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With its Speaker Series, the TUM Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence invites experts from all over the world to talk about ethics and governance of AI. These events serve as an important platform for sharing new research and exchanging knowledge.

The 20th session of the TUM IEAI Speaker Series will take place March 23rd, virtually. The topic of the session will be on AI and Legal Tech: Ethical Perspective.

We are pleased to announce that the speakers for this session are Prof. Thomas Hildebrandt and Prof. Henrik Olsen.

Thomas Troels Hildebrandt and Henrik Palmer Olsen will present an overview of the current trend toward using AI as an instrument to implement and enforce the law. In many countries around Europe and in the EU itself, AI is seen as a way to overcome challenges that are increasingly facing the modern state: growing regulatory complexity and with it an associated economic burden of being compliant; an increasing lack of lawyers to perform the the legal work needed; demands for more homogenous application of the law across local and national jurisdictions. They will be outlining two basic approaches to legal tech which is being considered and developed throughout the world: 1) Law as code and 2) Recommender systems for legal decision-making. Law as code addresses the challenges of embedding legal rules and decision logic in information systems and technologies and methods for making legislation machine readable and executable. Professor Hildebrandt and Professor Olsen will be giving examples of technologies developed in the EcoKnow.org research project for providing a traceable machine readable and executable model of legal texts that can support decisions and workflows, which is now used in local and central government institutions in Denmark. Recommender systems are build from existing databases of decisions, which are machine read by NLP algorithms, and then compared to the factual information in new incoming cases. Matching a new case to a previous decision (based on the principle of “most similar”) then function as a recommendation to the lawyer as to how the new case should be decided. In regards to both of these approaches they will discuss the ethical pros and cons and point to the AI Regulation proposal by the European Commission as a possible best balance.

Henrik Palmer Olsen is an internationally leading legal scholar and a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH), Faculty of Law. As co-founder of the Center of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) he has contributed to the development of a foundational science research agenda in law, and has pioneered research in the new field of computational law. He has also contributed actively to introducing computational law approaches in active litigation before the Supreme Court of Denmark. He has had several top 10 publications in, and is continuously in the top 10% most downloaded scholars on, SSRN.  Overall HPO has a track-record of academic excellence in his field including 100+ publications, many of which is published by leading international journals and publishers. He currently also serves as Associate Dean for Research and head of the PhD school.

Thomas Hildebrandt is Professor in software engineering and head of the research section for software, data, people & society. With a background in formal process models he has in more than 10 years been leading inter-disciplinary research and innovation projects with focus on methods and technologies for developing reliable and flexible software systems suited for the people who use them, including digitalisation of law, workflows and business processes informationsystems. His vision is to develop the foundation for reliable digital systems that can continuously be adapted to changing user needs and legislation, also after the systems have been taken into use. He is a member of several advisory boards and committees for digitalisation and artificial intelligence.

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