NSFW

My short excursions into my personal history of not understanding Nirvana in last week's weekly brought this into my Bluesky timeline

but also Portishead into my Spotify-thread. I must say that I had forgotten how much I love Portishead, in particular Roads - this week's - NSFW

YouTube:

with a beautiful life version on YouTube as well (and with the guitar player Adrian Utley looking a bit like Andreas Babler):

Retrospect

600

Prof. Dr. Peter Knees joined me in the laundry and we did episode 600 of #arsboni together. It's about the digital humanism initiative.

600 is quite a number. It has been quite a journey since episode 1 streamed in march 2020,

To celebrate this, I also did episode 601 with Dr. Sven Thorstensen on the Europol-hack of Sky ECC - a communication app used by many criminals - but not all users were criminals.

ZDF made a very interesting true crime podcast about the story.

European Legislation

I've been quite busy in trying to understand what, precisely, the European Commission is planning to do with the AI Act

and/or GDPR

and/or with platform regulation (Armin Wolf asks similar questions in a Falter-interview, Paywall)

Two learnings, for the moment: The situation is more 'dynamic' than ever and if there is any minimum consensus, then it's that European regulation doesn't look good.

Vienna Legal History Society

The society (WRG) organised a very nice and very well attended event in Juridicum. Invited speaker was Dr. Michael Kunze (world known musical author, author of countless songs) who presented his recent book

and spoke about Jhering, with a particular focus on his time in Vienna and his philosophical thinking.

He argued, in particular, that Jhering's positions have to be put in context with the disappearance of metaphysical/theological foundations in philosophy of science in the 19th century, so that Nietzsche's famous "Gott ist tot." is a key for understanding how Jhering was no longer willing to accept god as final justification for a legal argument.

Legal Tech Day

Sophie Martinetz and her team did a terrific job - again - to organise a fully packed legal tech conference.

Adriana, Michael, Boris (from left to right) and me represented the department, Markus was there for the LLM.

It was a terrific opportunity to meet and greet colleagues and friends from all over the sector. And the venue, Park Hyatt Hotel. was marvelous too, with a ceiling reminding (a little) of Musikvereinssaal.

It's a pity that I don't have 350 Mio € to buy it.

Parlament.FYI

Christina Helf and Christopher Helf from parlament.fyi organised a wonderful evening ("Erster parlament.fyi POL•DI•LOG") in the premises of CMS.

Parlament.FYI is a very interesting example of a useful AI-app, making parliamentary work more tangible, transparent and analysable. I appreciated, as part of the very well composed programme, a panel debate chaired by Joachim Kurz, with the speakers for digitalisation of NEOS, Ines Holzegger and the Greens, Süleyman Zorba.

Audience and panels were united in seeing Austria's performance in AI matters and AI regulation in a rather positive and optimistic light.

Here's more about the app:

Prospect

I will (have to) travel quite extensively in this week.

Commute

Commute is a wonderful project trying to understand whether COVID-19 could potentially increase the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer or Parkinson. Prof. Dr. Martin Hofmann-Apitius, whom I admire a lot and with whom I have had the privilege to collaborate for many years is coordinating this.

Monday/Tuesday will bring me to Luxembourg for a consortium meeting but also for a public workshop:

Moderator

• Martin Hofmann-Apitius (COMMUTE Project Coordinator, Department Head, Bioinformatics at Fraunhofer SCAI, University of Bonn)

Speakers

• Soraya Moradi-Bachiller (Public Involvement Officer, Alzheimer Europe)
• Davit Chokoshvili (Senior ELSI Specialist, Luxembourg National Data Service)
• Manon Gantenbein, PhD, Ms. (Head of Clinical and Epidemiological Investigation Center & Clinical Project Management Office, Luxembourg Institute of Health)
• Prof. Luca Pani, (Full Professor, Department of Biomedical, Metabolic and Neuroscience, Polyclinic, UNIMORE - University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia)
• Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó (Professor of IT and IP Law, Head of the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law, University of Vienna)

Details

• Date: 17th November 2025
• Time: 13:30-15:00 CET
• Format: Hybrid (Maison des Sciences Humaines (MSH) - Université de Luxembourg 11 Porte des Sciences, 4366 Belval Esch-sur-Alzette Luxembourg & online)

Registration

Please register here and read the form ‘Informed consent to the processing of personal data’ and tick the boxes accordingly. Please register on or before 7th November 2025. You will receive the link via email a few days before the event.

AICI - Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Imaging

On Thursday, November 20th, I will deliver a keynote in Villat at AICI - Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Imaging

It's a nice opportunity to see Prof. Dr. Georg Langs again whom I admire a lot and with whom I have the privilege tpo collaborate in the CD Laboratory for Machine Learning Driven Precision Imaging

Free entry, registration required, no stream.

FMA Fintech Day

I will try to drop by at the Fintech Day of the Austrian Financial Markets Authority on Wednesday.

This is part of the fintech-week 2025.

#arsboni

Agentic AI is a big topic - also in Law. On Wednesday, 19th, at 19.00 CET I will ask Charlotte Kufus from flank.ai about the topic.

The Vienna LLP will have an interview with Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Brameshuber, also on Wednesday, at 14.00, that I will host technically.

Look and Feel

Hotel Rimini

The Vienna concert was fabulous.

If I may chose two songs here today it would be

and

because New Year is coming soon.

They were supported by "Das Schottische Prinzip" that I hadn't known before and that are fun too:

Khatia Buniatishvili

Khatia Buniatishvili gave (again, see also Weekly 09/2025) a solo piano concert on Sunday evening with Schubert and Liszt, this time in Großer Musikvereinssaal.

The concert was recorded by ORF, so there will hopefully be an opportunity to see/hear it. Here's a video for the meantime with her playing Schubert:

She played, of course, beautifully.

I was, however distracted by people leaving or entering in the middle of a piece, coughing, sneezing, filming, by a ringing mobile, by people applauding after each movement of a piece and - much more - by those complaining about the misplaced applause. I don't understand why concert halls don't install a red/green light somewhere on the ceiling indicating when people should or should not applaud. It's such a stupid game of the elitist snobs complaining about those not knowing the rules and it's distracting to wait when applause or complaints or both will unwantedly appear again.

Wallners

Wallners played in Konzerthaus (Mozartsaal).

It was nice, although I was a little disappointed about the acoustics. Falter has an interview with them from earlier this year, Byte.FM a radio show, FM4 a text, CO-Vienna another interview with images.

And here's one of my favorite songs they played:

Reading List

Three dear friends (Thank you, again!) were so kind to offer me three very different books that I am currently reading simultaneously and that I want to recommend:

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Pompejis letzter Sommer, is a very interesting reconstruction of daily life and the appearance of Christianity;

Susanne Kippenberger, Kippenberger, draws a very sensible and empathic brother of her older brother Martin (see also Weekly 40/2025)

and, last, not least, Sven Regener, Meine Jahre mit Hamburg-Heiner, leads us back (or introduces the younger) into how 2005-2010 felt, when internet and social media were younger and blogging was cool.

Daisy

finally found the answer answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Have a wonderful week!

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)