Week 40/2026

The Maestro says it's Mozart

NSFW

This week's NSFW comes from two of my personal heroes who appered here earlier. It's Sophie Zelmani (see Weekly 38/2025 and Weekly 39/2025) singing a song of Leonard Cohen (see Weekly 23/2026).

On Spotify:

Here's the original that is not bad either:

but I like Zelmani's interpretation more.

Retrospect

Japan

I am still in Japan. It has been a uniquely inspiring journey, both from a professional and a personal perspective. I continued to do a few short videos on YouTube, e. g. one on my presentation at Kyushu University

and one on my Shinkansen trip from Fukuoka to Tokyo

I realised just now that the legs and in particular the shoes on the picture above are not mine and do not appear in the video but were generated by YouTube after I had asked the platform to provide me with a thumbnail suggestion. (Not sure whether this is an infringement of art. 50 AI-act ...)

I also did a short video on Shibuya

and some more.

Professionally, I profited a lot from my conversations with old and new colleagues at Kyushu University: Prof. Steven Van Uytsel who combines European legal education with several decades of experience in the Japanese academic system so that he can, possibly, understand what I find amazing in the Japanese system and kindly tries to translate it to me. Professor Satoshi Narihara who works in information law and had been a guest professor at our department for several months taught me about recent changes in the Japanese data protection regime made to foster AI developments. No longer informed consent needs to be the legal basis for AI training, even in cases of sensitive personal data.

After the lecture we had a wonderful lunch in a sushi-restaurant with a beautiful sea view together.

AI in ORF

According to several people who contacted me on this, I apparently appeared in a documentary that was shown by ORF this week. It was a real pleasure to talk to my colleague at UNIVIE Werner Gruber about the topic, but our conversation took place somehow 8 months ago so that I hardly remember it.

I can't watch it in Japan "due to legal reasons" so that I will need to wait for my return to assess whether what I said still makes sense today.

History of Legal Informatics in Austria

This book, published a few days ago,

is the end of a long, long journey. It's the final outcome of a research project that its authors undertook from 2008-2011. We've consolidated and reorganised the text and have published it now as a kind of birthday present for it-law.at. it-law.at was founded as an alumni association of "my LLM-program" many years ago, has grown significantly since then and celebrated its 25th birthday a few days ago.

I am very grateful to my friend and colleague for more than 20 years Markus Holzweber who had the stamina to continue to work on this for so many years and who had, by far, the greatest part of work with this. I am equally grateful to Birgit who went through this so diligently, helping us to get this into good shape. And last not least, Nicolas Reitbauer, plays an important role in this.

Prospect

Conferences and Talks

There are several intense weeks with lots of meetings/presentations etc. ahead on me, three of them in the week to come:

On Tuesday/Wednesday I will be with Fraunhofer/SCAI in Köln/Bonn

talking on "Data Readiness from a Legal Perspective". Prof. Dr. Martin Hofmann-Apitius and his team and colleagues have arranged a very attractive program.

On Thursday I will be part of the Internet Summit Austria.

I will be co-responsible for 1 (out of 4) breakout sessions in the afternoon.

Friday and Saturday bring re:publica to Vienna for the very first time.

My slot is on Friday at 11.45,

This will be a rant abut all the expert committees, advisory boards, high level expert groups and so on that I have seen (and have been part of) in technology regulation in the last 20 years and an attempt of an analysis what they are for.

One of my personal highlights will be to see Constanze Kurz again

at this occasion.

Look and Feel

Japan

I am still there, overwhelmed by so many, many impressions it's too early to talk about already now.

My DJI pocket Osmo 4p is often with me

Here's one of the outcomes, a short video about my day in Nikko

I will do at least one more about this Thursday in Kamakura.

Let me share with you - instead of writing about it - a few pictures, many of them taken by Birgit (with her permission, of course) that might tell more than words for today.