This conference focuses on the societal, legal, and ethical challenges posed by AI and data-driven technologies, including data governance and cybersecurity, across different jurisdictions. Speakers will elucidate the roles of governments, corporations, and civil society and assess policy options at national, regional, and international levels. Discussions will explore how to build inclusive and sustainable digital economies by strengthening data governance, promoting innovation, and closing technological gaps.
This conference examines the opportunities and challenges posed by artificial intelligence, data governance, cybersecurity, and other emerging technologies across different jurisdictions. As AI technologies advance at unprecedented speed, effective governance has become essential to ensuring that their ethical, legal, and societal impacts are responsibly managed. While digitalisation and AI are transforming societies, economies, and political systems, unlocking innovation and efficiency, they are also deepening digital divides and raising urgent questions about accountability, equity and security.
The conference will focus on several interrelated questions:
These questions underscore the need for comprehensive, interdisciplinary responses. States and stakeholders worldwide are responding in diverse ways to the disruptive power of digital technologies, often reflecting differing values, institutional structures, and power configurations. The conference will examine the respective roles of governments, corporations, and civil society, including China’s growing influence in technology governance, and assess critical policy options at national, regional, and international levels to ensure that digital transformation serves the broader public good. Understanding both the convergence and divergence of these approaches requires collaboration across academic research, public policy, the private sector, and civil society.
The conference aims to convene diverse voices to foster a shared understanding of the societal, legal, and ethical challenges posed by AI and data-driven technologies. Discussions will explore how to build inclusive and sustainable digital economies by strengthening data governance, promoting innovation, and closing technological gaps. Particular attention will be given to the ethical, social, and geopolitical implications of AI, including the global spread of digital state capitalism and its effects on power relations, national security, and strategic competition.
By highlighting both the promise and the risks of emerging technologies, the conference seeks to inform policy debates and contribute to the development of digital ecosystems that are innovative, inclusive, and sustainable. Ultimately, it aims to
The programme will be available soon.
Qingxiu Bu is Reader in Global Law at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex, UK. He has published widely in a variety of areas of law, many of which are themed around law and global challenges, with a particular focus on the development of legal infrastructures in transnational law and global governance. He has previously been a lecturer in law at Cardiff Law School of Cardiff University and the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast (UK), during which he taught transnational business law at the Centre of Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS), Georgetown University (USA) as Adjunct Professor. Qingxiu Bu was appointed as Li Kashing Professor of Practice at the Faculty of Law, McGill University (Canada) in 2019. He has held visiting posts at various institutions, including Lund University (Sweden), Tel Aviv University (Israel) and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Germany.
Thomas Feldhoff is Professor of Human Geography at the Faculty of Geography and Geosciences, Ruhr University Bochum. After graduating from East Asian Studies with a regional focus on Japan, he received his PhD in Geography at the University of Duisburg in 1999. He habilitated at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2004 with a thesis on the institutional foundations of construction lobbyism in Japan. He received the 2006 JaDe Award of the Association for the Promotion of Japanese German Cultural Relations (JaDe) and a Book Prize of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) in 2008 for his publication Bau-Lobbyismus in Japan.
Before joining Ruhr University Bochum in April 2016, Thomas Feldhoff held senior faculty positions at universities in Germany, the UK and Japan. His research and teaching today focuses on the nexus of georesources, sustainability and geopolitics with regard to sociotechnical transitions. It is based on a relational, multi-scalar, comparative perspective that looks into the ties to wider politics of territoriality, state, economy, science, and nature.
Thomas Feldhoff is Coordinator and Co-Director of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Redesigning the Post-Industrial City (EMJM RePIC), an inter-university, multidisciplinary study programme run by eight partners of the European University Alliance UNIC – The European University of Cities in Post-Industrial Transition.