Tarvi Martens

Tarvi Martens, born in 1969, has been a key figure in the Estonian IT and infosecurity field for the past dozen years. He has an MSc degree from Tallinn Technical University, with his thesis being on the theme "On Evidential Value of Digital Signatures".

Tarvi's first major achievement was leading Estonian Data Communication Department, the government agency responsible for building and managing governmental network, from 1993 to 1997. During that period, Internet penetration in Estonian public sector achieved 97%. He has been development director of Cybernetica (1997-2000), was the founder of Cybernetica's spin-off Privador, and led the company as CEO, working in the field of development and sales of communications security and PKI products and services.

Tarvi was among the originators of the Estonian ID card project in 1996 and has been a supporter and dedicated evangelist of it ever since. In 2002, Tarvi joined SK where he laid down the original concept of DigiDoc, the national de facto standard in Estonia for digital signatures. Today, this work is about to go international.

In 2003 Tarvi started with the e-voting project with National Electoral Committee in order to provide Estonian electoral system with Internet voting capability. As a result there were elections in autumn 2005 where Internet voting was official and accessible for the whole nation in the very first time in the history.

Tarvi has often written articles and given presentations at various events to popularise the Internet usage and applications in Estonia. He was also the author of first original Estonian book about the Internet in 1996.