news & events

On Tuesday, 5 December 2023, 6-9:30 PM CET, ENS Professor for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society Philipp Hacker will hold his inaugural lecture at the auditorium 'Logensaal' of European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). At the same time, the event will be the launch date of the International Expert Consortium for the Regulation, Economics and Computer Science of AI (RECSAI). A live stream of the event will be available.

Program:

• Welcome address by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Häde, Dean, Faculty of Law, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)
• Welcome address by Prof. Dr. Eduard Mühle, President, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)
• Presentation of RECSAI by Sarah Hammer, Executive Director for Finance, The Wharton School; Adjunct Professor, Penn Carey School of Law, University of Pennsylvania; Co-Lead, RECSAI (via Zoom)
• Keynote address "Generative AI and Policy: Evaluating ChatGPT & Co." by Ramayya Krishnan, Dean, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy; William W. and Ruth F. Cooper Professor of Management Science and Information Systems, Carnegie Mellon University; Member, National AI Advisory Council to the US President (via Zoom)
• Welcome address by Prof. Dr. Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Director, European New School of Digital Studies (ENS) Inaugural
• Lecture by Prof. Dr. Philipp Hacker: "Computer Science and Law: Foundations, Applications and Futures"

Following the lecture, there will be time to ask questions (in German or English) and end the evening with snacks and drinks.

ENS Professor Philipp Hacker is one of the founding members of the "International Expert Consortium on the Regulation, Economics, and Computer Science of AI (RECSAI)". The network brings together international experts from Europe, the USA, South Africa, Brazil and Australia, among others, with the aim of examining and evaluating the technical and legal implications of AI from an interdisciplinary perspective. Philipp Hacker is leading the project together with former ENS research fellow Professor Sarah Hammer from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. RECSAI receives funding from the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.

The core objective of RECSAI is to strengthen the international AI research network, particularly with regard to the legal and economic implications. The committee will also provide science-based recommendations for policymakers and international organizations. An international conference series is also planned, including events during the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2024, the United Nations AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva in May 2024 and at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. in September 2024.

Philipp Hacker says: “I am very happy that the Dieter Schwarz Foundation enables us to discuss and research the most pressing social issues in the field of AI with a top-class group of experts from all continents in the coming years. Topics such as non-discrimination, sustainability and national security, but also the effective application of AI and compensating for the shortage of skilled workers are at the heart of our efforts. I look forward to the collaboration and the insights we will develop together."

The network will be officially presented as part of Philipp Hacker's inaugural lecture on Tuesday, 5 December 2023, at 6 PM in the Logensaal of the Viadrina, Logenstraße 11, in Frankfurt (Oder). The event is open to the public. Please make sure to register online to join on-site and click here for the live stream.

Künstliche Intelligenz erschafft auf Grundlage bestehender Werke musikalische Kompositionen oder Kunst und generiert realistische 3D-Modelle von Objekten. Sprachmodelle wie GPT-4 können natürliche Konversationen führen, menschliche Schreibstile nachahmen und Bildgeneratoren wie Stable Diffusion erzeugen realistische Bilder und Videos. Das nimmt uns einerseits Arbeit ab, birgt aber auch die Gefahr von Missbrauch, der Verbreitung von Desinformation, Deepfake-Videos und diskriminierenden Inhalten.

Wie aber lässt sich eine Technologie kontrollieren, die sich in diesem Tempo weiterentwickelt? Welche Gesetze werden aktuell in Deutschland und Europa diskutiert – und wohin geht die Entwicklung der KI-Regulierung weltweit?

Am 29. November 2023 gibt Philipp Hacker, Professor für Recht und Ethik der digitalen Gesellschaft an der ENS, im Rahmen der Future Skills-Woche an der Viadrina Einblick in den Stand seiner Forschung und aktuelle Herausforderungen der KI-Regulierung. Der öffentliche Vortrag findet am 29. November von 16:30 -17:30 Uhr im Gräfin-Dönhoff-Gebäude der Europa-Universität Viadrina, Europaplatz 1 in Frankfurt (Oder) im Hörsaal 2 statt.

Are you an entrepreneur? And do you know how to handle data efficiently? Does your start-up have the necessary knowledge to deal with data?

You are welcome to join this workshop organized by our ENS Research Group "Politics & Governance of Digitalization" taking place on 7 November 2023, 9 AM - 3:30 PM in the ENS Coworking Space at Collegium Polonicum in Slubice. It will help you to understand how to govern data in organizations and why this is so crucial.

