

see. However, the realm of the real web is much bigger than that—estimates vary, but experts say that more than 90-99% of it cannot be

found via any of the search engines, and this percentage is growing rapidly. This is the part scientist tend to call the deep or the invisible

web. It is often illustrated with an iceberg: the tip of the iceberg is the visible part of the

web, while the large lump below the surface stays indiscernible, as it is inaccessible to

search engines’ web crawlers, hidden behind

registration (like your webmail or web bank) and paywalls (like Netflix or some newspapers), or

undisclosed by its creator and therefore cannot be indexed. A smaller but still sizeable portion

of the deep web or, let us say, the bottom of the iceberg, is purposely hidden. That is what we usually call the dark web, where users and their activity can remain untraceable.

While there are some alternatives to access it (such as I2P or Freenet), the most widespread

version nowadays is Tor or The Onion Router. It was initially developed by the U.S. Navy to

help people stay anonymous, but ironically, today a sizeable part of it is taken over by cyber

criminals selling drugs, stolen stuff, hitmen, child porn, and other illicit goods. Its name

comes from the technology behind it, as its users cannot access pages directly but through

many random and encrypted relays, nested like the layers of an onion. Tor webpages use the

.onion domain instead of, for example, .com and need a special browser. They cannot be found with search engines, but some of them are listed on link directories such as the Hidden Wiki. One may also say the dark web is characterized by

the “banality of evil,” as it is downright boring,

unless you are out for some illegal stuff or know exactly what you are searching for.

will be in the hands of the individual. When Google lost the case against the Spanish Data Protection Agency in 2014, a new precedent was set regarding the question of what constitutes personal data and of what a citizen’s rights are when it comes to the use of data collected by the provider. The collection of data of a person’s browsing history on the internet and digital profiling are not new, yet the old directive was not powerful enough to regulate this. The verdict of the European Court of Justice upheld the notion of the right to be forgotten. The citizen’s right to be forgotten provides grounds for the removal of personal information on request but according to certain critiques, the decision hinders the freedom of expression. GDPR will affect companies in new ways. The mandatory notification of any security breaches will be applied to companies that operate using EU citizens’ data. This means that if the data collector outsources data to a third party and there is a misuse, both companies will be liable, even if the third party is registered outside the EU. It also means that the GDPR will have implications for companies all over the world. Starting in May, operators will be legally required to follow the path of the data from collection to analysis. In case of a data protection breach that goes unreported for more than 72 hours, the operator will pay the price of non-compliance a fine of up to 20 million Euros. Paying ransoms to hackers to conceal a breach and to preserve the company’s good image may just cost too much in the future. The new regulation will also have an impact on e-commerce. Today despite 33% of the European population buying goods on the internet, the online market share compared to the total retail trade stays at a relatively low 7%. The new single digital market is supposed to build consumer trust and help economic growth. While we are benefiting from seemingly free information, we are also giving away information about ourselves for free simultaneously. Our privacy has been privatized. Also unquestionably, we are looking ahead to more serious breaches in the future. The question stays the same: are states adaptable enough to keep up with the pace of hackers?

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He now leads his own company, Intentional Software, which aims to transform teamwork in the modern workplace. In April 2007, he became the fifth person to visit space as a tourist and the second Hungarian in space. He returned to space in 2009, earning him the title of the first repeat space tourist.

People

János Lajos Neumann (1903-1957)

Charles Simonyi (1948- ) Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born American, was head of Microsoft’s application software group, where he oversaw the creation of their flagship software package – Microsoft Office. 98

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János Neumann, a Hungarian-born American, was a mathematician, physicist, and computer scientist. He is generally regarded as the leading mathematician of his time and said to be the last representative of the great mathematicians and a true genius. He was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, in the development of functional analysis, and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer, while also contributing to the Manhattan Project. He also worked on the philosophy of artificial intelligence with Alan Turing when the latter visited Princeton in the 1930s.


Douglas Engelbart was an American engineer, inventor, and early design pioneer of interactive computer environments and the internet. Notably, he invented the computer mouse in 1964. He also created the first two-dimensional editing system, and was the first to demonstrate the use of mixed text-graphics and shared-screen viewing. The Engelbart’s Law, named after him, defined the intrinsic rate of human performance as exponential.

Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) Alan Turing was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, crypto-analyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He played a critical role in the development of theoretical computer science and algorithmics by creating his self-named Turing machine during World War II, which was designed to break the German Enigma code. His machine, a precursor to the modern personal computer, is estimated to have shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over fourteen million lives.

Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013)

Stephen Gary Wozniak (1950- ) Closely linked with fellow Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak is a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. He developed both the Apple I and II computers, which were integral in the development of the personal computer industry. He currently serves as an executive at the data virtualization company, Primary Data. Wozniak also recently launched an online technical education platform in order to increase interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) careers. He remains an employee of Apple Inc. in a symbolic capacity. CULTURE

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them, while in Tron it was the computer that pulled in its own creator, who had to face the evil software, mastered by artificial intelligence, and find his way out from the hardware – the antitype of virtual reality. It is such a pity that the protagonist, played by Jeff Bridges, could not by then say “Operator, I need an exit!”

landline phones that offer themselves as a way out from the digital maze.

