Events

Data is a central resource of and multiple-use production factor in the 21^st century. Data creation, data processing, data use, and data transfer is – in the words of data geopolitics – inherently linked to the competitiveness of not only economies, but also of societies. Nevertheless, the quest for an adequate and balanced governance framework is on-going – whereby data governance does not only, but also encompasses hard and soft law regulation. The respective field of data law is emerging and not yet fully ‘surveyed’, still in the process of making as well as fragmented along the lines of existing rules and recent policy efforts. The legal (and infrastructural) taxonomy is in flux and an inherent element of modern-day data strategies worldwide.

Underlining this global nature of data governance, the conference is aimed at a truly global view on data law instruments – where the current EU pieces of legislation (inter alia the General Data Protection Regulation as well as the Data Governance Act and the proposed Data Act) are only one of many approaches. Most important, the conference is devoted to a contextual – and a decolonial comparative law – approach to data regulation – including cultural, economic, and infrastructural dimensions of data governance and linking perspectives from the global north and global south as well from liberal and authoritarian settings.

The conference is co-organized by the University of Passau Research Centre for Law and Digitalisation (FREDI) and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. The event is the final part of a three-tier conference series on Global Data Law and element of a greater research agenda with respect to Global Data Law & Policy.

Visit the website on the Conference Series on Global Data Law.
 

Program as pdf

Registration is open up to and including 26 November 2023.

Benedict Probst presents his vision for the independent research group, which will be hosted at the Institute. He gives first an overview of his background and his past academic work. Then, he speaks about his plans for the group and gives an overview of the envisaged research projects.

The transfer of knowledge has not changed fundamentally for many hundreds of years: It is usually document-based-formerly printed on paper as a classic essay and nowadays as PDF. With around 2.5 million new research contributions every year, researchers drown in a flood of pseudo-digitized PDF publications. As a result research and innovation is seriously weakened. We argue for representing research contributions in a structured and semantic way as a knowledge graph. The advantage is that information represented in a knowledge graph is readable by machines and humans. As an example, we give an overview on the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), a service implementing this approach. For creating the knowledge graph representation, we rely on a mixture of manual (crowd/expert sourcing) and (semi-)automated techniques. Only with such a combination of human and machine intelligence, we can achieve the required quality of the representation to allow for novel exploration and assistance services for researchers. As a result, a scholarly knowledge graph such as the ORKG can be used to give a condensed overview on the state-of-the-art addressing a particular research quest, for example as a tabular comparison of contributions according to various characteristics of the approaches. Further possible intuitive access interfaces to such scholarly knowledge graphs include domain-specific (chart) visualizations or answering of natural language questions.

Contact person:  Marina Chugunova

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Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) I is a technology that can create novel, original and inventive content based on users input or data. AI has become a powerful and disruptive force in various domains, especially in the pharma-biotech industry, where it can accelerate drug discovery, optimize clinical trials, and improve patient outcomes. However, the use of AI also raises complex and unresolved issues regarding patent inventorship and ownership. While some jurisdictions have explicitly excluded AI from being an inventor, there is still uncertainty on how humans can claim inventorship on the inventive contributions of AI. This presentation will explore the question of inventive contribution in an invention and its impact on inventorship from a pharma-biotech perspective. The talk further discusses how different jurisdiction’s patent law define an ‘invention’ and an ‘inventor’, and how this can address the challenges posed by AI-assisted inventions. This talk will also explore the case of the Artificial Inventor Project, and how different courts have rejected the argument of AI inventor. Finally, this talk will propose recommendations for a future framework model that addresses some of the patent inventorship and ownership issues posed by AI in the age of generative innovation.

About Pratap Devarapalli

Dr. Pratap Devarapalli MSc, LLM, PhD is an Intellectual Property Strategist and Patent researcher. He has expertise in dealing with Intellectual Property issues in relation to emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 3D bioprinting and synthetic biology. He is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at TC Bernie School of Law, University of Queensland, Australia. Pratap pursued his doctoral studies from the Centre for Law and Genetics, University of Tasmania, Australia where his research was focused on “Patenting issues related to Bioprinted tissues and Bioinks”. He was invited by Government of Japan to assist Japanese Patent Office in harmonizing of Japanese Patent Law in relation AI. He pursued his Master of Law (LLM) in Intellectual Property from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Geneva and the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is the recipient of the prestigious International Fellowship offered by WIPO. He holds a Master's degree in Genomics and a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology, Microbiology, and Chemistry. Pratap also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Patent informatics from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research at the CSIR Unit of Research and Development of Information Products, India and worked as a Patent researcher in the same.

