The Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law was well represented at The International Legal Informatics Symposium (program), which provides an interdisciplinary platform for all major questions of legal informatics such as legal information, e-government, e-democracy, e-justice, legal visualization, legal design, IT law, e-commerce, IP law, telecommunications law, e-procurement, Internet governance, etc. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó, Michael Cepic (CONNEXIONs), Paul Eberstaller, Johanna Göschlberger, Katerina Polychronopoulos (BIOMAP), Mariana Rissetto (TVB-Cloud) and Felix Zopf participated in fruitful and interesting discussions and one of our team members Marie-Catherine Wagner (InteropEHRate) gave a presentation on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data protection in the health sector, which she had developed together with Žiga Škorjanc. In order to make optimal use of AI technologies, interoperability of health data is essential. Therefore, the presentation dealt with legal aspects of digitalization and interoperability of electronic health records (EHRs) (see for this InteropEHRate project) as well as with the overarching obligations of a data controller when using Artificial Intelligence in a healthcare setting. As in some applications complicated Machine Learning Algorithms (so called "black boxes"), which are not easily - sometimes not at all - comprehensible for patients, seem to be opposed to the right to information and the principle of transparency, enshrined in the GDPR, aspects of various Austrian data protection legal bases were evaluated with a view to health data in an AI context.

Being most relevant for our research initiatives, IRIS 2020 provided a great opportunity for our team to be updated in the latest developments at the interface of the law and new technologies.

Further information is available here.