Films

Her

Matrix

Tron A movie released in the year when Commodore 64 went into production, Tron did not make it to our list as a tribute to its valuable contribution to the development of the movie industry, rather because it was one of the earliest pictures that envisaged the triumph of the machine and digitalism over humanity. Though the very same year saw the production of the cult movie Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s all-time classic featuring genetically designed so-called “replicants,” threatening the future of mankind who created 100

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Since 1999, we all know that déja vu is indeed a glitch in the “matrix.” In Matrix we had to face the truth that everything we thought was reality was nothing else than a nicely staged setting, maintained by artificially intelligent machines in order to make enslaved mankind produce the energy they need. An enthralled humankind has no other chance to fight their overlords but to find and rely on the “chosen one.” Luckily, there is always a handsome hacker and a couple of old school

Remember Tamagotchi? Well, it is like that, only worse. This 2015 Spike Jonze movie revolves around the question of what would become of human relationships if artificial intelligence came true. Let us say there would be a software specifically designed to meet all our social and community demands. Is it possible to fall in love with someone without a human body? If yes, how do we create new concepts of intimacy, bonding, or commitment? Could you then expect reciprocity from a person who is not flesh and blood? Before deterring anyone from watching the movie, we must add that these serious problems are served sugar-coated with romance and atmospheric music – which makes the movie easy to get indulged in.


Mr. Robot

Ex Machina One year later, the AI got a body on the movie screen. Of course, it is again a woman, and it reminds us of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, where the source of eternal sin was created to meet the man’s desire and wishes. The movie Ex Machina is a chamber play about the emancipation of a perfect-bodied, perfectly intelligent, man-made machine, a sort of strange love

triangle among two men and a robot. Like Her, this movie is also about reciprocity, and the answer it gives is scarcely promising. Those who had been wishing for a robot-friend or a robot-lover would surely be discouraged for quite some time after watching this movie.

Finally, the odd one out, since Mr. Robot is not a feature film but a series, but if there is only one thing you will watch this year about the impact digitalisation has had on society, this should be the one. The protagonist is Eliot, a real Jekyll and Hyde from New York, who happens to be a hacker. Outraged by the tech giant tellingly named Evil Corp., he establishes (the likewise aptly termed) FSociety organization, to strike a coordinated digital blow and push reset on society’s hardware. As we know, imploding the financial system is enough –the rest would follow suit and collapse like a cardboard castle. The whole system of an influential company that produces the e-coin currency is damaged by the attack beyond repair. The series paints a merciless portrait of an alternative present – of which the scariest thing is how firmly it is rooted in the realities of our own present.

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Netflix

Brands

Founded in 1997, Netflix, Inc. is an American entertainment company which provides streaming on-demand videos. It entered the contentproduction industry in 2013 under the ‘Netflix Original’ moniker. Since then, Netflix has greatly expanded its production of both film and television series; in 2016 they made 126 original series and films. More traditional media companies see Netflix, and the instant availability of their movies, as a threat. Today Netflix is present in 190 countries worldwide and of October 2017 has 109.25 million subscribers worldwide.

Amazon Founded in 1994, Amazon.com, Inc. is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company. It started as an online bookstore, but later diversified to sell electronics, food, toys and jewellery, among other items. Furthermore, Amazon also produces its own consumer electronics, like the Kindle e-readers. It maintains separate retail websites for different parts of the world. The tech giant is the largest internet retailer in the world by revenue and market capitalization. Amazon is the fourth most valuable public company in the world, and the largest internet company by revenue in the world. 102

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Napster Napster was founded as a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing internet service where MP3 digital audio files could be shared. At its peak, the site had about 26,5 million registered users, which allowed for the easy sharing and downloading of songs. Two years later after its 1999 founding, the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Still existing today as a digital music service, Napster changed the music industry forever, initiating the shift from CDs to digital music sharing.


Google Founded in 1998, Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in online advertising technology, search engine maximization, cloud computing, and a variety other internet-related services and products. Distinctive in how they analyze relationships among websites, Google is the most globally visited website and one of the most valuable brands in the world. Several other Google services, i.e. Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Translate, YouTube and Blogger, are also among the top 100 most visited websites.

Facebook Facebook, Inc. is an American for-profit corporation and an online social media and social networking service. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to reach a market cap of $250 billion. As of June 2017, Facebook had more than 2 billion monthly active users and counting. Since April 2016, Facebook has been the most popular social networking site in the world. While generating most of its revenues from advertisements, the company also owns Instagram, Messenger and the recently bought WhatsApp.

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OWNERSHIP IS OVERRATED Zsolt Pálmai

Ownership issues regarding digital products are most often discussed by contrasting digital formats with their physical equivalents (e-books vs. hard copies, MP3s vs. vinyl records, etc.), due to the obvious and often striking differences in the way the various forms of content are distributed, consumed, and handled. However, it is equally revealing to explore an analogy with another practice that our civilization has developed and now takes for granted: passenger car traffic. There are essentially two types of external forces that regulate how we drive around in our cars, forces that we are both familiar and (mostly, or at least ideally) comfortable with: physical and nonphysical. The former includes traffic gates and barriers of all kinds (which will stop or at least potentially damage a vehicle before a violation is

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committed), while the latter category is made up of visible signs (e.g. telling drivers to stop at an intersection or not to exceed a certain speed), as well as general regulations with which aspiring drivers must demonstrate a suitable degree of familiarity in order to receive a license. Is it safe to say that this is a settled state of affairs that people have come to accept, even if they sometimes violate the various regulations? Yes, it is—as evidenced by, among others, the general familiarity with the ramifications of said violations and the compliance with the procedures and potential penalties that they entail (e.g. paying fines, having licences revoked). The fact that we have arrived at this situation and the processes that have led to it offer a valuable historical perspective when investigating the


eventual outcome of the debate surrounding issues of digital ownership. And history suggests that fundamental changes to current practices are unlikely to occur. Let us switch now from cars to digital goods and untangle our analogy. In the digital world, “intangible” regulatory forces include, most prominently, End User Licencing Agreements (EULA) and Terms of Service agreements (ToS), while the most widely-used and known form of “tangible” regulation of digital goods is Digital Rights Management (DRM). Like traffic signs and general rules of the road, an EULA or ToS do not involve any direct, practical means (e.g. software) to keep users from using digital content in a way they are not supposed to; instead, they exist to enable the licensor to take them to court should they engage in such an activity (as well as to protect the company from lawsuits)—just like how a speed limit will allow the police to monitor roads and penalize violators using a predetermined, objectively applicable framework. Meanwhile, DRM involves technological means to limit by whom, when, how, and how many times a digital product is used. For example, before

