20th Wiener Juristengespraeche – Opportunities and Risks of Artificial Intelligence

bpv Huegel welcomed 120 participants to an international symposium at the STRABAG Kunstforum. The symposium was dedicated to the topic of legal opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence with the goal of merging legal issues and technical understanding.

 

6 March 2019. bpv Huegel covered various topics, including artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and blockchains, during the 20th anniversary of the Wiener Juristengespraeche organized by the international law firm. The discussions focused on the new legal questions that arise in these contexts.

 

The symposium included highly specialized lectures by bpv Huegel partners on various legal topics.  Thomas Lettau gave detailed insights into the latest developments in digitization and the relevance of blockchains in M&A processes. Gerhard Fussenegger, a partner in bpv Huegel’s antitrust law team in Vienna and Brussels, discussed new legal issues related to digitization and “big data,” including how algorithms are relevant to antitrust law and increasingly the focus of competition authorities. A presentation on the “GDPR Concept in AI Applications” by Dr. Sonja Duerager, head of the IT and data protection law department at bpv Huegel, explained the distribution of the roles, rights and obligations of those affected and the risks arising from AI applications.

 

Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó from the Institute for Innovation and Digitization in Law at the University of Vienna completed the picture with his lecture on questions of liability for AI applications under data protection laws. Finally, DI Dr. Bernhard Nessler from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Institute for Machine Learning, provided a humorous technical background for the legal audience – from the conception of AI to AI as an indispensable component of IT systems.

 

The presentation laid the groundwork for a top-class panel discussion in which technicians and lawyers discussed new questions about the responsibility and liability for all stakeholders that can arise from AI applications. The partners Dr. Astrid Ablasser-Neuhuber and Dr. Florian Neumayr led the discussions through the whole symposium.

 

“We are pleased that we were able to combine technical understanding with legal issues and to identify initial solutions at our symposium,” said Dr. Sonja Duerager, who was responsible for the scientific content of the symposium.

 

Press release

Impressions of the 20th Wiener Juristengespräche: