ZEVEDI Young Investigator from January until December 2024
Simone Kuhlmann studied law at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen with a focus on public and private media law. After completing her legal traineeship, including a period at Norddeutscher Rundfunk, and working as a research assistant in the Technology, Media & Telecoms practice area of the corporate law firm Taylor Wessing, she moved to the Chair of Public Law, Media and Telecommunications Law of Prof. Dr. Hans-Heinrich Trute at the Hamburg University in 2015, where she completed her doctorate with the title „Mediaagenturen und Werbevermarkter – Der Einfluss des Werbemarktes auf die Finanzierung und Beschaffenheit von Rundfunkprogrammen“ (‘Media agencies and advertising marketers – the influence of the advertising market on the financing and nature of broadcasting programs’). From 2020 to 2023, she coordinated the graduate programme The Law and its Teaching in Digital Transformation at the Centre for Law in the Digital Transformation (ZeRdiT) at the Hamburg University. Her research interests range from public media law and the law of digitization to medical and health law.
Project
During her fellowship, Simone Kuhlmann is investigating the permissibility of using algorithm-based knowledge-generating systems in the healthcare sector. Algorithm-based systems that use data to make forecasts or classifications are considered particularly promising in this area and can be used in a variety of ways, for instance to support treatment decisions, in the field of drug discovery or for the early detection of threats to public health. However, their use in such a sensitive area raises questions about their permissibility in view of the inherent functional logic of such systems, especially with regard to the limited validation possibilities of the output, since from a legal perspective qualitative expectations are attached to knowledge bases that legitimize decisions. What qualitative requirements the law places on knowledge as a basis for decision-making in the healthcare sector and how the law attempts to safeguard these for algorithm-based systems is the subject of her project.