The First Academic Standards Day in Graz with the participation of the FHJ project RADIUS

On June 16, 2026, the first Austrian Academic Standards Day (ASD) took place in the very nice ambient of the Aula of the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz.

The ASD is part of the EU funded research project EDU4Standards that aims to innovate standardisation education within European Higher Education Institutes.

Standards are increasingly seen as key drivers for economic growth, not only in industry but also in education. That is why the project EDU4Standards addresses the underutilisation of standardisation in education and research.

With the project’s comprehensive approach many different aspects are included such as developing teaching concepts, raising awareness, expanding education courses, building a community of educators and learners and establishing an EU Student Standardisation Association.

Coordinated by Fraunhofer ISI, the consortium unites 17 partners from 11 different countries. For more information please go to: The project | EDU4Standards.

EDU4Standards organises 15 ASD in 10 different countries as key events designed to deepen the understanding and engagement with standardisation across Europe. These events bring together researchers, students, academic staff and professionals in a series of interactive and insightful gatherings.

The first ASD took place in Graz, organized by the KFUG by the Faculty of Foundation of Law and IT that has a long tradition of dealing with IT, which dates back to the 1970s as “Legal Informatics”. Driving force for this first ASD was Uni.-Prof. Elisabeth Staudegger who conducts interdisciplinary research at the Department of the Foundations of Law in close cooperation with the research network “Human Factor in Digital Transformation” on trustworthy IT/AI through “Values by Design”. The event started with opening speeches of four high-ranking personalities, namely Andrea Kurz (Rector of MedUni Graz), Horst Bischof (Rector of TU Gaz), Michael Terler (Vice Rector Campus02) and Martin Polaschek (retired Federal Minister of Finance, University of Graz). In the morning, information about the meaning of standardization and why standardization skills should be taught at Universities was given. In a next step, the event combined short talks but also fun, as promised. There were a pop-up video production, a world-café session and poster presentations. Together, we experienced a day with a wealth of factual and personal information, because in the videos people talked about their favourite personal standard, which revealed a broad range of standards that are relevant in our daily life’s.

Within the RADIUS presentation, Sabine Proßnegg talked about the aims and contents of the project RADIUS and about the first results. The legal research done in RADIUS showed clearly that while legal documents like the AI Act and the GDPR are highly relevant they are often difficult to understand for people not from the academic or legal world. Here, technical norms can serve as a translation that operationalize the legal rules into technically implementable tasks.

In addition, legal texts themselves refer more and more often to technical norms simply out of the necessity to be able to adapt to a quickly changing digital world. To sum up, in RADIUS technical norms not only concretizise the sometimes vague legal norms but they also help to understand and put into practice the aims of these legal texts.

Sabine Proßnegg then ventured briefly into the ISO TR 24028:2020 about “Trustworthy AI”. The norm defines trustworthiness as both an ongoing organizational process as well as a non-functional requirement.

To sum up, it was a very informative as well as entertaining and inspiring day and it remains to be hoped that this ASD was not a one-time event but actually triggered a lasting impact on the development and use of standards in the academic world. The Austrian Standards International (ASI) was represented by Karl Grün and was also one supporter of the event, and he expressed his wish that Graz become a hub for standards- For more about ASI, please see We norm the future | Austrian Standards.