Keynote at the 1st International Symposium on AI & Infrastructure

Prof. Martin Gaedke was one of the keynote speakers at the 1st International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence & Infrastructure in Nanjing, China, held together with the 4th China–Austria S&T Innovation Cooperation Exchange on September 19–20, 2026. The symposium was organized by the Sino-Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Nanjing) and Coovally Computing (Barcelona), together with the School of Automation of Nanjing University of Science and Technology, the School of Internet of Things and the School of Artificial Intelligence of Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and the China–Austria Belt and Road Joint Laboratory on AI and Advanced Manufacturing. International partners were the Distributed Systems Group of TU Wien, whose Prof. Schahram Dustdar served as General Chair, and the Springer journal Computing.

In his keynote “Rules Are Infrastructure: What a year of living with AI agents taught me about trust”, he reported on his sabbatical self-experiment with AI agents working on his real inbox, calendar and documents. His claim: the missing AI infrastructure is no longer compute, it is the rules we never wrote down. Even silence can become a rule, when an agent infers one from an unanswered question and saves it to shared memory. The keynote builds on VSR’s work on trustworthy AI in the ENFIELD AI Network of Excellence and Gaedke’s consulting work on AI, agentic computing & digital transformation with companies in Europe. It closed with one thing to do on Monday: write down three rules your team runs on that nobody ever wrote down, then give them to your agents.