App for iTunes Store

iTunes went DRM-free in 2009, Apple’s DRM used to prevent (or at least make it considerably harder for) users from making copies of MP3s purchased from the company’s digital store. This way, users were not only told what they could and could not do with their music, they were also proactively prevented from misusing their files by built-in software limitations—just like how traffic gates will keep drivers from entering certain sections (at least if they want to keep their cars intact). One major difference, of course, is when you pay for a car you have every right and means to “alienate” it—sell it or pass it on to someone—, whereas you generally cannot do this with MP3s, e-books, video games, and other digital products. These products are not “owned” in the same way. In fact, technically speaking, it is more accurate to call users “licencees” rather than “owners,” and EULAs and ToS agreements make sure that this distinction is clearly and thoroughly defined. This presents a massive contrast not only with the practice of ownership regarding cars, but also the way we have traditionally owned the items that we are also “consuming” in digital form today: books, records, game disks and cartridges, etc. The various complaints are widely publicized, claiming that the purchasing process is deceptive, as clicking on the “buy” button does not result in the transaction that people have come to expect when shopping for goods. More specifically, it does not allow purchasers to sell or simply copy goods they no longer need. But is this really as big a concern for consumers as some analysts and advocacy groups make it out to be? To the best of our knowledge, no, it is not. In fact, even as e-book sales continue their moderate decline in some major markets—while also still lagging far behind physical sales, with digital numbers only projected to reach a quarter of all book sales in 2018—the trend cannot be blamed on these oft-criticised limitations. In a 2013 survey by Voxburner (the debate about digital ownership appears to have been more intense during the early 2010s), only 6% of respondents cited not being able to sell an e-book as a reason for preferring physical. Being “restricted to a particular device” (a form of DRM) and a limited ability to share (a situation that has CULTURE

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seen improvements across the board) accounted for only 20% and 10% of reasons given. This data, combined with the previously discussed situation involving cars and driving, suggests two things: First, ownership is a somewhat vague and, consequently, overrated concept (since the smaller, more practical details of what you can actually do with something you supposedly “own” are what seem to matter), and second, licencing works and is here to stay. What if you do not have a driver’s licence? Then you cannot operate a vehicle on public roads—or anywhere, depending on local regulations. And even if you are a licenced driver, you cannot park anywhere at any time. Physical goods, while they satisfy many people’s expectations of alienability, also present similar limitations. They degrade physically, can get lost or destroyed, and take up space. By contrast, your digital “possessions” will not sound or look worse over time, and should you delete a file by accident, you can re-download them using the appropriate account system (barring server-side issues or a compromised ID). And while a well-packed bookshelf is more likely to impress visitors, it is hard to beat the practicality of a tablet’s capability of storing dozens of books is a slim and light package. This does not mean that the situation is perfect— but “perfect” is another term that has little practical use in the present discourse. The market and the industry continue to evolve: Account sharing, allowing for multiple users to access the same content (another feature simply not possible with physical goods) is expanding; leading video game distribution platform Steam is now offering refunds for digital titles; audiobooks from Audible can be kept even after cancelling one’s subscription. At the same time, people still love physical books (and buy about three for every digital purchase, as discussed above), wait in line for hours at the box office for the latest Star Wars and Marvel movies, and even vinyl record sales hit a 25-year high in 2016. Meanwhile, despite their culture-defining significance and large user base, streaming services like Netflix and Spotify have struggled to turn a profit, raising questions of sustainability. Just like how rules of the road are the result of a logical, multi-stakeholder process, and exist 106

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to protect the various parties involved, rules of digital ownership offer different kinds of protection to consumers, creators, and distributors. They are also a work in progress, shaped to a great degree by “end user” response. This dynamic is far too complicated for the legal power to sell an unwanted digital product to be singled out as the defining issue, as evidenced by the general acceptance of existing practices by the consumers. To an increasingly large number of people, the trade-off is worth it, and the legal framework will continue to evolve accordingly. In fact, you may only partially “own” your car now: As of 2015, General Motors’ official position is that the software that allows your vehicle to run is merely licensed to users.


E-SPORTS: THE CHESS OF THE 21ST CENTURY Arnold Velansits For a new generation of boys and girls, watching television is not always the default option—and neither is choosing to watch or partake in sports. Or at least not in sports that the generation before them considers “real” sports. While the term e-sport got coined to sidestep the mostly philosophical question of whether it is “real” or not, e-sport itself is absolutely a real phenomenon, one that attracts a bigger audience each year, while also drawing the attention of mainstream sponsors. Although it is not big enough yet to threaten basketball, football or Formula-1, a new way of sport has nevertheless been born with the digital revolution, and it is here to stay. Take for example one of the most well-known video games of the past ten years: League of Legends. It is a competitive fantasy arena game, where players choose a hero from a roster of more than a hundred (think of these as different

roles in other sports, only more visually distinct) to embark on a digital battle where the goal is to destroy your opponent’s fortress. The game takes roughly an hour to play, and as the ten players wrestle with each other, spectators can see the action unfold from a bird’s-eye view, with skilled commentators focusing on where the most crucial plays are being made. This game has more than a hundred million players worldwide, and the top championship, (hosted in the LA Staples Center in 2016, and the Beijing National Stadium in 2017) had a peak viewership of more than 14 million, with the winners taking home more than a million dollars in prizes. And League is almost as exciting to watch as it is to play: while the complex rules take months or even years to master, a viewer can easily see when one player is about to make a play, wander into an enemy team’s trap or turn

