re:publica 18 - Alle Sessions

• Marilia Monteiro
• Gerd Billen
• Nicola Jentzsch

The recent media outcry over Cambridge Analytica's practices and facebook’s eminent role in it have demonstrated that people worldwide are calling for consumer protection regulation and transparency on business practices. However, convenience often eats compliance for breakfast, especially if no pro-privacy choices are available. We may want to erase our facebook accounts – but what about our mobile money transfer systems or smart home applications we have integrated into our daily or business routine? Is it not convenient that the ridesharing app can track our location? Cashless transfers and check-ins via smart devices are also quite handy – from Ghana to Mongolia. It is obvious that companies providing these services need our personal data. However, does our consent to use our data really provide a carte blanche to use them for anything - and interlink them with any data on our connected device? Do data and privacy always have to be pitted against the principles of competition and innovation?

This session aims at discussing different approaches to state-of-the-art consumer protection, regulation and enforcement, its challenges and unseized potentials with three internationally networked and renowned experts.

We want to look at consumer protection from the viewpoint of regulators, civil society and consumer organizations as well as from private sector. What is the European General Data Protection Regulation about to bring to markets? What challenges shall be tackled with the EU ePrivay-Regulation? What can we learn for consumer protection enforcement from the “NetzDG” and the principle of market place location? Which approaches have different countries taken, what has been successful and what has failed? Are there industry standards or useful self-regulation approaches?

We live in increasingly data-driven societies and economies fuelled by data trackers in our pockets. Which is the data economy and society we as sovereign citizens want to inhabit?

• Andres Guadamuz

In 2014, the conceptual art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik programmed an autonomous online agent (a bot) to purchase random items from the dark web with a weekly budget of $100 USD in bitcoins. During his ongoing experience, the Random Darknet Shopper has purchased jeans, generic Viagra, cigarettes, collector’s coins, and instructions on how to hack a Coke vending machine. But perhaps the most interesting item arrived in 2015, when the artists received 10 yellow ecstasy pills inside a DVD case. The police in the Swiss town of St Gallen confiscated the machine, but later “released it” after prosecutors determined that no crime had been committed as the possession was for the purpose of an art project.

With the rise of more sophisticated and independent artificial intelligence, situations like the one above will take place more often. Self-driving cars, smart contracts, IoT devices, data mining bots, machine learning algorithms; technology will be given autonomy to make decisions in various circumstances, and sometimes these may prove to be illegal or illicit. What happens when these autonomous agents break the law? Who is liable? Is there even anyone liable?

At the moment, the law has not given much thought to infringement committed by AI, mostly because of until now most autonomous agents were not sophisticated. But with the growing presence of intelligent bots in all areas of life, we will need to explore new solutions, or perhaps re-visit older regimes.

This presentation will explore potential legal pitfalls regarding AI liability, and will look at various legal solutions that we could explore to allocate liability.

• Jonathan Funke

2016 gründete Jonathan Funke tip-me.org, ein Projekt für globales Trinkgeld, welches direkt und transparent beim Hersteller ankommt. Damit macht er aus einer jahrhundertealten Tradition ein Werkzeug zur globalen Umverteilung, das unglaublich effektiv ist. Beim Kauf eines Produkts kann man so durch nur 10% Trinkgeld die Löhne der Produzenten um 250% steigern. Das globale Trinkgeld landet direkt auf den Mobiltelefonen der Arbeiter und Farmer. 

Jonathan nutzt die Blockchain-Mechanismen dazu, seinem Ziel der fairen Globalisierung ein gutes Stück näher zu kommen. Wie genau das funktioniert, erklärt er auf der re:publica.

Dieser Talk wird präsentiert von TINCON, dem Festival für digitale Jugendkultur.
8.-10.Juni 2018 / tincon.org

• Michel Reilhac

Experiencing a film in Virtual Reality is by nature a completely different experience from one viewer to the next since each is free to choose where to look around the 360 scape and how to interact or not. This creates a challenging new dilemma for the VR writer or director: how can their carefully designed story experience unfold as they have envisioned if the viewer is entirely free to catch or ignore the meaningful parts of the 360 environment ?

