Join the Cyber Policy Center on May 27 from 1PM–2PM Pacific for Europe's AI Future: The EU's Plan to Produce AI Technology People Can Trust, a seminar with Joanna Smolinska.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  This seminar concludes the Spring Seminar Series. We will be resuming seminars in the fall. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

The European Union – a Union of 27 different countries speaking different languages with distinct legal frameworks – is well known for its culture, food and regulation. It is less known for the pro-innovation effect that the EU-level regulation has (akin to federal-level rules in the US), providing one set of rules across the continent that enable companies to sell their products and services to 450 million consumers and hundreds of thousands of businesses. In the digital space, the global AI race is on. Investments in AI infrastructure are announced every week across the globe. In the EU, public and private partnerships are mobilized to invest billions of Euros in AI industrial uptake and supercomputers – AI factories and giga-factories – that will provide commercial access to compute. Startups and researchers will be able to access for free or at the level of cost they can sustain.
 
How does the EU plan to become a continent that not only uses AI technology created elsewhere but also builds it? Where will the money for compute and talent come from? Will its AI regulation result in a race to the top, making human-centric tech a commercially viable value proposition and a competitive advantage? How does it plan to make compliance easier for innovators who, coming from different national labs, often struggle to scale their innovations, facing regulatory fragmentation and insufficient access to capital?

In this talk we will delve into how the EU plans for its citizens to have the best of the two worlds in AI: produce technology that people can trust, that helps solving societal, economic and environmental challenges of today, with democratic oversight and helping innovators scale across the continent and beyond.

About the Speaker:

Joanna Smolinska is Counsellor for Digital and Deputy Head of the EU Office in San Francisco since the day it opened September 1, 2022. She focuses on AI policy and regulation, online content moderation, policies promoting digital markets openness and innovation in the context of transatlantic relations, forging cooperation with California civil society, business, academia and government. Before coming to SF, she had worked for 15 years in the European Commission in Brussels across a wide range of policy areas. In DG CNECT, the Commission’s department responsible for EU tech policy, Joanna focused on digital and green transformation, digital services and copyright regulations, tech standardization, digital skills, blockchain, and technology start ups/scale-ups. She was actively involved in the development of the EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Of Polish nationality, Joanna graduated from Warsaw School of Economics, holds a Master’s Degree in Finance from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and a Master’s Degree in European Law and Economic Analysis from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. Joanna is also a Non-resident Fellow with the Transatlantic Leadership Program and the Digital Innovation Initiative at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a Tech Policy Fellow of the 2024-25 cohort at UC Berkeley.