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the game around with the well-timed activation of an ability. And while the game enjoyed almost complete dominance of the e-sports-genre in the past five years, a new challenger appeared in 2017: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, a game which, despite being released in an unfinished state, already boasts more than 3 million concurrent players and, thanks to its popularity in China, is growing at an enormous rate, with a concept that can be described as the digital equivalent of Hunger Games. These sports games have grassroots origins: Rather than being picked by studios to be the “next big thing”, the gameplay, the visuals and the buzz generated by the community gives these games visibility in online video sharing and streaming sites, such as Twitch.TV, Ustream, and YouTube. From there, certain games might even make the move to television channels, but this is not necessary for becoming popular. Since the games are being played from computers or cell phones, sometimes huge hits can have millions of viewers without ever entering the mainstream media at all. Every e-sport is also a video game, but the same is not true in reverse: a game needs to provide a solid framework of rules, have room for players to grow and improve their gameplay via regular practice, and usually cannot contain too many random

elements (unless if we venture into the realm of card games, where randomness is a prerequisite). But most importantly, it needs an audience willing to not only play but watch the games as they go on—this is rarely something that can be earned unless the developers strive for it. If one adjective were to be used to describe the e-sport scene, it would be volatile. In regular sports, one could easily live a lifetime while having one favourite sport. Meanwhile, in the e-sports world such a situation is unrealistic. Quake and StarCraft, iconic games considered to be the forefathers of e-sports, have both retired and given way to multiple successors in the past 20 years. Nowadays, new competitive games are constantly popping up, but unless they can match the biggest names (like the aforementioned League of Legends, the biggest e-sport currently), their fate is usually to fade away in a matter of years. That said, retraining, although somewhat rare in more physical sports, is certainly a viable option for professional players in this scene. Fighting games, where the basic concepts remain the same—two players confined in small arenas, fighting to control space, predicting their opponent’s attacks and pressuring them—, see complete competitive scenes migrating from one

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game to the other. This was the case between Street Fighter III and its latest (fifth) iteration, and similar patterns can also be seen in the game’s rival series. And if competitive play is no longer an option, the player can still choose to stay in the community as a commentator or content creator: Famous StarCraft player Sean ‘Day9’ Plott became the biggest commentator for StarCraft II before moving on to Hearthstone, and then into game development. And volatility does not only refer to the games retiring: The titles themselves change very rapidly, a property attributed to developers actively tinkering with gameplay elements while their games gain popularity. Imagine if the rules of soccer or the size and shape of the field were changed— sometimes even during big competitions. This is what e-sport-players have to deal with during their careers. The developers are walking on thin ice during this balancing act, as most games also have a casual audience, often much more sizable than the pro players, and what is considered a fair change by the pro players are not always welcomed by the hobbyists, and vice versa. There have been games that started out as competitive fan-favourites but lost ground and eventually faded away as a consequence of a change that led to stale, uninspiring, and predictable gameplay. Not everything is shiny and happy, though, as e-sports display all the traits of unregulated competitions. In South Korea competitive teams might often compel players into practicing 14-16 hours a day in the hopes that they gain an edge in the arena. In the United States and in Europe there have been numerous scandals where players have consumed excessive amounts of energy drinks or went straight for Adderall during matches—a pattern that could be avoided more easily with a bit of governmental oversight and standardisation. Success is not easy in this field, as players all around the world can quickly learn from and replicate each other’s moves and tactics (or even training methods), without having to access limited physical training space. If the current trends continue, more and more e-sport titles are bound to appear and ultimately become accepted by the mainstream

the same way chess, pool, and poker are. The question is not if but when—and for young gamers all around the world, it is not even a question anymore but today’s reality.

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DIGITALISATION IN THE FILM INDUSTRY Anikó Gorácz During its 120 years of history, the film industry has always been fond of reflecting on the technology that was necessary for its creation. Ever since it was possible to record and project motion pictures at the end of the 19th century, the creators were constantly concerned about the new means of production and how it can be included in the storytelling on the canvas. Take the vampires as an example, as one of the oldest and most popular tropes of movies. The blood-sucking creatures – who were already popular during the era of the silent movies – embodied and still embody alien and unexplainable deviant social behaviour in the eyes of the viewers, and thus at the end of the movie they had to die in order to restore the balance. The death of the vampire on the screen shows perfectly where the cinematic technique was at a given time. In the era of the flammable celluloid, when whole cinema factories and stores often burnt down, vampires were scorched by the sunshine, disappearing into flames like the technical carrier on which they appeared. In the pioneering era of digitalisation, when the digital recording of motion pictures became technically possible, but the deterioration of the quality of the images was still a problem (everything became too pixelated in comparison to recordings on the celluloid film), the doomed vampire did not burst into flames like its predecessors but broke into pixels at the moment of its death. In the future, vampires will probably become encoded errors created by hackers and in order to destroy them one would have to cut them off from the network they live on.

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In the first 100 years of filmmaking many things changed (genre, themes, narrative etc.) but the technical carrier remained the same. The old motion pictures produced by the Lumière brothers at the end of the 19th century could be played by any machine in a movie theatre in 2000, as the basic principle did not change: the celluloidbased, perforated-edge filmstrips remained more or less the same since Edison invented them. Even though at the end of the 1920s the sound started to accompany films, and later the appearance of coloured motion pictures heralded the end of the black-and-white movie era, the principles of recording and projection remained unchanged for 100 years. However, in the last 10-15 years this method transformed greatly, movie theatres completely switched to the use of digital projectors, screening special digital package files, so called DCP copies, instead of film stripes in metal cans. Only a few big cinemas, art cinemas and film festivals maintained the use of classical film-projectors, in case the celluloid enthusiast Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan or Béla Tarr decided to make a new movie. Cinematic innovations – such as digitalisation – usually start with blockbuster movies, intended for a wider audience. Arthouse cinematography has always been more conservative concerning the use of new techniques than the makers of commercial movies. László Nemes Jeles has shot his Oscarwinning film Son of Saul on 35mm film. Today this counts as a curiosity, an artistic whimsy, especially since in 2011 the three big camera manufacturers (ARRI, Panavision and Aaton) have ceased the production of classic film cameras. Moreover, the equipment needed for analogue cutting has been gathering dust in film history museums for quite some time now. Not to mention that through the use of digital technologies the cutting of sound and the motion picture became two completely independent procedures. It is not rare in the case of blockbuster films that these are done in completely different studios, often continents apart, and then


