ESRs Research Pitches are available on Youtube!

Our Early Stage Researchers present their research topics on LeADS Channel on Youtube!

Each Researcher has prepared an individual 1-minute Research pitch in which they present their research topics, their main research questions, why their topics are important, and how they aim to research them. It is also possible to read a summary of their topic in the description of the video.

The videos are also organized in an easy-to-watch playlist that can be accessed here. We invite you to watch them and follow the LeADS Project on Youtube!

ESR Barbara Lazarotto participation at 1st Democracy & Digital Citizenship Conference Series

Early Stage Researcher Barbara Lazarotto (ESR 7) presented her research at the 1st Democracy & Digital Citizenship Conference Series, hosted by Roskilde Universiteit on September 29-30 2022 in Roskilde, Denmark.

 

As a part of the panel named Data bodies/digital panopticonBarbara presented her topic of “The myth of “dataism” and the construction of citizen-centered cities” exploring the role of sociotechnical imaginaries on the datafication of cities.

To do that, Barbara first presented the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, explaining its role in pushing for the datafication of society, especially cities, promising impartial, reliable, and legitimate decision-making, yet giving the datafication and categorization of citizens and entire populations.

Barbara presented a solution of placing citizens at the center of the decision-making process of creating smart cities, connecting with Lefebvre’s idea of “Right to the City”. The new participatory city-making does not intend to replace the current democratic system but add to the current one new forms of citizen participation. At last, Barbara highlighted that Data Protection is also essential to increase citizen empowerment in cities, by enhancing data minimisation, transparency, and proportionality.

ESRs on their first day in Kraków

A Recap of LeADS Training Module 5

From the 14th to 23rd of September 2022, the 15 ESRs met again for their fifth and final training module. This time they had the chance to meet in the beautiful city of Kraków at Jagiellonian University which is one of the seven beneficiaries of the project. The LeADS training program is structured around several training modules that together aim at training a new generation of researchers as legally attentive data scientists that become experts in both law and data science capable of working within and across the two disciplines. Whereas the fourth training module in Crete focussed on the computer scientist perspective, this training module focussed again more on the legal perspective.

Training Week 1: On Data and Ownership

The first week kicked off with issues surrounding propertization of information. Ewa Laskowska-Litak from Jagiellonian University introduced the ESRs to existing legal regimes as well as technical solutions that can provide legal or de facto protection to data. Dariusz Szostek and Rafał Prabucki introduced the ESRs to benefits and risks of blockchain as an opportunity for privacy and intellectual property rights. Furthermore, Adrianna Michałowicz presented and discussed current approaches of two key deliverables from the European Strategy for Data: The Digital Governance Act as well as the Data Act and how they reflect the latest European approach to data governance. Marietjie Botes from Luxemburg University presented legal approaches to ownership and how prior to the European Strategy for Data the Commission reflected on introducing new property rights in machine-generated non-personal data.

ESRs on their first day in Kraków

ESRs on their first day in Kraków

Katarzyna Południak-Gierz from Jagiellonian University focussed her presentation more on the consumer perspective and how personalisation techniques (e. g. behavioural or contextual tailoring) are used on them online. Together with Fryderyk Zoll, the ESRs had the opportunity to discuss the methodology of legal research and difficulties they have encountered throughout their first year of research. A completely different topic was subsequently presented by Katherine Lee, research engineer at Google Brain. In her talk on language models, i. e. models that learn a probability distribution of a sequence given the previous tokens, she elaborated on how they are trained with data as well as how they might pose privacy risk if they leak information. The first training week ended with a session by Marietjie Botes on discrimination and debiasing of algorithms.

Training Week 2: The Next Steps of the LeADS Project and Conference on Human Rights Centred AI

Week 2 kicked off with a session by Arianna Rossi from Luxemburg University on ethical and legal aspects of social media data mining from a researcher’s perspective. In her lecture on transparency and algorithmic decision-making, Agnieszka Jabłonowska focussed on transparency, its promises as well as its shortcomings. Using the example of consumer law, she discussed with the ESRs the efficiency of newly imposed transparency obligations on online platforms with regard to the disclosure of ranking parameters. Looking at the concrete example of a platform where consumers can reserve hotels, the group concluded that in its current implementation the imposed transparency obligations might not achieve their goal of informing consumers on why certain offers are ranked above o thers. An IP law perspective was adopted in the following lectures. Michał Wyrwiński explained approaches to “Protection of Image” in different jurisdictions. Furthermore, Żaneta Zemła-Pacud and Gabriela Lenarczyk discussed approaches to propertization of information in life sciences and to what extent the IP system already provide control over data.

