Last week we had the annual three-day CPDP event in Brussels. CPDP is a fairly big stakeholder conference. The theme this year was 'The age of intelligent machines”. Not so long ago IEEE organised a one-day seminar on "AI and ethics” also in Brussels. So you can sense some common concerns. However you can find details of CPDP here: http://www.cpdpconferences.org Perhaps as CPDP is held in Brussels - even if not in a typical institutional setting - the organisers succeed in attracting a very varied crowd. There were of course folk from the various EU bodies - the parliament, the commission, EDPS and so on. But also regulators from various EU member states and elsewhere, including the US. And the Council of Europe. And of course many academics and folk from industry. And there were well-known names such as Simon Davies, Bertrand de la Chapelle, Gus Hosein, Paul Nemitz, Bart Preneel, Marc Rotenberg, Marietje Schaake, Phil Zimmerman and many, many more, For a sense of industry involvement see: http://www.cpdpconferences.org/sponsors.html But the event is by no means dominated by industry, far from it. Between the implementation of the GDPR and Brexit and the new US administration and concerns about AI, encryption policy, cyber-warfare, mass surveillance, the so-called Internet of Things - internets of things? - and cloudy computing the programme was very rich. You can find the various sessions on YouTube: search with “CPDP 2017”. One that may be of immediate interest was the one organised by ICANN on: The GDPR impact on the domain name community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5We1t1bClro This was not the first time I had participated. But I did sense this year was even better, if only because there was a bit more participation by technology-aware folk. I would hope to see that continue. It would be good to see some RIPE people there next year. It would be even better if NCC could also get involved in some way. Organising a panel? Or sponsoring some nice coffee! Gordon