after the digital post-production works they are put together again in a third studio. The viewers only perceive the ultimate result, the perfect sound effect and movie experience. Thus, those directors who chose to swim against the digital filmmaking current and continue to use film strips, or sometimes even black-and-white films (there are only two places in the world where blackand-white film rolls can be developed) and do little digital post-production work may quickly earn the title of a strange or eccentric artist. Even though these filmmakers turn to these ‘obsolete’ techniques for the effect as well, they try to preserve the raw and realistic effect created by filmmaking that reminds us of the direct style of the documentaries. Despite the rising trend of digitalisation, the gourmands of film-consumption swear that seeing A 35mm movie on the canvas is an experience like no other. a few years ago, Steven Spielberg claimed that he will be faithful to the analogue artistic methods of a 35mm film until the last film development laboratory closes. However, this age does not favour him and the other celluloid enthusiasts. Less and less movie theatres are capable of screening film rolls, and the art of filmmaking is becoming more and more similar to genetic engineering in a laboratory rather than capturing the reality in front of the camera. TOY STORY, THAT IS, THE CGI STORY Anyone who likes animated movies is surely familiar with the cavorting desk lamp which became the symbol of Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar became independent from Lucasfilm – founded by George Lucas – with the help of Steve Jobs as an investor and you can already guess by the name Pixar that from the start was strongly committed to digitalisation and was aiming to build its own universe from pixels. At the very beginning the main source of revenue for the studio was the Pixar Image Computer, a special computer designed for animation works, and the software designed to go with it, which was later pushed out from the market by Adobe’s graphic programmes. At first Steve Jobs and the Pixar studio were only hoping to fill the gap made by the orders of the Disney Studio, but later they also began to produce their own animations.

The first director of the small animation studio was John Lasseter who studied at Disney and created his first Oscar-nominated CGI short movie called Luxo Junior in 1986 (it was about the adventures of the grey desk lamp). At that time computer animation was a curiosity but the decades passed since then proved them right. Even though today it is impossible to imagine a movie without some computer animation, when they presented the first completely animated full-length movie Toy Story in 1995, not many believed in its success. Digital effects have been used for a while then, but only in certain genres (e.g. sci-fi, Lucasfilm) as the process was expensive and complex and the results were more embarrassing than convincing. But Toy Story started a new era and wrote a new chapter in film history with a story that occurs mostly in a children’s room with toys talking to each other. According to the story, eight-year-old Andy gets a new toy, a space cowboy figure with laser-guns (the predecessor of robotic toys), and therefore temporarily discards the soft sheriff figure, which has been his faithful companion since he was little. The fight that begins between the old and the new toy for the child’s love perfectly symbolizes the rivalry for the viewers’ favour between classic filmmaking and the new digital technologies. Just as peace was reached between the old and the new at the end of Toy Story, the two different and at first glance seemingly incompatible methods of filmmaking have both eventually become a natural part of our lives. The recurring line of the movie “To infinity and beyond!” became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and although Pixar has since integrated into the Disney empire, the possibilities of CGI are infinite. The computer animation and the digital methods became playthings for filmmakers, just like the cowboy and sheriff toys in Andy’s bedroom.

Tha space cowboy figure with laser-guns and the soft sheriff figure from Toy Story CULTURE

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INTRODUCTION: ANTALL JÓZSEF KNOWLEDGE CENTRE

The Antall József Knowledge Centre (AJKC) in Hungary, during its eight years of existence, has introduced a variety of events targeting Hungarian students enrolled in higher education, as well as domestic and international professional audiences. The Knowledge Centre’s main objectives, in line with the Antall philosophy, are talent management and providing students and young professionals with wide-ranging practical knowledge through various events. The Knowledge Centre is a Budapest-based think tank researching topics of national, regional, and international relevance such as the Visegrad Cooperation, the future global role of the US, China, and Russia, the Middle East, security policy, sustainable development, as well as technological and social innovation. Our institution, with its main office in Budapest, two regional offices in Pécs and Győr, as well as the Brussels Office, is working toward strenghtening institutional relations both at the national and international level. Each of these offices also develops scholarship and internship programmes. The publishing activities of AJKC involve releasing professional publications, scientific works

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on political and social sciences (with special regard to security policy and international relations), as well as university textbooks. In our autobiographical series, prominent personalities of the Cold War period, including Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl recount crucial years and decisions still affecting their lives. Reacting to events of political, social, and economic significance in the 21st century, the professional publications series of the Knowledge Centre is made up of works incorporating the latest results of international relations, geopolitics, political history, economics, and psychology. In spring 2015, the Brussels Office of the Knowledge Centre was established. The bust of Prime Minister József Antall was inaugurated in the József Antall Building of the European Parliament on 31 March 2015 as part of the first instalment of the Variations on Europe conference series, which continued in May and September. In January 2017, at the event organised jointly with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered a speech


entitled Europe 2017 on the challenges of our common future. The event was opened by Dr Hans-Gert Pöttering, Chairman of the KonradAdenauer-Stiftung and former President of the European Parliament. Our largest event is the think.BDPST conference. The main aim of the project focuses on innovation, new technologies, and regional development is to put Hungary on the map of large-scale regional conferences, by organising the most significant innovation forum in the region, a dialogue is facilitated a between the representatives of the economic, governmental, and scientific spheres. The event enjoys the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary and the International Visegrad Fund. In addition to innovation, the Knowledge Centre puts special emphasis on sustainable development. During the four instalments of the SUSCO Budapest conference series, many topics were examined including the sustainable development goals (SDGs) developed by the United Nations, smart cities and sustainable transportation, water and the city, and the global energy landscape.

