The AI Act: Risks and Opportunities in the New Landscape of AI Governance

Dr. Maria Moloney holds the position of Chief Researcher and AI specialist at Irish technology company PrivacyEngine. She has a doctoral degree in Information Systems from Trinity College Dublin and has accumulated two decades of research and consultancy experience in the fields of informational privacy, security and more recently in AI. Moloney is also the Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) for the European COST Action entitled “Fintech and Artificial Intelligence in Finance,” a network of universities (50+) across Europe and beyond with 300+ active researchers involved in research collaboration. With her interests on the intersection of data protection and AI, she assumed the position of Vice Chair of the CEDPO (Confederation of European Data Protection Organisations) Working Group on AI (CEDPO AI WG), where she has jointly published a series of opinion papers on the potential impact of the EU’s AI Act on the role of the data protection officer. She is also an active member of the executive committee for CEDPO and for the Association for Data Protection Officers (ADPO) in Ireland.