Soon I will host a champagne toast in honour of our employees who have given 25 or 40 years of service. These are the happy days in the life of an administrator, you see. It has only been since last year that we’ve been able to honour people who have served 40 years. That’s extra special when you know that our university will celebrate its 40th anniversary only in 2016. These people are the true pioneers of UM. They jumped into the deep end and are still swimming around forty years later. I just calculated how many hours of their lives they have spent so far at this university. Assuming a 38-hour week and 8 weeks of holidays per year, this amounts to 66,880 hours. That gave me a moment’s pause.
It also got me thinking about my own career so far. The longest time I’ve worked anywhere is 14 years, at the Freie Universität Berlin. I didn’t do the same thing all 14 years; my jobs ranged from professor to faculty council member and institute director to faculty dean. And I think that’s also the case for many of those to whom I raise my glass in celebration of this milestone anniversary on 10 November. Doing the same thing for 40 years, no matter how challenging or interesting the job is, is not for many people. And that’s the beauty of a large organisation like a university. The feeling of ‘it’s time for something different’ can very often be answered within the organisation itself. Though such a milestone probably has more to do with loyalty and the personal development of employees, I’m also a little proud that this organisation has managed to captivate people for so long. To their and our health!
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Search for new president, strategic program, evaluation of Human Rights Advisory Committee, and change of student members
Dear members of the UM community,
The past few months have been busy at the University Council, so I wanted to update the community on some of the things that we have been doing.
University Council
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AI-Generated Representations of Architectural Works and Limits of Architectural Copyright
Copyright lawsuits in the US brought by groups of writers, artists, and musicians against AI developers have mainly focused on the AI training stage rather than the output stage. One of the reasons for this focus is that claimants often struggle to demonstrate that AI outputs are copies of original...
Law
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Developing Agnostic Network AI Models for Financial Crime Detection
Can we trust AI with our financial integrity? With financial crime, the stakes aren't just monetary—they involve the rule of law and the health of our democracy. But in the COMCRIM AI PhD project, we are facing a unique challenge: How do you train a machine to find a needle in a haystack when that...
Law
