Week 48/2024

Alles blau und weiß und grün und später nicht mehr wahr

Detail from inside the Parliament. I was there for a podcast. More to come in a few weeks.

NSFW

This week’s song is in German again, and it’s an old classic.

GDR, Merkel, NewWave, everything is in this song that was released in 1974 - 50 years ago and reused by Angela Merkel when leaving office.

It’s also on YouTube (with a short introduction by Nina Hagen about the text)

The Merkel-Version can be found on YouTube as well:

Here’s an interview with Nina’s then bass player, Matthias Neumann, on Merkel’s selection of the song. Neumann’s CV is also remarkable, btw.

Retrospect

St. Pölten

The Work 4.0 in Care conference introduced me to a company called cogvisAI. They have developed a ‘made in Austria’ smart sensor that prevails elderly patient from falling. There’s a marketing video on YouTube

Despite the very interesting content, I was - again - stunned about how St. Pölten looks like. This is a view from the meeting venue:

And I didn’t find too many places better than this. The city is called “Welthauptstadt der Kreisverkehre” (world’s capital of roundabouts), people discuss why it’s perceived as so ugly and architects give quite good answers. Another view from a shopping center, 3 walking minutes from the main station.

AI Security

Another really nice and relevant event we had coorganised happened on Monday. We had two brilliant keynotes and a very interesting panel debate on interdisciplinarity and AI security (research) and documented both on YouTube:

This is inter alia with Joerg Heidrich, a very old colleague from Hannover and co-editor of a “Loseblattsammlung” (1250 pages!) we had edited together 15 years ago. I was also pleased to meet Brent Mittelstadt from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) for the first time.I have stumbled across the OII and its people already several time in my carer and it has always been a pleasure - here’s some more about its history.

The panel brings brilliant people with legal, technical and social perspectives asking the fundmantal question whether European law can contribute to IT-security at all.

I was very happy about the audience’s interest on what we had to say, among them UNIVIE’S vice-rector Roland Maier who was so kind to not only open the event but to stay their for its whole duration. I also learned (from him, again :-)) that it’s better to always wear a suit at such occasions - he wore one, of course, wheras I was in a kind of Japanese Hanten - as it was about IT security and i had expected a more casual dresscode (and had, however, abstained from wearing an #arsboni-hoodie - still my most favority piece of clothes :-) )..

Rechtschreibung

Dr. Oliver Mandl explained in an iunterview what Building Information Models are and how it is to write aPHD (on them).

Prospect

Digital Society

On Wednesday, November 27th, I will ask, together with Harald Kapper and Susanne Lackner, what can be done against Fake News (not too much, I am afraid).

Free participation is (in principle) possible, a stream will be provided.

Digital Health

Friday afternoon will bring me to Graz for the “54. Kongress für Allgemeinmedizin”.

Here’s the full programme.

Cyberspace Conference

Masaryk University Brno hosts a wonderful conference each year: the Cyberspace Conference. It lasts 2 days and has more than 15 streams and special tracks, this year on Friday and Saturday November 29th and 30th, with a very dense agenda of high quality that will attract around 300 participants. I will be there on Saturday, as I am chairing a track on “Special track: How transparent is "transparent"?: Transparency obligations in the era of new technologies in healthcare”. All speakers here (Katarzyna, Syed, Katja) are from our department.

Here’s the full programme and here’s a description of ourr track:

#arsboni

We’ll have two sessions.

On Monday, November 25th, I will talk with Prof. Miriam Buiten. The timing for this meeting couldn’t be any better: Buiten is an expert in analysing the Digital Services Act (DSA) and has received the Latsis Prize for her research on platform regulation recently.

And on Thursday, November 28th, at 9.00 am we will discuss Digital Governance in the new Austrian Government.

Dr. Georg Serentschy is the former head of Austria’s Telecom regulator RTR, Mag. Michael Seitlinger is group director at the Austrian telecom provider A1. Serentschy and me (together with Prof. Dr. Katja Hutter) wrote a study on the matter last year (that was funded by A1) and will be, somehow, the basis of our conversation.

Look and Feel

Peschorn-Interview

Episode 123 of the Dunkelkammer Podcast has a very interesting interview with the head of the “Finanzprokuratur”, Wolfgang Peschorn.

Peschorn gives, inter alia, precise recommendations how Austria’s bankruptcy and enforcement laws should be reformed in the light of scandals such as all the developments with René Benko that keep many people speechless.

Bluesky

Finally, lots of interesting people are currently moving from Twitter/X to Bluesky and there is quite some debate on whether this is a good or a bad idea. Even the President has an opinion. I appreciate that it’s currently a much more crowded and energetic space than it was a few months ago - without a crazy billionaire making ruthless propaganda and millions of trolls.

I have - slightly - changed my personal social media strategy as well: My minor, spontaneous personal thoughts will appear on Bluesky only and no longer on Twitter. Pure announcements will still be posted on both platforms.

My Bluesky-handle is easy to memorize: @nikolausf.substack.com.

Daisy

dislikes the fact that it’s getting dark so early nowadays.

© Felix Forgó

Have a wonderful week!

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)