In 2017, the Knowledge Centre organised the fifth Antall József Summer School. Every year, 40-50 students from more than 20 countries enrolled in different MA and PhD programmes participate in the two-week event, which aims of which is to strengthen and render the Visegrad Cooperation more visible in the field of education. The Antall József Summer School provides those interested in Central European studies with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the V4 region and Hungary. The objectives of the Knowledge Centre include talent management and the establishment of higher education network. For these purposes, AJKC organises the annual Danube Regatta. The number of participating universities has grown year after year since its inception: in 2017, teams from 18 Hungarian and two foreign universities, Maastricht and Hannover, competed against each other in rowing eights and dragon boat races. Other aims of the Regatta include encouraging a diverse use of the Danube and improving the image of Hungary.

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THE HISTORY OF THINK.BDPST IN PICTURES Organised by the Antall József Knowledge Centre, the third instalment of the strategic conference aimed at regional development, think.BDPST, will be held on 28-29 March 2018. In 2018, the conference series, revolving around research, innovation, and future technologies, will focus on the future of transportation, the innovation potential of human-machine interaction, and urban innovation. The primary goal of the conference is to showcase the main research and innovation trends in transportation, thereby facilitating cooperation opportunities and initiating dialogue between the governmental, academic, and business sectors. Each year, think.BDPST offers insight into the latest innovation trends and research results in the field of future technologies, focusing primarily on the Central European region, with special regard to the Visegrad Group. Speakers of the two-day conference include HE Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary, Professor David Winickoff, Secretary of the Working Party on Bio-, Nano-, and Converging Technologies at OECD, HE Dr Zoltán Cséfalvay, Permanent Representative of Hungary to the OECD, Vik Kachoria, President and CEO of Spike Aerospace Inc, Robert Missen, Director at DG MOVE, Innovation & Research of the European Commission, Lord David Willetts, Board Member of UK Research and Innovation, Anat Lea Bonshtien, Chairman and Director of the Fuel Choices and Smart Mobility Initiative at the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel, Kornél Szepessy, CEO of HungaroControl Ltd, Dr Jacob Cohen, Chief Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, and Dr József Pálinkás, President of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office Hungary.

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It is an honour for us to welcome the Republic of Korea as the special guest country of the conference this year, considering its status as the world’s leading innovator, as well as the rapidly developing cooperation between the V4 and Republic of Korea. The main patron of the conference is HE Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary. Side events of think.BDPST include the Start-up Expo and the Young Leaders’ Forum. This year, seventeen start-ups from the field of innovation will introduce themselves as part of the Start-up Expo, where visitors will have the opportunity to meet the winners of Europe’s most prestigious start-up competitions. The Young Leaders’ Forum (YLF) welcomes young professionals, researchers, and managers, who would like to become chief actors in the field of innovation, urban planning, transportation, or the automotive industry. The Forum provides a platform to discuss their innovative initiatives and their possible applications. The main aim of YLF is to facilitate the establishment of multidisciplinary partnerships by connecting young innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs, PhD candidates, and policy experts in public administration. The main aim of think.BDPST is to place Hungary and the V4 on the innovation map of Europe. The event is realised in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary and with the support of the International Visegrad Fund. Other partners and sponsors of the conference include the Budapest Enterprise Agency, CORDI R&D, the Pallas Athene Innovation and Geopolitical Foundation, and the Hungarian gaming service provider Szerencsejáték Zrt. Connect to the future – think.BDPST.


think BDPST 2016

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AJKC PAST EVENTS

Regional Balance and Challenges to State Sovereignty in the Changing Middle East 5 December 2017

Visegrad Variety – Industry V4.0. 20 February 2018

The two-panel conference discussed the most important features of the current political and social attributes of the Middle Eastern region, with special regard to the dynamics of regional balance and the sovereignty of states. The first panel discussion, entitled “How to Deescalate Conflicts among Middle Eastern Powers? ” focused primarily on exploring the nature of power struggle in the region, while the second, entitled “Will Defeating ISIS Mean the Defeat of Terrorism in the Region?” covered topics such as current features of ISIS and its possible future scenarios. Speakers included Hasan Al Momani, Associate Professor at the Prince Al Hussein Bin Abdullah II School of International Studies of the University of Jordan, Hasan Kösebalaban, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations of Istanbul Şehir University, Eman Ragab, Senior Researcher of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, and Cinzia Bianco, Head of Research at the Euro-Gulf Information Centre.

The event examined the role of the state in Industry 4.0. The main conclusion made by the discussants is that the state may have to interact with stakeholders to facilitate a smoother form of cooperation. It should play the role of orchestrator, while making certain changes that will help avoid negative trends within the labour market. These warning signs we witness today are not new at all – automatisation has been liquidating jobs in the last 100 years, and this trend will continue in the future. Technological or automation unemployment are not new phenomena, they have been present for a long time. As it was underlined, the key of success in the age of Industry 4.0 is education, not only because companies coming to the region find it difficult to identify educated and skilled workers, but also because the environment around us is changing so rapidly that it necessitates the creation of a more flexible education system.

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AJKC FUTURE EVENTS

The V4 and the Eastern Mediterranean: Prospects of Cooperation 24 April 2018

Danube Regatta 5 May 2018

The objective of the international conference is to provide a platform for academic debate on the security and economic relations between the V4 and the Eastern Mediterranean, two regions that are of key importance for Europe’s future. The conference poses the question whether the V4 can become a new, pragmatic catalyst of a European foreign policy towards our southeastern neighbourhood. The question is how such a policy can be better equipped to benefit from the changing balance of power and the opportunities for greater economic cooperation between the key actors of the Eastern Mediterranean. The conference is devoted to the analysis of the prospects and challenges of these opportunities.