Guest Speaker: Jan Oleszczuk-Zygmuntowski, Lecturer in Management and Artificial Intelligence at Kozminski University (Warsaw), Programme Director at CoopTech Hub, first Polish center for platform cooperativism, Co-president of the Polish Economics Network

Please register by sending an This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

ENS researcher Dr. Filip Bialy has joined the DiCED team at the University of Manchester, which is studying the use of modern digital techniques in election campaigns. DiCED (Digital Campaigning and Electoral Democracy), is a five-year project funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The project will be led by Rachel Gibson, a Professor of Political Science from The University of Manchester. The key goal will be to examine how digital technologies and new forms of data are reshaping the electoral landscape and the nature and purpose of political campaigns, in both new and old democracies.

Focusing on the USA, the UK, France, Germany and Poland, DiCED will provide one of the first in-depth comparative analyses of what has been dubbed a new form of ‘data-driven’ political campaigning. It will look at where this new mode of electioneering is emerging, and ask why it is more prominent in certain countries.

Filip Bialy is an Assistant Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan and part of the Science and Technology studies group at ENS. He holds a PhD in political science and a postgraduate diploma in Big Data and data processing. His research focuses on the ethical and political implications of digitalization processes, including the widespread adoption of AI. He was a visiting fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science and in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and currently is a fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin.

Many scientists share preprints on social media platforms to gain attention from academic peers, policy-makers, and journalists. In this study we shed light on an unintended but highly consequential effect of sharing preprints: their contribution to conspiracy theories. Although the scientific community might quickly dismiss a preprint as insubstantial and ‘clickbaity’, its uncertain epistemic status nevertheless allows conspiracy theorists to mobilize the text as scientific support for their own narratives.

To better understand the epistemic politics of preprints on social media platforms, a team of authors including ENS researcher Mareike Bauer studied the case of a highly controversial biomedical preprint, which was shared widely on Twitter in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic. Using a combination of social network analysis and qualitative content analysis, they compared the structures of engagement with the preprint and the discursive practices of scientists and conspiracy theorists. The authors found that despite substantial engagement, scientists were unable to dampen the conspiracy theorists’ enthusiasm for the preprint. Moreover, they found that members from both groups not only tried to reduce the preprint’s epistemic uncertainty, but sometimes deliberately maintained it. The maintenance of epistemic uncertainty helped conspiracy theorists to reinforce their group’s identity as skeptics and allowed scientists to express concerns with the state of their profession. The study contributes to research on the intricate relations between scientific knowledge and conspiracy theories online, as well as to the role of social media platforms for new genres of scholarly communication.

Mareike Fenja Bauer is a PhD researcher at ENS. Her research focusses on anti-feminism on visual social media platforms.

Authors: Mareike Fenja Bauer, Dr. Maximilian Heimstädt, Carlos Franzreb and Dr. Sonja Schimmel

Ulrike Klinger, Professor for Digital Democracy at the European New School of Digital Studies / European University Viadrina, will be one of thirteen Thomas Mann Fellows in 2024. In the context of the 2024 election year in the United States, the Fellows will explore issues of democracy and vulnerability. During their stays of several months at the former exile residence of the Mann family, the Thomas Mann House, they will work on their projects in exchange with US experts and the public.

Ulrike Klinger will take a transatlantic perspective on the 2024 election campaigns. In 2024, there will be elections for a new European Parliament in May and U.S. presidential and congressional elections in November. Her project will focus on actors and allegations that challenge the legitimacy of elections themselves, on election fraud campaigns and disinformation about the electoral process.

The Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles is a lively place for transatlantic debate, where outstanding personalities and innovative thinkers explore fundamental political, social, and cultural issues and concerns facing our world today and in the coming years. The Thomas Mann Fellowships enable academics, pioneering thinkers, and intellectuals who live, or have lived, in Germany to tackle the pressing challenges of our time and to foster the intellectual and cultural exchange between Germany and the United States. For a complete list of the 2024 Fellows, click here. 

Ulrike Klinger joined ENS as Professor for Digital Democracy in October 2020. She is also Associated Researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. Before joining ENS, she was Professor for Digital Communication at Freie Universität Berlin and head of the research group on “News, campaigns and the rationality of public discourse” at the Weizenbaum Institute. Her research focuses on political communication, the transformation of digital publics, and the role of technologies in democratic societies.

Large Generative AI Models, such as ChatGPT, GPT-4 or Stable Diffusion, are revolutionizing the way we communicate, create, and work. They are rapidly and profoundly impacting all sectors of society, from business development to medicine, from education to research, and from coding to the arts. Like many other transformative technologies, they offer enormous potential, but may also carry significant risks regarding, inter alia, opacity, bias, or fake news.

Against this background, the workshop brings together leading scholars to discuss the far-reaching technical, legal, regulatory and social implications of recent advances in generative AI systems.

It is organized by Professor Sarah Hammer (University of Pennsylvania Law School, USA) and Professor Philipp Hacker (ENS / European University Viadrina). The organizers acknowledge the generous support of the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.