A series of contacts with Estonian officials in the field of technology, research and digital policy was held today by the Deputy Minister of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy, Mr Kyriakos Kokkinos, in Tallinn, where he is accompanying the President of the Republic, Mr Nicos Anastasiades, during his official visit to the country.
Mr. Kokkinos also visited this afternoon the company Autotek, which operates in the field of technology in the automotive sector.
In his statements to the media after his visit to the technology company in the automotive sector, Mr. Deputy Minister said that "we had the opportunity to get into an autonomous vehicle. This is an innovative project of the company and the purpose of the vehicle is to transport passengers without a driver, only with the coordinates in GPS, with the geographical map.
The challenge in automobile transport is how this kind of technologies will become a daily routine in transportation. In all geographies today there is an effort to introduce such innovative approaches to self-driving, but the legislation, road signage and other provisions needed are not ready yet, so the use of such vehicles is in controlled spaces such as airports, parks, university campuses.
But, especially in the US, the challenge is to make the autonomous car part of the everyday functioning of a city, without this meaning that it will replace the conventional car overnight. But the technology and the innovation is there, it's a matter of readiness of the society of the infrastructure, of the people to adopt this kind of self-driving and it's also fully electric not only autonomous.
In Cyprus we can start in an experimental stage and maybe it will be one of the recommendations that I will make in one of our universities to start planning this, not only for the technological readiness because the technology is there, but to see in terms of the infrastructure of the country, in a controlled environment in Estonia is a country that should be proud of its digital transformation successes. We are signing tomorrow at the level of the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister of Estonia the Memorandum of Understanding and today we have seen through this Memorandum what kind of synergies and cooperation we can directly develop in Cyprus.
I have extended an open invitation to him to come to Cyprus in June and preliminary work will be done in order to start direct cooperation in the fields of cyber security, the registration of citizens in the Civil Registry in a more modern way and in the issue of training scientists in modern digital technologies.
I also met today with the Estonian Association of IT Companies, we explained to them the plans and challenges of our country and how these challenges are opportunities for cooperation with the local IT ecosystem and we will host them in Cyprus, in cooperation with the Cyprus IT Association in June, to develop partnerships."
(PM/NG)
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