Prof. Mauritz Kop Brings Quantum Governance to TUM's Public Interest Technology Course With Urs Gasser and Fabienne Marco

On August 24, 2026, Prof. Mauritz Kop taught a Quantum-ELSPI overview at the Technical University of Munich with Urs Gasser and Fabienne Marco, as part of a one-week Public Interest Technology course piloted in TUM's new Data & Society master's program at Gasser's Chair for Public Policy, Governance and Innovative Technology.

Teaching Engineers to Build for the Public Interest

The course took technically trained students through competing understandings of the public interest, digital rights, GovTech, digital public infrastructure, public-interest AI, and democracy, with cases from OpenAI's governance crisis and AlphaFold to Aadhaar, Ushahidi, and vTaiwan, and guest contributors including MacArthur Foundation president John Palfrey. Kop, founder of Stanford RQT and of Quentir, who developed Quantum-ELSPI in a Stanford–Oxford collaboration with Luciano Floridi, added quantum technology as a field where public-interest choices can still shape what gets built, from medicine to security.

Kop, Gasser, and Marco at TUM and XPANSE Abu Dhabi

The session builds on Kop and Gasser's research collaboration, from the 2023 Festival of Ideas at TUM's Raitenhaslach Monastery to their joint publications in Nature Physics and Science, and on their engagements with Marco, who moderated the 2024 XPANSE panel on global quantum governance in Abu Dhabi and whose Quantum Social Lab hosted the 2025 International Quantum Forum in Munich. Further reading connects Kop's quantum governance research with responsible innovation and design justice.