ODSC East 2020 is one of the world’s largest conferences for AI data science. This year it was successfully converted from a face-to-face conference to a digital conference at short notice due to the worldwide Corona Pandemic.

Speakers include some of the key contributors to many open source tools, libraries and languages. At ODSC East 2020, the latest AI and data science topics, tools and languages were explained and discussed by some of the greatest and smartest minds in the field. It is the conference to engage, build, evolve and learn from the entire data science community.

In this context, I had the privilege to be a speaker in cooperation with Dr. Volker Hadamschek (BASF Digital Farming GmbH) at this conference with the title: GDPR in Action- Does It Work?

We wanted to show that implementing these requirements for doing business in Europe has proven to be much easier than expected. To this end, we gave an insight into real life, accompanied by legal expertise on how the GDPR requirements were implemented in the digital farming sector at BASF. Dr. Volker Hadamschek is data protection officer at BASF Group, which is the world’s largest chemical company.

The main focus was on the following key issues:

• How does the GDPR implement data protection requirements?

• What is the risk if I do not ensure compliance with the GDRP?

• How do I efficiently implement the GDPR requirements?

• Why are Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook promoting GDPR as a blueprint for US data protection regulation?

In addition to the economic aspect, Geoffrey Hinton and other leading scientists have also stressed the urgent need for data processing regulations. We pointed out that GDPR provides an important piece of the puzzle to ensure that data is used for good. We also discussed the echo on GDPR in the US, Canada and Brazil, but our focus was on EU data protection rules (GDPR). The focus of the presentation was to present the practical challenges in a solution-oriented way. In this way, my contribution brought great added value to the digital audience of practitioners.

This conference was also a highlight of my career as a speaker so far. It was incredibly inspiring to see how all those people, despite many difficulties, still came together digitally to talk about future perspectives.