The EU Commission has appointed Prof. Borges, Managing Director of the Institute of Legal Informatics as a member of the New Technology formation of the newly formed Expert Group on Liability and New Technologies. This Expert Group will look at issues of AI, robotics, The Internet of Things and Industry 4.0. In particular, it will focus on the development of a liability framework and other legal instruments for new technologies.
The background for the formation of the Expert Group is the Communication of 25th April entitled "Artificial Intelligence for Europe" (COM(2018) 237) from the European Commission to the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions.
The work of the Expert Group could be of particular importance in the near future: in the Communication, the Commission emphasises, amongst other things, the urgency to address emerging trends, the promotion of investment, the preparation for socio-economic changes and the need for an appropriate ethical and legal framework for AI. The Expert Group, which met for the first time on 26th and 27th June, will draft a report with an evaluation of the legal framework and recommendations for the development of a legal framework by the summer of 2019.
Prof. Borges is a an expert on IT Law and some of the main areas of his research are questions of liability for autonomous systems such as vehicles or robots, Data Protection, Internet law, electronic banking, electronic legal transactions and identity, copyright law and cloud computing. He sat as a judge at the Higher Regional Court of Hamm and is one of the founders of the working group "Identitätsschutz im Internet e.V. (a-i3)".