Patricia Thaine adopted again a more technical perspective in her presentation on privacy enhancing technologies such as differential privacy or synthetic data. Mohamed Ali Kandi from Toulouse University introduced the ESRs to the fundamentals of networking, e. g. by presenting to the researchers the technical structure ‘behind’ the internet. Claudia Castillo Arias from INDRA, one the LeADS partners that is closely involved in LeADS activities, provided ESRs with insights into their business activity in her lecture on Military operations planning: difficulties and challenges. On Wednesday 21st, all ESRs attended the conference “Designing Human Rights Attentive AI – An Interdisciplinary Perspective” co-organized by LeADS and LiderLab of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. The conference perfectly reflected the interdisciplinary approach of the LeADS project with diverse presentations on topics such as “Can we trust Fair-AI?” (Salvatore Ruggieri – University of Pisa), “Ethical and Legal Issues in Accessing Biobank Data to develop AI tools” (Andrea Parziale – Maastricht University) or “Explaining AI in Cyber Defence” (Marco Antonio Sotelo – Indra).

Conference on Human Rights Attentive AI

Conference on Human Rights Attentive AI

On the day after the conference, ESRs and beneficiaries of the LeADS project met to discuss and evaluate the overall progress of the project. The training in Kraków constituted the last training module for the ESRs. The next time, the ESRs will come together in December in Toulouse for the Technical innovations In Law Laboratories (TILL) workshop, where they will work on challenges that the non-academic partners of the LeADS project are confronted with in their business activity.

 

 

 

Finding a Way Out the Ethico-Legal Maze of Social Media Data Scraping

For the latest issue of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) news journal, Arianna Rossi from LeADS beneficiary University of Luxembourg wrote an article titled “Finding a Way out of the Ethico- Legal Maze of Social Media Data Scraping”.

In her contribution, Arianna writes about the experience of the interdisciplinary project “DECEPTION” with regard to thecompliance of data protection rules and ethical research ethics principles when doing research on internet data.

She concludes that in order to encourage researchers to comply with the ethico-legal maze, practical guidance drafted in laymen terms as well as best practices and toolkits tailored to certain technologies should be created. Her article is available on this website. A more extensive version of their findings has been published in the Privacy Symposium 2022.

TcIoT Workshop “Trusted Computing and the Internet of Things”

 

We are pleased to invite you to the workshop “Trusted Computing and the Internet of Things” that will take place on Thursday, November 10 in hybrid mode at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse – IRIT (a LeADS partner). Participation in this event is free and open to all, but prior registration is mandatory. For more information and registration go to the event website.Program:

9:15-9:30 – Introduction

9:30 – 10:30 – Session 1 

  • Trust management in large-scale IoT – Pr. Mawloud OMAR (Université Bretagne Sud)
  • How to authenticate things (objects) remotely? Opportunities and challenges of today’s technologies – Dr. Gabrielle LENZINI (University of Luxembourg)

10.30 – 11.00 – Coffee Break

11.00 – 12.00 – Session 2

  • Analyzing the risk of IoT enabled cyber-physical attack paths against critical systems – Pr. Panayiotis KOTZANIKOLAOU (University of Piraeus)
  • Privacy Preserving Authentication for Internet of Vehicles (IoV) – Dr. Khaled HAMOUID (ESIEE Paris)

12.00 – 14.00 – Lunch Break

14.00 – 15.00 – Session 3

  • Secure integration of IT and OT – Prof. Sokratis KATSIKAS (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
  • Trust in the IoT ecosystem – Dr. Youcef IMINE (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France)

15.00 – 15.30 – Coffee Break

15.30 – 16.30 – Session 4

  • Greater reliability in the IoT thanks to the group – Pr. Maryline LAURENT (Télécom SudParis)
  • Blockchain-based cryptographic key management for IoT – Dr. Mohamed Ali KANDI (Paul Sabatier University – Toulouse 3)

16.30 – 17.30 – Round table and conclusion