Luxembourg (Europe)

At the end of May, the Government presented Luxembourg's vision of artificial intelligence (AI) with a view to driving the country's digital transformation forward. The strategy reveals how the Grand Duchy could reap the benefits of this influential technology while at the same time ensuring protection for fundamental principles regarding ethics and confidentiality. How does the Grand Duchy plan to make a place for itself in this high-tech environment?

Three major ambitions
The Grand Duchy is keen to demonstrate once again its reputation for adopting new technologies at an early stage is totally justified. The development of a reliable environment dedicated to AI-related services and activities is backed up by resources and infrastructures that are already available.

With the aim of adopting a leading position in the digital world, three ambitions have been defined:

Being one of the most advanced digital societies in Europe, if not the world;
Focusing on a sustainable economy based on data;
Promoting the development of AI by applying a human-centred approach.
To be able to adapt to the rapid changes in the sector, the Government is considering its strategy above all as a "political vision" that can be readjusted at any time.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?tag=Digital+L%C3%ABtzebuerg

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=AI

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Laws

Luxembourg’s government defines its strategy vision for artificial intelligence

Mai 24, 2019; Luxembourg’s government has made its vision for AI known via a newly published strategy report that promises, first and foremost, a human-centric approach.

The “Strategy Vision for Luxembourg” was jointly drafted by Digital Luxembourg, a government initiative that strengthens and unifies the country’s digitalization efforts, and Luxinnovation, the national innovation agency, with valuable input from public and private experts.

The starting point of a process without a finish line, this vision is a framework for action and a springboard for new policies. Acknowledging the speed of AI’s arrival, the report articulates the government’s intention to actively shape, drive and leverage this life-changing technology. It aligns with Luxembourg’s three digital ambitions:

Be among the most advanced digital societies in the world, & especially in the EU

Become a data-driven & sustainable economy

Support human-centric AI development

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?tag=Digital+L%C3%ABtzebuerg

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=AI

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Laws

Information Technology Law (IT Law) is a research area concerned with Ethics and Law for Information Technologies. The area has recently gained increasing interest, due to the rapid and pervasive deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies within industrial products that we can find in our everyday life.

The first central concern is the demand of clear legal and ethical guidelines to channel this development. The research area is receiving worldwide attention not only due to the disruptive impact it may have on the labour markets, but also because of the complex socio-ethical and legal questions it poses in combination with its manifold and complex technological challenges.

The second central concern is the relationship between humans and AI technology: there is a potential danger of raising negative attitudes in society towards the development and deployment of modern artificial-intelligence technology (e.g., by often poorly informed, biased media reports), while there is at the same time an education gap regarding the actual state-of-the-art and the predictable future in the development of intelligent autonomous systems. There’s no reason AI can’t take ethical actions/moral decisions, but a pure artifact, with no human component, should never be held to be the moral agent or the legally responsible party; justice and responsibility are concepts by which we humans organize our own societies, and which rely on human interests, drives, and capacities in order to steer behavior in ways appropriate to maintain those societies.

Law and Ethics for Science and Technology aims at developing and studying means to make the use of AI technologies in critical areas in a safe, sustainable and responsible way. Ethics-by-Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools to endow autonomous agents with the capabilities to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, as well as the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that agents’ behavior remains within given ethical and moral bounds.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?tag=Digital+L%C3%ABtzebuerg

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=AI

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Laws

Friday saw the presentation of Luxembourg's strategies for artificial intelligence (AI) and the continuous digitisation of priority economic sectors.

On 24 May 2019, Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, who is also Minister of Digitalisation, and Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of the Economy Étienne Schneider presented the political guidelines for AI and the data-driven innovation strategy to support the emergence of a sustainable and trusted economy in the Grand Duchy.

The development of a strategic vision of AI in Luxembourg has become a national priority, intended to be beneficial to society and its citizens. In a data-driven society, AI is the channel through which countless amounts of data can be transformed into instantaneous exploitable responses. 

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?tag=Digital+L%C3%ABtzebuerg

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=AI

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Laws

Blockchain Law passed in Luxembourg
By Annie-Laure Mahieu, Project and Research Assistant @The LHoFT Foundation

WOO! But what is the Law about?

On 14thof February, the Luxembourg parliament passed Bill 7363 into Law on Blockchain and the circulation of tokens as dematerialized securities. 

This addendum to the Law of 2001 on the circulation of securities was proposed by the Minister of Finance, Pierre Gramegna, at the end of September 2018 and approved unanimously with 58 votes in favor and 2 against it. 

The possibility to issue dematerialized securities had already been introduced into Luxembourg Law in 2013. Bill 7363 is a new amendment that qualifies tokens as dematerialized securities and sets up a legal framework for the use of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in the context of their circulation. 

COOL! So, what does all that mean?

From now on, securities may also be registered in an account and transferred using secure electronic registration mechanisms such as distributed ledger technologies (i.e. Blockchain). One of the particularities of DLTs highlighted within the text is the fact that every issuance, transaction and exchange is recorded on it. Once transactions have been verified and included on a block, they can no longer be removed. This is the principle of immutability. The second principle of a DLT technology is its traceability. A distributed ledger is a secure database that keeps a record of every movement of an asset, from its first issuance on the DLT to its last ownership. The protection of this data is ensured for every transaction added to the distributed ledger as it is encrypted and “hashed” into a code.  This traceability at the level of the transaction ensures the security of the system. DLT technologies are being recognized by the Luxembourg Law as a new way of managing securities accounts. While there were already some conditions for the dematerialization foreseen in the previous legal framework, this constitutes an additional alternative.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Blockchain

https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=blockchain

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?tag=Digital+L%C3%ABtzebuerg

Smartly regulating financial innovation requires all stakeholders – the financial sector, start-ups, regulators and academics – to understand technology and law.'

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?tag=Digital+L%C3%ABtzebuerg

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=FinTech

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Laws

http://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=University+Luxembourg