RTG International Guest: Professor Burkhard Schäfer, University of Edinburgh

RTG Privacy and Trust is delighted to have had Professor Burkhard Schäfer as our international guest. During his visit, Professor Schäfer gave two lectures: in Frankfurt am Main and at TU Darmstadt, and participated in the PEASEC conference, TU Darmstadt.

His lecture held on September 21 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt was devoted to the topic of automatic translation as legal tech. Automatic translation is one of the biggest AI success stories, increasingly finding application in the administration of justice – from the automatic translation of legal texts in the EU to the tourist who uses his smartphone to threaten his hotel with legal action. However, the use of automatic translation by legal (and linguistic) laypersons can expose the user to great risks in the process.

His second lecture held on September 25 at TU Darmstadt was pondering the question whether we can formally verify that autonomous systems behave lawfully. In 2021, the Law Commissions of England and Scotland submitted their report on the legal framework for autonomous vehicles on UK roads. This is an ambitious law reform project that also creates new engineering and design challenges for software developers and car manufacturers. Using the tension between safety and data protection law as a case study, the talk discusses an ontology-based argumentation system that was developed as part of the AISEC (AI secure by Design) project.

Prof. Schäfer is one of the world's leading researchers in the field of law and IT. He is concerned both with technology as an instrument and as a subject of regulation and the consequences for the systems involved.