Week 13/2025

Nett.

Mar 21, 2025

Back Home. View from lexICT’s office in Hannover Docks in Hannover. What a marvelous weekend.

NSFW (Nikolaus’ Song For the Week)

This week’s song is an alltime classic from Jacques Palminger and Erobique (vulgo: Carsten Meyer).

TAZ has an article from 2007 on the creative process behind the song. Christian Schachinger wrote about it in Der Standard two years later.

YouTube (Sound only)

I like the motto, it can be used at many occasions. Excuse my French.

The whole album is nice, my second favorite there is this one:

The idea of “Songs for Joy” (that is: everybody can sing) was resumed last year again for a new album (that I don’t know yet) - here’s more about the (old and new) concept.

Retrospect

Brussels - European AI week

I attended the International Institute of Communications (IIC)'s Annual Europe Digital Communications and Media Forum 2025 in Brussels, hosted by Belgium’s regulator BIPT - IBPT (Belgian Institute for Postal services and Telecommunications) and had the pleasure to participate in a panel "AI Act: Implementation & enforcement progress report". This was also part of the European AI week 2025.

© Amanda Crabbe

It was a little disappointing (although I must say that I had expected this) that neither the Commission nor the AI Office were present - not on the panel and not in the audience either. This lead to the obscure but also well known situation that approximately 150 qualified people in the room - regulators, industry, academics etc. - were somehow united in complaining about someone who couldn’t hear the complaints.

Many were reporting about the (new) Commission’s (new) messages that “simplification” and “deregulation” would be needed which sounded very different from earlier statements. It was really astonishing how quickly the wind changed here after Trump and Vance.

We invested some time in - again - not clarifying the relation between GDPR and AIA and I referred to experiences made in Switzerland last week. Ceyhun covered news about the Spanish approach that he had written an instructive blogpost about recently. Peggy was an excellent master of ceremony.

There’s more on this on LinkedIn (from fellow panelists Patrick and Ceyhun, from people in the audience and the IIC and me).

DEMGES

The Commission “Democracy in Digital Society” (DEMGES) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, chaired by Barbara Prainsack and Astrid Mager, of which I am a proud member had a tow days workshop in Vienna.

Due to my gig in Brussels I could only participate remotely on Tuesday

but on Wednesday I gave a presentation on (somehow) legal requirements for AI in University education, dealing mainly with uncertainty coming with the AI-act (universities as deployers, high risk system, GDPR issues, IP etc.).

I invested a significant bunch of my time into criticising Ursula von der Leyen’s political guidelines,

and in particular this sentence in it

that has/is a paragraph on its own on page 10.

My point was, in particular, the irony that we live in times in which a revolution no longer means that people try to replace the government by the people’s force, but, to the opposite, the government tells the people what they should do. In my view, there’s a lot of helplessness shining behind this call for revolution - and that was my topic.

I also asked here - as well as in Brussels - whether anyone knew the identity of the authors of the Commission’s guidelines on prohibited AI practices and on AI system definition - assuming that it’s some junior lawyers in their twenties - but didn’t receive any information. If you know more about this, please let me know. If I had the time, I would love to officially ask for information here, but unfortunately, as so often, I don’t - so that I won’t play through whether this would fall under some freedom of information legislation.

Smartfox and Better4U

We had a nice panel debate on data altruism and data donation on the one hand and GDPR, DGA, EHDS and the Austrian Health Telematics Law (Gesundheitstelematikgesetz) on the other in our project SmartFox.

I also attended (parts of) Better4U’s consortium meeting in UNIVIE’s “New Aula”, delivered a greeting address there

(and learned about the preinstalled beauty filter in my camera).

Books

Finally, all thre major books I was involved in recently, arrived in my office.

It’s nice to see them together, but it’s also rather frustrating that someone who wished to buy all three of them would need to pay more than 650 €.

I am very close to the moment now that there is literally no more storage space in my office for all the books written, sent to me or bought.

Inaugural Lectures

We had a very nice event with three inaugural lectures on Wednesday. Here are vice rector Hautsch, dean Zöchling-Jud and - in order of appearance - the three new colleagues Anne Kühler, Anuscheh Farahat and Harald Eberhard.

In almost all statements, the US-Europe tensions were mentioned.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the reception because I ran to an internal meeting of the

Better Administration

Initiative Bessere Verwaltung’s (better administration initiative) The initiative’s founder Wolfgang Gratz is remarkably active in pushing this further and you may expect some more activities here in the upcoming weeks and months to come. Currently, the initiative is analysing the recent Government Programme on content that is relevant for or based on input from the initiative.

Prospect

#arsboni

Trump

I will speak with Prof. Niko Härting on Friday, March 20, at 3 pm. We will discuss a frontal attack of Donald Trump via a presidential order against free advocacy in the US.

Surprisingly, many bar associations, lawyers, NGOs etc. have stayed rather silent here for quite some time - although this is an unbelievable example on how little the Trump administration is concerned about bare minimums of the rule of law and seperation on powers. It’s a direct threat for probably 98 % of (major) law firms worldwide and a perversion of fundametal principles of equalitiy rights.

Niko wrote an excellent article on the matter, more information can be found via “Gerechtigkeit und Loseblatt” or “The Guardian”.

And - better late than never - finally, also official institutions start raising their voice.

If time allows, I will try to find out why no Austrian organisation is present here (yet?).

AI in Higher Education

A week later, on Friday, March 28th, at 9.00 am, I will stress (again) topics of AI usage in and for higher education. Prof. Barbara Geyer will be my guest.

Changes in the Legal Professions

On March 27th, at 17.30 CET, Dr. Žiga Škorjanc is hosting a joint event of our department and “Juristenverband”, together with Arashdeep Singh Patial.

Panelists:

DDr. Ciresa (Lawyer in Vienna)
Dr. Philipp Merzo (Lawyer in Vienna and founder of AI:ssociate)
Dr. Wolfgang Pichler (Chief Evangelist, MANZ)
Markus Scheffler (Head of Product Management, LexisNexis)

In German, free entry, registration requested, no stream (as far as I know).

Look and Feel

Hannover

I spent last weekend in Hannover.

It was such a pleasure to meet so many so nice people again. Some of them helped me to experience a première (still possible after 17 years of me living there): I went Boßeln for the first time ever.

For those not knowing this “sport”: You go for a walk in a group (the larger the better), with a ladder truck full of alcohol and food (the more the better) and throw a bowling ball around (the further the better). At the end you enter a restaurant and eat lots of “Grünkohl mit Pinkel”.

Yes, it’s mainly about the eating (no Grünkohl for me) and drinking (tea, in my case, “Kurzer” in the case of most others) and the singing and, above all, the friendship. “Team red” won, I believe (I was in team yellow), but nobody really cared.

This is us going to the start line. It was a beautiful day.