About the kickoff event
The SIG-AI-ACT kickoff event, taking place on 6th March, marks the official launch of the initiative and brings together researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders interested in accountable, transparent, and trustworthy AI. The event will feature two keynote talks that set the vision and research agenda for SIG-AI-ACT, addressing both foundational challenges and emerging opportunities at the intersection of AI systems and regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act. Following the keynotes, participants will engage in breakout sessions, designed to foster interactive dialogue on concrete research directions, practical implications, and opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Most importantly, we aim to build a community at the intersection of AI research, practice, and regulation and therefore seek topics and questions to be discussed in our breakout sessions. We kindly ask you to contribute such questions during registration.
For inspiration, example questions include:
- What evidence do you currently rely on to trust AI-based decision-support systems in your domain?
- What are the main technical, organizational, or legal barriers you face when integrating the EU AI Act into existing AI workflows?
- Which aspects of the AI Act are hardest to translate into concrete technical requirements or evaluation criteria?
- What best practices have you seen that effectively balance trustworthiness, transparency, and privacy in real deployments?
- How can regulation such as the EU AI Act enable innovation rather than hinder it, and what technical or organizational mechanisms are needed to support this?
Details
- Date: 6 March, 2026
- Time: 9:30–17:00
- Location: Aula Conference Center, TU Delft – Mekelweg 5, 2628 CC Delft (Room Frans van Hasseltzaal)
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Asia Biega — Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), Germany
Talk Title: Co-Designing for Compliance in Post-Market Fairness Monitoring
Abstract: The EU AI Act requires post-market monitoring of high-risk AI systems, but a gap remains between legal mandates and viable solutions. This talk argues that bridging this gap requires co-designing legal, technical, and social infrastructure and presents the results of such a multi-year co-design approach. We first show how to systematically translate legal obligations under the EU AI Act into concrete fairness monitoring protocols based on multi-party computation. We then confront a fundamental barrier that purely technical solutions overlook: beyond technical soundness, audit feasibility depends on whether affected users and organizations are willing to participate at all. Drawing on empirical user studies, we examine the trust conditions, transparency requirements, and governance structures that determine whether compliant fairness audits can actually function in practice.
About: Dr. Asia Biega is a computer scientist and a tenure-track faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) where she leads the interdisciplinary Responsible Computing group. Her research explores the intersection of computing and society, with a focus on technology governance. She is a principal investigator in the CASA Cluster of Excellence and the FINDHR consortium, and has collaborated widely across disciplines and sectors. She has served as an external expert for the European Commission, and the General Co-Chair of FAccT 2025, the biggest academic conference focusing on the societal impacts of computing. She now sits on the FAccT Executive Committee. Her work has been recognized with Council of Europe’s Rodota Award for innovative research in data protection, Annual Privacy Forum Best Paper Award, SaTML Notable Reviewer Award, the GI-DBIS Dissertation Award of the German Informatics Society, and she has been named one of the 2025 "100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics"
Prof. Andrej Zwitter — University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Talk Title: Trust in the Age of General Purpose AI: Cybernetic Governance and the EU AI Act
Abstract: The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act marks a decisive shift toward proactive and risk-based governance of artificial intelligence, with General-Purpose AI (GPAI) emerging as a central regulatory challenge. GPAI systems are not confined to single use cases but operate as foundational infrastructures embedded across sectors, applications, and regulatory domains. This keynote examines how the AI Act’s GPAI framework both reflects and struggles with a broader structural problem: the convergence of digital technologies and the resulting convergence of governance regimes.
About: Andrej Zwitter is Professor of Humanities and Digitalization as well as Director of the Digital Age Research Center at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He served as Dean of the Faculty Campus Fryslan and founding dean of the University College Fryslan, University of Groningen, Netherlands. He was a founding board member of the WEF Chapter Zero, Netherlands and of the urban data centre Data Fryslân. His expertise covers data governance, law and ethics of digitalization, as well as emergency management and sustainabilty governance.
Program
| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 09:00–09:30 | Walk-in |
| 09:30–09:40 | Welcome and Introduction |
| 09:40–10:30 | Keynote by Asia Biega |
| 10:30–10:45 | Coffee break |
| 10:45–11:00 | Talk by Nandi Robijns (EU Commission) |
| 11:00–12:15 | Breakout session on Translation and design |
| 12:15–13:15 | Lunch |
| 13:15–14:05 | Keynote by Andrej Zwitter |
| 14:05–14:15 | Coffee break |
| 14:15–15:30 | Breakout session on Challenges of transalation and design of AI Act compliant systems |
| 15:30–16:30 | Panel discussion |
| 16:30 onwards | Drinks & Bitterballen |
