Trust and Identity: The new frontier in the AI Age

With recent AI tools such as Deepfakes and OpenAI/GPTn it is possible to automate the fabrication of complex digital content on a large scale and to create large numbers of convincing bots that can convincingly mimic human behaviour, e.g. posting product reviews, engaging in political and societal discourse, acting as influencers, interacting with followers etc.

The consequences are a fundamental threat to European society and business. While the issue of disinformation is already being addressed on multiple levels (including an EU HLEG in 2016/17 and various content marking standardisation efforts), the additional dimension of an automation of the fabrication of disinformation has not yet been acted on.

Most countermeasures to address this fundamental challenge require standards, e.g. standards for tracing information back to its source or creator, standards for bot-resistant pseudonymous identities, standards or protocols for assigning and tracking trust etc.

In his role at VDE in Germany he drives a broad range of digital topics such as the trustworthiness of information, product verification, human-machine interfaces in the digital age or new virtual conferencing paradigms. Dr Sebastian Hallensleben is also one of the thought leaders for AI Ethics in Europe. He is the chair of CEN/CENELEC JTC 21 on standardisation structure for AI, as well as the convenor of the international IEC Special Expert Group on AI Ethics.

Svenja Hahn (1989) is a first-term Member of the European Parliament for the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), part of the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. She is from Hamburg, Germany. Svenja Hahn is a member of the Committee for Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) where she especially focuses on AI legislation. She is also a substitute member in the International Trade Committee (INTA), where her focus has been on South and Southeast Asia, responsible business conduct and circular economy. Furthermore, she is Renew Europe coordinator in the Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age (AIDA), established in 2020.  

Svenja Hahn is also a member of the delegation to ASEAN and South Asia and a substitute member of the delegation to Australia and New Zealand. She is member of several parliamentary intergroups, such as the LGBTI Intergroup, the Disability Intergroup, the Anti-Racism and Discrimination Intergroup (ARDI), the Intergroup on Seas, Rivers, Islands and Coastal Areas (SeaRICA), the Spinelli Group and the SME Intergroup, as well as the working group on Responsible Business Conduct (RBC) and the Youth interest group.

Svenja Hahn was the President of the European Liberal Youth (LYMEC) from 2018-2020, and before that she served as the press officer (2014-2016) and Vice President (2016-2018) of the organisation. Since 2020, she is the First Vice President of the European Liberal Forum (ELF). As a Member of the European Parliament IMCO, she is one of the shadow rapporteurs in the file of the Artificial Intelligence Act.

Axel Küpper is a professor for Service-centric Networking at Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) and Telekom Innovation Laboratories, which is a public-private partnership of Deutsche Telekom AG and TU Berlin. Before, he was an assistant professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he received his postdoctoral lecture qualification (habilitation). He graduated in computer science from RWTH Aachen University, where he also received his doctorate.

Axel's early research focused on distributed and mobile systems and networks, context-aware applications, and location-based services. In recent years, he has worked intensively on topics related to Mobile and Cloud Computing, Service-oriented Architectures, and future web technologies. Axel is an advocate of decentralized systems and applications. The focus of his work here is on distributed ledger technologies, token economy, self-sovereign identity, emerging blockchain-based applications, blockchain analytics, and decentralized online social networks.

Dr Tanja Pavleska is a researcher at the Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks, Jozef Stefan Institute. She graduated from the Faculty for electrical engineering in Skopje, Macedonia, at the Institute for Automation and System Engineering. She obtained her PhD from the Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School in the area of Computational trust and reputation systems, with special emphasis on the user behaviour in the online social platforms.

Her main interests are in identity management, critical infrastructure security, trust and reputation management, user behaviour in digital platforms, cybernetics and complexity principles in online systems, behaviour modelling, Internet governance, digital policies and regulatory frameworks, and IoT Healthcare standardisation.

She was involved in the EU FP7 project e-SENS (Electronic Simple European Networked Services), where she was led the work of the Cybersecurity and Trust Work-stream. She also led the work on policies and regulatory frameworks work within the H2020 EU project COMPACT.  Currently, she is leading the work on EU governance landscape in the H2020 project Digital Europe for All, and has been working on the assessment of architecture building blocks in the same project.

Tanja is also the chair of the Slovenian Internet society (ISOC) chapter, as well as a co-chair of the IEEE P2933 standardisation initiative on Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security (TIPPSS) in Clinical IoT.