What Schools Need to Know About AI, Data Protection, and Intellectual Property Rights

Accompanying this year’s Jugend Innovativ competition, a free training seminar for teachers from secondary schools was held at the University of Education (PH) in Graz. Alongside Jana Breyer from Jugend Innovativ, Dagmar Hlavacek from the PH and Angela Siegling from aws-austria wirtschaftsservice GmbH were the driving forces behind this practice-oriented seminar on intellectual property rights such as patents, trademarks, design rights, and copyright in the school context. Participants received guidance on handling intellectual property, artificial intelligence, and data security.

On the first day of the seminar, FH JOANNEUM Kapfenberg delivered a workshop on cyber security. Klaus Gebeshuber introduced the topic from a technological perspective: current threats, types of attackers, ransomware, phishing, social engineering, and risks posed by AI were discussed alongside secure password management and the correct response to attacks on mobile devices. Complementing this, Sabine Proßnegg examined the legal foundations — in particular the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — and showed how schools can handle personal data securely.

FH JOANNEUM also shaped the majority of the morning of 27 April. Joachim Schauer, project leader of the FFG-funded Josef Ressel Centre for time-series-based error prediction in industry, spoke about big data and artificial intelligence from a technical perspective. AI has arrived at the centre of society — with transformative potential, but also with real challenges. Schauer illustrated clearly why new technologies are not automatically beneficial and can in some cases even be harmful.

The workings of locally installed large language models (LLMs) were addressed at a conceptual level — including the significance of training data, autoregressive text generation, and emergent capabilities. Following an introduction to generative AI in image generation and the basic principle of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), practical implementation in the classroom was also discussed. One thing is clear: humans and AI will work ever more closely together.

Sabine Proßnegg examined the legal aspects of this development — in particular the role and protection of humans within the framework of the AI Act and the GDPR. These topics are being researched at FH JOANNEUM, among other contexts, within the FFG-funded RADIUS project.

Overall, the two seminar days were very successful — and at the request of the organisers and audience, are intended to be offered again in the future. This, however, exposes a structural problem: since universities of applied sciences receive no basic research funding and operate exclusively through tuition and project financing, there is no institutional framework for socially important initiatives such as this — unless they are separately funded. That is not only a pity, but also a cause for concern.