Enrico Francesconi's End-of-Year Message to Members and Announcement of ICAIL 2023 Venue

Dear IAAIL Members,
with the end of 2021 we are also at the end of the 2020-2021 tenure of the IAAIL Executive Committee, I had the honour to chair.
It's been a period characterised by the dominant conditioning of the Covid-19 pandemic, affecting of lives in many respects, as well presenting us with enormous challenges.
All our traditional activities had to be reconsidered, including our biennial major event, the ICAIL, which in 2021 was held on-line. Nevertheless, the 18th ICAIL organised in 2021 by the University of Sao Paulo was a great success as the figures, recently communicated in our report, testify
http://www.iaail.org/?q=article/icail-2021-final-report-ai-and-law-confe...

As always, the conference proceedings have been published by the ACM and are available in the ACM Digital Library
https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3462757

Such an unprecedented situation gave rise also to some opportunities, as the possibility to reach a wider audience on-line, and to create an official YouTube channel, aimed to improve the dissemination of our activities, topics and tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-nPeKR_Ey5EDrUAFr_4mEg
This can be a way to expand the traditional boundaries of our community and reach additional potential stakeholders, who can provide new challenges and open new perspectives.

Another element testifying the interest in our activities is represented by the high number of proposals to host ICAIL 2023: we have received 7 bids, all from very qualified teams and centres of interest for AI and Law topics.

In the last few months the IAAIL EC carefully analysed such bids, following criteria related to the alternation among geographical areas, involvement of the teams in AI and Law activities, local facilities, risks mitigation foreseen, and so on.

Now this process has come to a conclusion and, on behalf of the IAAIL EC, I'm pleased to announce that the next ICAIL conference (ICAIL 2023) will be held in Braga (Portugal) at the University of Minho, with tentative conference dates of June 19th through June 23rd; Matthias Grabmair will be the Program Chair and Michał Araszkiewicz will serve as secretary/treasurer.

At the end of my term as President of IAAIL, I would like to thank very much all the Members of IAAIL for their support, as well as the Members of the IAAIL Executive Committee for their work and collaboration throughout the past two years:
Vice President: Floris Bex, Utrecht University and Tilburg University, Netherlands
Secretary-Treasurer: Michał Araszkiewicz, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Executive Committee (members-at-large):
Anne Gardner, Honorary Member
Danièle Bourcier, CNRS (France)
David D. Lewis, Reveal, Chicago (US)
Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna (Italy)
Juliano Maranhão, University of São Paulo (Brazil)

I wish good luck to the next IAAIL Executive Committee which will be chaired by Floris Bex (Utrecht University and Tilburg University, The Netherlands) and will be composed by:
Monica Palmirani (Vice-President, Univ. of Bologna, Italy)
Michal Araszkiewicz (Secretary-Treasurer, Jagiellonian University, Poland)
Anne Gardner (Honorary Member)
Juliano Maranhão (Univ. of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Adam Wyner (Univ. of Swansea, UK)
Serena Villata (CNRS, France)
Roland Vogl (Stanford Law School, US)

I join the IAAIL Nominating Committee which will be composed as follows:
Enrico Francesconi (Past President, CNR (Italy) and European Parliament)
Bart Verheij (Past Past President, University of Groningen)
Alexander Hudek (Kira Systems (Canada))
Ken Satoh (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

On behalf or the IAAIL EC I wish you a very Happy New Year and all the best to our community!

Enrico Francesconi
Outgoing President of IAAIL