IDLaw at the Cyberspace Conference 2024

by Michael Schmidbauer

IDLaw at the Cyberspace Conference 2024

The team of the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law was once again able to participate in the renowned Brno Cyberspace Conference – a visit which by now has become tradition for our department (see last year’s report).

The Cyberspace Conference 2024 was organised by the Institute of Law and Technology, Faculty of Law in cooperation with the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University, Brno, and the European Academy of ICT Law, Vienna. Over two days, from November 29th to 30th 2024, the conference brought together experts to discuss and learn about legal and social aspects of information and communication technologies.

Our department was thrilled to contribute to this conference by taking part in the special track How transparent is "transparent"? Transparency obligations in the era of new technologies in healthcare, kindly hosted by Prof. Nikolaus Forgó.

Florian Seitz and Martin Tomus provided the audience with insights into new legal challenges for (medical) universities with their talk “The AI Act and medical universities – An Austrian perspective”. Michael Schmidbauer, representing the CD-Laboratory for Machine Learning Driven Precision Imaging, held a presentation titled “Art 22 GDPR - A closer look at the right not to be subject to automated decision-making”. Katarzyna Barud and Syed Zulkifil Haider Shah talked about practical implementation of transparency, representing their project KATY with their talk "Explainable AI in healthcare and how it helps fulfil transparency obligations in the AI-based recommendation systems - KATY use case study". Finally, Katja Hartl rounded off our department’s contributions by giving insights about “Operationalisation of transparency requirements of the AI Act” in the OPTIMA project.

Questions of experts in the audience sparked fruitful discussions after the presentations, helping to identify opportunities for advancing the team's research.

The conference was expertly led by General Chair Radim Polčák, with Jakub Míšek and David Šmahel serving as Deputy Chairs. We want to thank them for providing us the opportunity to take part in this exceptional conference and are already filled with excitement for Cyberspace 2025. The insights gained, the discussions held, and the connections made have left us all enriched and inspired.