Turkey Informatics Association's 36th International Informatics Congress, hosted by BTK, was attended at its closing meeting by Dr. Ömer Fatih Sayan, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure.
In this year's program, themed "Secure Digital Future: Artificial Intelligence," experts in the field spoke over two days, and numerous sector representatives were hosted. Congratulating TBD for their successes in the sector, Deputy Minister Sayan said, “The successes we have achieved as a country belong to all of us.”
Describing developments in technology as an "explosion," Sayan stated, “Information and communication technologies have turned the world into a small village. In today's golden age of information technologies, we are achieving very important gains for our country. However, these gains are never sufficient for us. Thankfully, we have a benchmark like the National Technology Move to measure the quality of what we do, to take these gains one step further. Our ultimate goal is to highlight concepts such as innovation, research, development, and entrepreneurship. Rather than just closely following information and communication technologies, by effectively utilizing the increase in qualified human resources, the growth of domestic and national products, and the acceleration of the productization process, we must reach a position of supplying technology rather than demanding it.”
Stating that as the Ministry, they utilize the dynamism of the private sector in developing domestic and national technologies, Sayan spoke about the importance of 5G technology. Sayan said, “5G Technology is now at the forefront of the issues countries prioritize the most in technology. Because 5G will fundamentally change data flow and processing, especially IoT architectures, and machine-to-machine communication. Expected to be a thousand times faster than 4G, 5G will make the economy fully digital end-to-end. With 5G, next-generation mobile communication technologies will address different use cases and business models with different requirements, enabling a fully mobile and connected society. 5G technologies will play an important role in strengthening socio-economic transformations by increasing productivity, sustainability, efficiency, and overall welfare levels. While countries around the world work on 5G, is it possible for this noble nation, marching towards 2023 targets with rapid steps, to wait?”
Deputy Minister Sayan: We Are Chasing Innovations to Achieve Success in Domestic and National Production
Emphasizing the need to follow innovations in all sectors to achieve success in domestic and national information technologies in our country, Sayan said, “As the Ministry, we are trying to realize the 2023 vision with our technology, ecosystem, and support for domestic software. We are rapidly continuing our efforts for our country to take a larger place in the global artificial intelligence market in the coming years. Turkey is one of the world's important economies.”
In addition, underlining the importance of ensuring cybersecurity, Sayan continued his speech as follows: Cyber attacks targeting our country mostly aim at electronic communication infrastructure and, primarily public institutions, banking, energy, health, and other critical sectors. More than 99% of these attacks consist of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Phishing attacks. In recent days, there have been very intense DDoS attacks particularly on the banking sector. On the other hand, since the beginning of 2019, 3,903 DDoS attacks have been carried out against only the banking sector in our country, and all these attacks were neutralized in the internet infrastructure without any impact on citizens or service continuity. In other words, approximately 15 DDoS attacks are launched daily against our banking sector, and our internet service providers block these attacks under USOM coordination. We are aware that one of the most important resources in ensuring national cybersecurity is trained human resources. Accordingly, rapidly taking the necessary steps to train qualified experts and close the shortage of cybersecurity specialists in our country is among our top priorities.”
In his speech, Sayan also provided information about the Safe Internet Service launched by BTK. Sayan said, “While preparing our youth for the informatics sector, which is the most important field of the future, through training provided via the Academy, we are further strengthening our team with the CYBER STAR competition organized under USOM without requiring a graduation condition for our trained young people in cybersecurity in our country.”
Deputy Minister Sayan concluded his speech by calling on everyone to support Tree Holiday declared by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.