"Alexa - now I'm controlling my data!"

For smart personal assistants (SPA) such as Amazon Alexa, Google Now or Apple Siri, the departments of Public Law and Information Systems at the University of Kassel at the Scientific Center for Information Technology Design (ITeG) of the project AnEkA, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), have researched requirement and design patterns that reconcile two often conflicting goals of service quality and legal compatibility. Now, the DFG has approved a project extension in which the two departments, together with the Department of Information Systems and Systems Development, will evaluate the developed patterns by users and thus adapt them even better to the needs of the developers of SPAs.

SPAs are enjoying increasing popularity. However, during development, privacy and data protection often take a back seat in favor of high quality of service. "One possible reason for this may be a lack of legal expertise on the part of developers," Jandt suspects. "They have difficulty implementing legal requirements in addition to function-related requirements." The project group led by Prof. Dr. Alexander Roßnagel and PD Dr. Silke Jandt from the Department of Public Law, Prof. Dr. Jan Marco Leimeister from the Department of Information Systems and Prof. Dr. Matthias Söllner from the Department of Information Systems and Systems Development has addressed this problem. The first phase of the DFG-funded project "Requirement and Design Patterns for the Law-Compatible and Quality-Centric Design of Context-Sensitive Applications (AnEkA)" created requirement and design patterns. The patterns resolve conflicts that arise in the development of smart personal assistants as soon as attention is paid to both high service quality of the devices and high legal compatibility.

In the DFG-funded extension of the project, the previously created patterns will now be evaluated. As was the case in the first part of the project, the evaluation is also being carried out as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration at the interface of legal sciences and business informatics. "In the last two years, we have already been able to accomplish a lot through our interdisciplinary collaboration," reports Roßnagel. This approach reflects the core of the project and connects two disciplines that can thus add a lot of value together. "The topic of legal compatibility has repeatedly been in the media - the urgency is enormous," Söllner cautions. "And this is exactly where we want to use our knowledge together to improve the development of Smart Personal Assistants," says Leimeister. 

Contact:

Prof. Dr. Jan Marco Leimeister

University of Kassel

Department of Information Systems

Phone: +49 561 804-6064

E-mail: leimeister@uni-kassel.de

Prof. Dr. Alexander Roßnagel

University of Kassel

Department of Public Law with

with a focus on the law of technology and

of Environmental Protection

Phone: +49 561 804-3130

E-mail: a.rossnagel@uni-kassel.de

Prof. Dr. Matthias Söllner

University of Kassel

Department of Information Systems and

Systems Development

Phone: +49 561 804-3450

E-mail: soellner@uni-kassel.de

PD Dr. Silke Jandt

University of Kassel

Department of Public Law with 

with a focus on the law of technology and 

of Environmental Protection

Phone: +49 561 804-6088

E-mail: s.jandt@uni-kassel.de