The Department, as the core of the newly established Centre of Information Society Technologies (CIST), is working to become a national and regional Centre of Excellence in IST in South-East Europe. This challenge is addressed by forming a flexible junction between the university, the academic community, local community, industry & SMEs, NGOs and policy makers, co-ordinating their efforts at spreading the overall use of and excellence in IST.

The four associated groups of partners – NGOs, science and education institutions, policy makers and SMEs are acting both as contributors of inputs and as final users, the outputs also serving a wider range of researchers, business and professional users as well as various final service users.

The research activities performed have a pivotal role in integrating awareness and understanding of IST, as well as their implementation into the Bulgarian Public Society. Regional development, local economic development and issues of cohesion are among the main goals in research, analysis and development of the CIST in the last years. Strong efforts have been applied in promotion of global society development using the new technologies and for local community development initiatives. The research activities offer different ways how a large number of national organisations, NGOs, SMEs and local communities can best benefit from new IST.

The cooperation of the Department with industry resulted in the international projects. The work under the projects for research, training & development is in the framework of Centre of Information Society Technologies - CIST.