Radim Polčák has served as Masaryk University’s Vice-Rector for Development, Legal and Information Technologies since 2019 and he also heads the Institute of Law and Technology at the MU Faculty of Law. Last year, he was appointed to the Czech Government’s Legislative Council and to the Deputy Prime Minister for Digitalisation Ivan Bartoš’s Advisory Council. He also became the Czech representative to the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence (GPAI).
The Cybersecurity Hall of Fame has existed since 2018 as part of the IS2 Independent International Conference on Information Security. This year’s event was held on 24 and 25 May in the Sternberg Palace in Prague. “I appreciate the award very much. I would like to thank the jury and the conference organisers for bestowing this honour on me and for including me among the prominent personalities of Czech cybersecurity, whom I respect very much. I know some of them personally and we have a friendship, or dare I say it, a camaraderie. It is a great honour for me and a great commitment for my future work,” said Radim Polčák, who became only the sixth member of the Hall of Fame. In previous years, the first director of the National Cyber and Information Security Agency, Dušan Navrátil, Andrea Kropáčová of CESNET, an association providing national information infrastructure for science, research and education, and the director of the Czech Military Intelligence Jan Beroun, were honoured.
Radim Polčák’s wife and son accepted the award in Prague on behalf of Radim Polčák, who was unable to attend in person due to another professional conference abroad. The Vice-Rector joined the ceremony through a short video address in which he commented on his absence and spoke about the field in which he has been working for 20 years. “It is no longer just an IT or a technical problem. Cybersecurity has become a societal issue and is being addressed by lawyers like me. Our society is deeply penetrated by various information technologies and our everyday lives are dependent on them.”