Stefan Schmid is a Professor at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. MSc and PhD at ETH Zurich, Postdoc at TU Munich and the University of Paderborn, Senior Research Scientist at T-Labs in Berlin, Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, and Full Professor at the University of Vienna, Austria. Stefan Schmid received the IEEE Communications Society ITC Early Career Award 2016 and an ERC Consolidator Grant 2019.
Can you tell us why you joined the SPATIAL Advisory Board?
SPATIAL is situated in a timely and exciting context, and the project goal of developing a trustworthy AI is essential and ambitious. As an expert on dependable networked and distributed systems, I was excited by the opportunity to contribute to this endeavour. The project is also fascinating for me because it is multi-disciplinary, touching on societal and ethical questions.
What are your expectations for a project like SPATIAL?
Given the strong consortium covering the various critical aspects, I am convinced that SPATIAL will set the stage for – and can make significant contributions toward – European cybersecurity, including AI as a central component, leveraging its trustworthiness. It will also enable innovative new business models and raise awareness of these emerging technologies and tradeoffs as part of cybersecurity education.
What is the biggest challenge you see for SPATIAL?
A major challenge will be to come up with the right notions of trustworthiness which are practical, tractable and concrete, and at the same time, general enough to apply to a wide range of AI approaches. A trustworthy AI also needs to account for various layers and policies, which make the project complex and require the tight collaboration of the different experts SPATIAL brings together.
For which approaches do you see a potential for a more-depth consideration in the SPATIAL project?
I find the interplay between formal methods and AI particularly interesting, with a significant potential for impact on various application domains. Several ERC projects are also running on these topics, and I see much synergy potential here.