[Unhyped AI Seminars] AI & Government Edition

If you're new to our series, the Unhyped AI Seminars is a sociotechnical & responsible AI seminar series to improve understanding of AI and its effects on society.

The series is organised by Leonardo Bezerra through the PHAWM research project, funded by Responsible AI UK, and is hosted in partnership with the StirAI multidisciplinary research lab at the University of Stirling.

For details of past editions or to keep up-to-date with our agenda, check out the .

• Morning: Alberto Franzin, EU AI Office, Unit A3 (AI Safety)
• Lunch: pizza networking
• Afternoon: Christos Christodoulopoulos, Principal Technology Adviser at ICO (formerly Responsible AI at Amazon)

Innovation & Regulation: the European Union approach to trustworthy AI

Information Technology is an industry that has historically been unaddressed by regulation, in part due to its recency and speed. This lack of regulation has often been framed as a decisive enabler of innovation, and many important industry stakeholders have actively defended a soft approach to regulation. However, some of the major breakthroughs in the field have stirred extensive legal battles, evidencing the need of regulation to protect innovation and intellectual property. More recently, the speed and magnitude with which breakthroughs have impacted society have prompted governments to propose technology regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), proposed by the European Union (EU) and replicated by other major countries. In 2024, the EU approved its AI Act to foster AI innovation while safeguarding fundamental citizen rights. In this meet-up, we will discuss the major aspects of the AI Act and the role played by the AI Office, the EU institution responsible for implementing the AI Act. In particular, we will discuss the potential impact of systemic risks from general-purpose AI (GPAI) models, and how the AI Act attempts to mitigate them.

Panelist: Alberto Franzin @ EU AI Office

Alberto Franzin is a technology specialist in the AI Safety unit of the European AI Office. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Padova in Italy and a Ph.D. from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium, where he also worked as a postdoctoral researcher. He has worked on various topics in artificial intelligence, optimization, and machine learning, through academic projects and industry collaborations.

With great power... My journey in Responsible AI

As LLMs become part of products used daily by millions of people, it is increasingly urgent to ensure that these models are developed and operate responsibly. In this talk, I will share my journey in Responsible AI (RAI), from my early work in automated fact verification to the development of the Amazon Nova family of foundational models and my new role in the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data protection regulator. I will share some examples of RAI research that I and my former team have done, including the largest RAI benchmark for video foundation models, and a linguistically-inspired text-to-text LLM watermarking method. I will also talk about the role regulatory agencies like the ICO play in the extremely fast-paced world of post-ChatGPT AI. Finally, I am going to discuss how RAI is practiced in an industry setting and how it is influenced by and sometimes informs AI regulations.

Panelist: Christos Christodoulopoulos @ UK ICO

Christos Christodoulopoulos is a Principal Technology Adviser for the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator, working with the AI Policy and AI Compliance teams. Before that, he was a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon, working on Responsible AI for Alexa and the Amazon Nova family of Foundational Models. He has a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, and he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois. He was a Program Chair for EMNLP 2025, a Senior Area Chair for various *CL conferences and was the General Chair for the 2021 Truth and Trust Online conference.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

University of Stirling, Cottrell Building, Room 4B96, Stirling, United Kingdom

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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