There are 2 kinds of immersive authors/directors: those who try and force the viewer to see what they want them to see (like in flat films) and those who let go and leave the viewers to their own serendipitous discovery of their story world.But the one thing we all need to learn is how can we include the viewer inside our VR immersive storie s since , like in a game , he/she is at the center of the filmed VR environment and at the heart of its action. How do we script the viewer’s presencesince he/she is an essential part of the narrative flow but in a totally unpredictable way?

This presentation is about my current research in creating a practical methodology that defines presence in an immersive story world. I have found 9 ways of being "here" in VR. There are probably more. Knowing them will help us building coherence in all immersive experiences.

• Jelena Milosevic
• Brigitte Strahwald

Hospitals are still an attractive target for criminal hackers, also because they are still consideres soft targets. The attacks have different objectives, one of them is to gain access to individual health, medical and personal data. Patients can thus be more or less directly harmed.

As a nurse, Jelena is facing these challenges daily. She sees vulnerability on all levels and in all roles and locations in the hospital – in software, devices, and with humans. The consequences can be severe and harm patients, employees and the hospital itself. The reasons are manifold, e.g. stressed healthcare workers with limited interest in IT security, poorly equipped IT departments, missing updates, ignorance, organisational shortcomings in the hospitals .

We need to understand why IT security in hospitals is so fragmentary. We also need to understand the working conditions in hospitals and the needs of the healthcare workers. We need to understand the system and the processses and how medical devices and computers are connected. We need to think about innovations and IoT, e-health, digital and smart hospitals.

Jelena will show a lot of examples and discuss with Brigitte and the audience how to create awareness so that we can build a safe and secure IT environment in hospitals.

• Salomé Eggler
• Tey Al-Rjula
• Alexander Schmid
• Thérèse Carolin Tasche

Today, exercising many rights and accessing a variety of services such as healthcare, education and voting comes in lockstep with legal proof of existence – if you don’t have it, you can’t participate. Given that the birth of one out of four children under the age of five remains unregistered worldwide, this has alarming consequences for a lot a people. However, remedy seems within reach: blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology showcase new avenues when it comes to managing one's identity. By providing people with a digital ID, blockchained identities not only offer access to political, economic and social life, but also promise the mitigation of identity theft as well as time and money consuming KYC processes. Unsurprisingly, many of the most innovative projects in terms of identity management in the 21st century thus focus on self-sovereign identity.

Let's co-create!

In an attempt to streamline current efforts and move towards more hands-on applications, this workshop will:

• build bridges between technologists and international development experts;
• forge a common vision about the design of decentralized identity management; and
• highlight core ingredients of such a delivery framework, taking into account the privacy concerns of the most vulnerable.

Beyond that, to foster cooperative approaches and create workable solutions, the workshop will guide participants through GIZ´s international project portfolio to elucidate the most pressing issues in respect to decentralized identity management.

While the workshop will provide nuanced insights into recently implemented development projects, all those interested in having a closer look at data protection questions are warmly invited to join the introductory session on self-determined identity management on 2 May.

supported by T-Labs

• Adam Harvey
• Hadi Khatib

The Syrian Archive is a collective of human rights activists dedicated to documenting human rights violations and war crimes committed by all sides in the Syrian conflict. Their network of researchers and journalists are pioneering new methods for accountability and advocacy, which rely on collecting, verifying, and annotating thousands of videos posted online that contain evidence of human rights violations. But manually reviewing these videos is expensive, does not scale, and cause vicarious trauma. Currently there are over 1 million videos waiting to be reviewed.

The VFRAME computer vision toolkit is being developed in collaboration with the Syrian Archive initiative to improve their information gather capabilities. VFRAME can analyze large-scale video datasets to locate illegal munitions (e.g. cluster bombs, incendiary weapons, barrel bombs); filter graphic content; and extract metadata about scenery, logos, and text. This metadata is then made searchable through both text and visual queries allowing the Syrian Archive to more quickly locate and verify videos that contain evidence of war crimes and human rights violations.