Organised this year for the 6th time, the Danube Regatta is the most significant sports and cultural festival for universities that bring together people with a passion for sports and music. At the Regatta, rowing and dragon boat teams compete on the most beautiful reach of the Danube; that is, the Parliament of Hungary and the main building of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In 2018, Hungarian universities will be joined by teams from Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia in the rowing race on the occasion of the Hungarian Presidency of the Visegrad Group. Therefore, the Regatta does not only build a community of Hungarian students, but provides an avenue for them to establish international relations. Besides water sports events, visitors can enjoy cheerleader shows, sporting programmes, concerts by the winners of the Sound of the University music contest, as well as music provided by Hungarian bands and DJs.

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NEW RELEASES

Jakub J. Grygiel, A. Wess Mitchell The Unquiet Frontier

Zbigniew Brzezinski The Grand Chessboard

From the Baltic to the South China Sea, newly assertive authoritarian states sense an opportunity to resurrect old empires or build new ones at America’s expense. Hoping that U.S. decline is real, nations such as Russia, Iran and China are using aggressive methods to test Washington’s resolve in strategically critical areas and to gauge our leaders’ commitment to protecting allies in faraway regions. The Unquiet Frontier explains why the United States needs a new grand strategy that uses strong frontier alliance networks to raise the costs of military aggression in the new century. Grygiel and Mitchell reveal how numerous would-be great powers use an arsenal of asymmetric techniques to probe and sift American strength across several regions simultaneously, and how rivals and allies alike are learning from America’s management of increasingly interlinked global crises to hone effective strategies of their own. The Unquiet Frontier demonstrates why the United States must strengthen coastal alliances, which are its best line of defense as great maritime power.

In The Grand Chessboard, renowned geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski delivers a brutally honest and provocative vision for American preeminence in the twenty-first century. The task facing the United States, he argues, is to become the sole political arbiter in Eurasian lands and to prevent the emergence of any rival power threatening our material and diplomatic interests. The Eurasian landmass, home to the largest part of the globe’s population, natural resources, and economic activity, is the “grand chessboard” on which America’s supremacy will be ratified and challenged in the years to come. In this landmark work of public policy and political science, Brzezinski outlines a groundbreaking and powerful blueprint for America’s vital interests in the modern world.

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NEW RELEASES

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Is the American Century Over?

David F. Schmitz Brent Scowcroft: Internationalism and PostVietnam War American Foreign Policy

For more than a century, the United States has been the world’s most powerful state. Now some analysts predict that China will soon take its place. Does this mean that the American century is over? Will China’s rapid rise spark a new Cold War between the two titans? In this compelling essay, world-renowned foreign policy analyst Joseph Nye explains why American century is far from over and what the US must do to retain its lead in an era of increasingly diffuse power politics. America’s superpower status may be well tempered by its own domestic problems and China’s economic boom, he argues, but its military, economic and soft power capabilities will continue to outstrip those of its closest rivals for decades to come.

The two most important change of fortune events in the twentieth-century were the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War. Brent Scowcroft was a part of both, and along with many from his generation, it was his conviction that the United States of America is a unique nation. It cannot be compared to great powers before and it is singularly suitable to fulfil the leading role. However, he also knew about the potential dangers this view involved, and how easily these notions could turn into self-conceit and could even lead to a catastrophe.

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OUR CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

Ádám Kégler, PhD

Nested Loops

Editor-in-Chief, Political Scientist

Anikó Gorácz

Top 5 (Films)

Filmcritic, MA Head of Office, Branding and

Digitalisation in the Film Industry

Communications Office Antall József Knowledge Centre

Zsolt Pálmai

Ownership is Overrated

American studies major Head of Office, Transatlantic Relations Office Antall József Knowledge Centre

Cecília Varsányi

Carbon Impacts of Digitalisation

Economist, MA Head of Office, Sustainable Development Office Antall József Knowledge Centre

Ildikó Voller-Szenci

Fake News

Lawyer, MA Head of Office, Brussels Office Antall József Knowledge Centre

Eszter Zborai Economist, MA Head of Office, Talent Management Office Antall József Knowledge Centre 122

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Talent Management


Letícia Csordás

Dependency or Social Expectation?

Economist, BA Marketing Team Leader Antall József Knowledge Centre

Elina Herédi

What's the Value of Privacy?

Economist, BA Project Manager, Brussels Office Antall József Knowledge Centre

Enikő Jancsek

Top 5 (People, Brands)

International Relations Expert, MA International Relations Manager

Online Education

Antall József Knowledge Centre

Roland Menyes

The Scourges of Progress – Is Social Media Leading us in the

Lawyer MA, Technical Manager MA,

Right Direction?

PhD student Researcher Antall József Knowledge Centre

Zsombor Szabolcs Pál

The Basics of Digitalisation

Historian, PhD candidate Researcher

The AI and its Conundrums

Antall József Knowledge Centre Deep and Dark Web

Ágnes Surján

South Korea: Connecting Everything

Korea Expert, MA International Relations Manager

Kakao - “Connecting everything”

Antall József Knowledge Centre

Kinga Szálkai

Cyberthreats: Simple Scenario or Rough Reality?

International relations expert, PhD Researcher Antall József Knowledge Centre

ANTALL JÓZSEF KNOWLEDGE CENTRE

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REFERENCES OF PICTURES AND USED DATA

source: Pages 20-21: Society: Shutterstock Page 30: Courtesy of Logiscool Page 33: Courtesy of Logiscool

Page 39: Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea: Shutterstock

Page 40: The opening page of the app KakaoTalk: Shutterstock

http://w w w.x ybernetics.com/techtalk /

WirelessNetworks/images/EvolutionOfG.png

Page 72: The promise of 5G, source: http://inside5g.

com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Screen-Shot2015-04-29-at-12.55.50.jpg

Page 73: Fog architecture, source: https://www.pub-

nub.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/edge-computing-diagram-1024x512.png

Page 42: Shutterstock

Page 44: Social Network: Shutterstock

Page 45: Addicted to social media: Shutterstock

Pages 74-75: Transportation: Shutterstock

Page 47: Z generation in 2018: Shutterstock

of Prolan Irányítástechnikai Zrt.