Multinational companies are affected by tax reforms both at home and abroad. We study the effect of foreign corporate tax reforms on domestic employment and wages. To do this, we link the universe of Norwegian firm-level foreign direct investment (FDI) data with the universe of Norwegian individual tax returns. Exploiting the staggered implementation of tax reforms in foreign countries which affect the subsidiaries of Norwegian firms, we find that domestically-owned Norwegian firms see domestic salaries increase by 2.4% following foreign tax cuts. We conclude that if all foreign profits are repatriated, approximately 18% of the foreign tax burden is borne by workers.

Contact person: David Heller

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Mobility of scientists has been increasingly recognized as a strategy to favor recombination of ideas and innovative research. However, our knowledge of patterns of migration of scientists, as well as their determinants, remains limited. We measure migration of scholars based on information on changes in their institutional affiliations over time, using metadata on over 36 million journal articles and reviews indexed by Scopus. Specifically, we produce a database of annual international migration flows of scholars, for all countries, from 1998-2017 (the “Scholarly Migration Database”). We use the newly generated database to provide evidence on the relationship between economic development and the emigration propensity of scholars, and to assess patterns and trends of gender inequalities in international mobility. Initial key results and potential further developments for this project will be presented.

Contact person: Michael E. Rose

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Reported numbers of observed scientific misconduct, e.g. through retracted articles, are increasing at an alarming rate. The detected cases, however, only present the tip of the iceberg because the actual amount of scientific misconduct is impossible to observe. Fraud in science is professionally and socially unaccepted and leads to sanctions for the culpable scientists so that misconducting scientists try to hide their fraudulent actions. This means that ultimately, the size of the population of misconducting authors remains elusive and, as such, presents a “dark number.”
We estimate the size of the population of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences, drawing on capture-recapture methods. We find that the population size of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences is about 4,000 and therewith much larger than the cases that are detected. This finding calls for more transparency through data sharing among peers and author responsibility assignment. (joint with Maikel Pellens)

Contact person: Rainer Widmann

We investigate the impact of misconduct on the financing and exit opportunities of entrepreneurial ventures that are technologically related to the misconduct perpetrators. To do so, we consider all reported misconduct cases affecting US startups during 1998-2020 and estimate differences-in-differences models saturated with fixed effects. We show that startups producing similar technologies as the misconduct perpetrators become less likely to obtain financing and raise smaller amounts after the misconduct event is reported in the news, relative to startups developing dissimilar technologies located outside the perpetrators state. The strongest negative effects of misconduct are found to be associated with technological misconduct and sexual harassment, followed by financial fraud, while misconducts related to intellectual property infringements have statistically insignificant impact. Startups related to misconduct perpetrators are no less likely to be acquired than unrelated startups.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

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Startup Role in Post-war Rebuilding of the Ukrainian Economy (Iuliia Gernego, Kyiv National Economic University)
Innovative Entrepreneurship in Turbulent Times of War in Ukraine (Tetiana Shkoda, Kyiv National Economic University)

This paper shows that gender inequality affects the extent to which scientific ideas are used to develop new technologies. Despite strong incentives to select the most promising ideas, we claim that inventors are more likely to build on men’s rather than women’s science. We exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries – i.e., instances when a man and a woman publish the same idea around the same time – and track the citations that those papers receive in patented inventions. The papers led by female scientists receive on average 40% fewer patent citations than their male-led twin. We examine several explanations for this gender gap in inventors’ attention. The pattern of results is consistent with inventors’ value expectations being a driver of the attention gap, beyond differences in the salience, overall productivity, and academic impact of scientists’ research. These findings have implications for our understanding of frictions in science-based technology development, as well as for broader theories of how gender inequality shapes cumulative innovation.

Contact person: Michael Rose

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