This session will discuss and showcase how VFRAME and the Syrian Archive initiative are working together to innovate new tools and improve open source information gathering technology to strengthen justice and advocacy efforts.

https://vframe.io

https://syrianarchive.org

• Julia Krüger

Der Talk gibt einen Überblick, wie die Regulierung durch Algorithmen zu regulieren ist. Dazu verknüpft er wesentliche internationale Forschungs- und Diskursergebnisse aus dem Bereich der Algorithmen-Regulierung mit aktuellen politischen, rechtlichen und technischen Tatsachen und Perspektiven. Konkrete Lösungsansätze werden vor und zur Debatte gestellt. Komplexe Sachverhalte werden so weit wie möglich durch mediale Interventionen der Erfahrung zugängig gemacht. Am Ende steht ein Überblick, welche Dimension von Kontrolle durch welche politischen Akteure in unterschiedlichen Rechtsbereichen ausgeübt oder ermöglicht werden kann und wie zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure dazu beitragen können, gesellschaftliche Schäden durch künstliche Intelligenz zu begrenzen.

• John Weitzmann
• Kai Christian Wagner

Blockchain-based tokenization is all the rage. It can be used to build trusted virtual currencies into any kind of project or enterprise – with a view to providing the people involved with an objective way to incentivize whatever is needed, be that computing power, exchange of data or the involvement in a project in general.

To be active in such systems requires spending tokens that you either buy or earn based on other contributions. In the Bitcoin system, tokens are issued to “Miners” that contribute to verifying the blockchain. But the contribution earning you tokens could also be any other kind of effort, like editing content or sharing data. Inevitably, this introduction of currencies brings about the monetary dynamics of economies, i. e. systems framed by laws (code), organized in markets and governed by structures that can range from dictatorship to democracy. If we acknowledge the complex dynamics of economies, questions arise about the potential risks and benefits of tokenization, especially where it is introduced to manage public infrastructure.

Two such infrastructures are free knowledge and proof of identity. Both require a continuous investment into maintenance, but everyone is free to use them without charge. Projects like Wikipedia run on volunteers and donations, proof of identity is most often provided by states, sometimes by companies in exchange for privacy and personal data. Tokenization could be a new way to ensure sustainability of this kind of public infrastructure by compensating stakeholders that contribute to it. It could allow for new mechanisms to redistribute power and wealth. Or it could create detrimental patterns of power accumulation and inequality – something we might not want around public infrastructures. So, is tokenization good or bad for public infrastructure?

In our discussion, we will shed light on existing models of tokenization and discuss the future potential for its use in the context of public infrastructure.

supported by T-Labs

• Luca Hammer

Automatisierung ist der Kern des Digitalen. Kommunikation wurde aber schon lange vor dem Internet automatisiert. Etwa durch Anrufbeantworter oder Postwurfsendungen. Warum stören wir uns so sehr an Bots?

Ich versuche Automatisierung aufzuschlüsseln. Auf einer technischen Ebene von einfach (automatische Nachricht beim Folgen) bis komplex (Bewerten der Begriffe in einer Nachricht, um das zentrale Thema zu bestimmten und dazu passend das automatische Erstellen einer einzigartigen Antwort). Auf einer Transparenzebene: Accounts, die sich eindeutig deklarieren (@MagicRealismBot) und solche, die ihre Automatisierung verschleiern.

Wie erkennt man Automatisierung? Neben sichtbaren Eigenschaften (Profilbild, Aktivität, Sprache, etc.) gibt es unterschiedliche Tools (botometer, botcheck, etc.), die bei der Erkennung helfen. Keinem sollte man blind vertrauen, sondern sie nur als Indizien betrachten.

Der Vorwurf der Automatisierung um das Gegenüber zu diskreditieren. Wo liegt der Unterschied zwischen Nachrichten, die von Bots verbreitet werden und Nachrichten, die als Werbung verbreitet werden? Lenkt uns die Diskussion um Bots von wichtigeren, aber komplexeren Themen ab? Müssen wir uns darauf einstellen in Zukunft häufiger mit Maschinen zu kommunizieren? Und warum ist hier alles so grau?

Slides: https://lucahammer.at/slides/2018_rp18_bist_du_ein_bot.pdf