Page 46: To like or not to like: Shutterstock Page 48: Shutterstock Page 51: Shutterstock

Page 52: Shutterstock

Page 55: Shutterstock

Page 56: Shutterstock

Page 83: Relay Based Interlocking System: Courtesy Page

8 3:

Prosigma:

Irányítástechnikai Zrt.

Cour tesy

of

Prolan

Page 83: RBC: Courtesy of Prolan Irányítástechnikai Zrt.

Page 85: Road traffic deaths by number and type

of road user (WHO 2015). Note how vulnerable road users are in danger in less developed regions:

Pages 58-59: Economy: Shutterstock

Page 60: The Hitchhikers of Technology: Shutterstock

Page 61: Analyze Hard. Have Fans. Make Profit.: Shutterstock

Page 62: Die Mensch-Maschine: Shutterstock

Page 63: The steam engine - illustration from Meyers Konversations-Lexikon 1897: Shutterstock

Page 64: Driverless metro in Budapest: Shutterstock

Page 68: Current state of digitalisation in the

energy value chain: https://about.bnef.com/blog/ digitalization-energy-systems/

Page 68: Country rankings for different types of

Courtesy of AImotive

Page 86: A typical “vision first” sensor setup primarily relies on cameras and is completed with radars and ultrasonic sensors: Courtesy of AImotive

Page 86: AI-based segmentation of cars, trucks, drivable surface and obstacles (upper inlet) and

AI-based distance recovery of objects (lower inlet): Courtesy of AImotive

Page 86: A self-driving vehicle prototype according to “vision first” concept. Cameras are mounted to the front, the rearview mirrors and the top of AImotive’s car: Courtesy of AImotive

renewable energy investments, capacity additions and production, 2016 REN21, 2017. Renewables 2017

Global Status Report: http://www.ren21.net/wp-con-

Pages 88-89: Security: Shutterstock

Page 69: Data centre Full of Rack Servers and

for different actors: Shutterstock

tent/uploads/2016/06/GSR_2016_Full_Report.pdf Supercomputers: Shutterstock

Page 70: The evolution of mobile networks, 124

Page 90: Cybersecurity means very different things Page 91: Threat types and information security principles: European Parliament


Page 92: Members of the Anonymous Group wear-

ing Guy Fawkes masks at a protest: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Page 93: Targets and their interests: European Parliament

Pages 96-97: Culture: Shutterstock

Page 98: Charles Simonyi: Shutterstock

Page 98: János Lajos Neumann: Shutterstock

Page 99: Alan Mathison Turing: https://hu.wikipe-

dia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#/media/File:Alan_Turing_ Aged_16.jpg

Page 99: Douglas Engelbart: Shutterstock

Page 99: Stephen Gary Wozniak: Shutterstock Page 100: Tron: Shutterstock

Page 100: Matrix: Shutterstock Page 100: Her: Shutterstock

Page 101: Ex Machina: Shutterstock Page 101: Mr. Robot: Shutterstock Page 102: Amazon: Shutterstock Page 102: Napster: Shutterstock Page 102: Netflix: Shutterstock

Page 103: Google: Shutterstock

Page 103: Facebook: Shutterstock

Page 104: A well-packed bookshelf vs an e-book?: Shutterstock

Page 105: App for iTunes Store: Shutterstock

Page 107: Azubu Frost clan (League of Legends players) at Intel Extreme Masters 2013 - Electronic Sports World Cup: Shutterstock

Page 108: eSports athlete HiddenByArt playing Street Fighter V match at video game tournament NCR NorCal Regionals 2017: Shutterstock

Page 110: Béla Lugosi in Dracula: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugosi_B%C3%A9la#/media/File:Bela_ lugosi_dracula.jpg

Page 111: The space cowboy figure with laser-guns

and the soft sheriff figure from Toy Story: Shutterstock

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NEXT ISSUE

IN FOCUS: CHINA Launching in May 2018, the next issue of In Focus magazine will investigate the role of the People’s Republic of China in the changing global order. The issue will focus on China’s fundamental changes caused by the rapid development and modernization processes of recent decades, as well as the country’s new role in world economy and global governance, while also shedding light on Chinese politics, economics, society, and culture. In what direction will Chinese foreign and economic policy evolve in the “new era,” as President-General Secretary Xi Jinping has called the coming decades at the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party? How can we evaluate the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative and the cooperation mechanism between China and sixteen Central and Eastern European countries, the 16+1? Can China really become the new “green superpower?” Furthermore, the next issue—among other topics—will introduce Chinese holidays, business etiquette, and the Chinese film industry as well. We have invited ambassadors and acknowledged experts from China and Hungary to contribute to In Focus: China and analyse the rise of China in the 21st century, a topic of crucial significance.

IN FOCUS

2018. 2nd Issue Free of Charge

China

Interviews

Economy

International Affairs

Culture

Additional issues of In Focus are available on the webpage of the Knowledge Centre, www. ajtk.hu. Please kindly note that In Focus can be downloaded free of charge after registration.

CONTACT INFORMATION

IMPRINT

Antall József Knowledge Centre

Publisher: Péter Antall, Director

Address: 2 Czuczor Street, H-1093 Budapest

Editor-in-Chief: Ádám Kégler

Web: www.ajtk.hu

Editor: Enikő Jancsek

Telephone: +36 20 310 8776

Layout and Pre-press Preparation: Gergely Kiss

E-mail: ajtk@ajtk.hu

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