Talk@Weizenbaum Institute

Back to Madrid after attending the workshop «Data Solutionism in Servicing the Public. The Changing Interplay between Tech Companies and Public Entities» at the Weizenbaum Institute in the wonderful city of Berlin. We had a lovely multidisciplinary journey to how technology is shaping society.

The workshop included talks about different topics:

• Alex Gekker talked about patents around connected autonomous vehicles and their strict requirements about the performance of edge networks.
• Burcu Baykurt explained how US gov-tech firms capture value of smart cities.
• Eran Fisher presented an interesting overview of the datafication process that started with fillable forms.
• Sofie Verbrugge presented an interesting data use case and how Athumi – a Belgian PIMS – is trying to grab value in the data economy through trust.
• Zacchary Cooper talked about genAI, copyright and strategies of human creators in the music industry.
• Zoraida Frías shared her view of the measurement ecosystem in the telco sector, another example of a thriving ecosystem enabled by data.
• Litach Nir spoke about perception of health-related apps and algorithms.
• Sam Hind summarised research on how to evaluate genAI models throguh benchmarks leaderboards and other practices.

Finally, I gave a brief overview about the research I conducted during my PhD and a demo of our data pricing tool as a first step towards an observatory of the data economy. Glad to see the talk triggered an interesting discussion and that the audience found the tool a very interesting step ahead. We discussed about economic and ethical implications of growing such a tool, and its relationship with regulations such as the Data Governance Act.

Thanks very much Dr. Volker Stocker and Dr. Tamar Ashuri for the invitation and for hosting such an insightful and inspiring event. Looking forward to meeting again and pursuing some common publication with researchers of this community.