An independent committee of experts chaired by Professor Peter Liggesmeyer (Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) and President of the German Informatics Society) chaired the selection committee for the allocation of the 20 additional professorships in Bavaria. In an academically-led expertise and ranking procedure, the selection committee used a strict catalogue of criteria when appraising the quality of the received proposals; in the case of the University of Passau, the committee gave a clear overall approval recommendation to Education Minister Dr Spaenle and Minister of Economic Affairs Ilse Aigner. ‘With ten new professorships going to universities and another ten to universities of applied sciences, we are laying the groundwork for the further development of Bavaria’s already excellent research competencies in forward-looking areas of digitalisation and for a state-wide network of academics’, said Dr Spaenle.
Enthusiastic responses at the University of Passau following news of the approval
President Burkhard Freitag said: ‘This success was made possible by our long, hard work in the area of digitalisation and the co-operation of our academics across faculty boundaries. The new Chair can build on the University’s established research competencies in IT Law, particularly as embodied by the Institute of IT Security and Security Law and the East-Bavarian Internet and Digitalisation Network. It will add an international perspective and a focus on questions of data use and value creation.’
Professor Dirk Heckmann, who had supported the proposal, was very pleased with the result: ‘This new Chair strengthens our research and education focus on IT Law. Altogether, we will then have five professorships specialising in the IT questions of digitalisation, which opens up great opportunities for involvement in international and interdisciplinary research projects.’
The new Chair will be embedded at the University’s Faculty of Law. Its scope will include the areas of validity, (legal) security and reliability of use, as well as research on massively complex and heterogeneous data. Within this scope, the Chair will deal with information and data law, data aggregation, storage and data use in digital contexts. In addition to the national laws and regulations, the Chair’s focus will be on European and International Law, an important aspect in view of the fact that data are processed in a number of countries and jurisdictions simultaneously.
To find out more, visit the Center Digitisation.Bavaria website.