Estonian Centre of Excellence in ICT Research (EXCITE) unites the pinnacles of Estonian IT research EXCITE has been created with the purpose of filling an important role on the global IT research landscape, where people are trying to find solutions for current issues as well as future challenges.
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XCITE has been active since 2016 and unites 16 Estonian research teams in order to research and develop ways for developing secure and dependable IT systems and services. EXCITE operates on an activity matrix principle where common research topics that were previously operated separately by different research teams are brought together and PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are jointly supervised. TalTech, the University of Tartu and Cybernetica AS are our partner institutions. EXCITE is funded by the European Regional Development Fund. TalTech’s Professor Maarja Kruusmaa is the person who kick-started EXCITE during its early years. TalTech’s Professor Ivo Fridolin took over her role in 2020. He begins by saying that a researcher in EXCITE is never alone. All top Estonian IT researchers can help and support them. “We have joint PhD students across research teams in order to be better organised as well as financially supported. In a sense, researchers are required to collaborate, even if their personality traits suggest that they would be better off working quietly on their own,” says Fridolin. Nevertheless, this is certainly not the only reason why EXCITE was created. It also provides a more constant and sustainable funding for researchers, who according to him have “crazy ideas”, which may not find immediate application. The research funding system in Estonia is extremely competi-
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tive and EXCITE provides a degree of certainty that even if a researcher and their team may not get funding during the call for proposals this year, they are not going to have to leave the university to take a different job. EXCITE researchers utilise scientific methods in order to develop dependable and reliable ICT systems and apply them everywhere – health care, safety (hardware and work environment), environmental protection (water quality), banking and other fields.
Top research challenges EXCITE is not only an umbrella organisation for top researchers. All researchers concerned about research and its future have gathered here. Whether it be young talent or resources – the two are clearly intertwined. Fridolin says that you might believe a top researcher can find ideas out of nowhere, but there to actually a complex causality linked to it. “Throughout history, the brightest members of society have been excited by unexplored areas or depths that regular minds have not been able to make sense of,” says the EXCITE coordinator. “In ideal situations and during the best times, EXCITE researchers are able to work on these unexplored areas. IT is completely intertwined with all areas of life and because of that, the variety of challenges is broad and is only expanding further. It must be noted that high tech discoveries have made mankind rather powerful. So powerful in fact,
that it is not the imagination of top researchers that is limiting, but rather man’s own imperfections and our ability to maintain that delicate balance between our wishes and actual possibilities.” Complexity and intrigue work hand in hand here, but the former means time and resources. As a consequence, research is expensive, especially top research. Fridolin recalls 19 December 2018, when Estonian researchers, politicians and business organisations signed a social contract with the president as witness in which the focus was to increase public funding for research and development as well as innovation to 1% of the GDP and at least keep it at that level. “Unfortunately, this was not carried out. The new national budget foresees an increase for research funding to 1% of the GDP, but that may no longer be sufficient anymore.” The Estonian Employers’ Confederation annual conference entitled “Tuulelohe lend – Who are the winners in a changing world?” was held in late March 2021, and the President of Estonia as well as the Chairwoman of the Estonian Employers’ Confederation Council Kai Realo signed a contract to establish a club for innovation intensive companies. The Estonian Employers’ Confederation initiative brings together companies that invest at least 2% of their turnover into research and development. Fridolin says that this is a worthy initiative which clearly states that there is no growth in prosperity without innovation. “Aligning the national aggregate indicator to 2% of the GDP requires an increased number of companies investing in research and development” says Fridolin. Researchers at EXCITE (Professor M. Dumas’ research team) are develEstonian Centre of Excellence in ICT Research
