Professor Mireille Hildebrandt will present a keynote on ‘Whiteboxing Machine Learning’ at the CD-MAKE conference in Benevento, Italy on Friday september 1st.
... »On Friday 30 June 2023, COHUBICOL PhD researcher Emilie van den Hoven presented COHUBICOL’s Typology of Legal Technologies to a delegation of the Ministery of Digital Affairs (MODA) of Taiwan and its Minister Audrey Tang. The event was hosted by FARI - AI for the Common Good Institute and included talks by the co-directors of the institute, as well research presentations on behalf of Université Libre de Bruxelles and FARI and by Van den Hoven as the representative of Vrije Universiteit Brussels and the LSTS research group.
... »On Monday 26 June, Hildebrandt will join a Round Table in Paris in the closing session of the Lecture Series ‘New Perspectives on Normativity: Joint lecture series on ‘International Law and Technology’, co-organised by Dr Andrea Leiter (University of Amsterdam) and Dr Delphine Dogot (Université Catholique Lille, Paris Campus). That same week, on 29 June, she will join the Conference on ‘Prereflective Agency’, organised at the University of Birmingham, by Prof. Sylvie Delacroix, who recently published her monograph on ‘Habitual Ethics’. Hildebrandt will join the session on ‘Moulding the infrastructure that moulds our habits’, meant to unearth the way that habits co-constitute our normative frameworks while simultaneously addressing the way habits are induced by way of technological infrastructures.
... »COHUBICOL postdoctoral researcher Gianmarco Gori teaches on data protection law in a training workshop organized in the context of the project DIAGRAMMI SUD (Diritti in Agricoltura attraverso Approcci Multistakeholders e Multidisciplinari per l’integrazione e il Lavoro Giusto). The fight against labour exploitation requires the processing of personal data: the prevention and repression of criminal activities as well as the social and working inclusion of victims involve the collection, processing and transmission of personal data among a network of multiple stakeholders. In the workshop, Gori will address the issues raised by data protection law in practice together with operators working in the reception system for asylum seekers, in information desks for immigrants, in the anti-trafficking network and in trade union organisations.
... »Our postdoctoral researchers Pauline McBride and Laurence Diver, and affiliated researcher Masha Medvedeva (Leiden University), will deliver a tutorial on “Method for Evaluating Legal Technologies (MELT)” at the ICAIL Conference, on 19th June 2023 in Braga, Portugal.
... »COHUBICOL postdoctoral researcher Dr. Desara Dushi is co-chairing the 2nd International Workshop on Imagining the AI Landscape after the AI Act (in conjunction with the Second International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence) IAIL2023 in Munich on 27 June 2023. After the success of last year’s workshop, Desara is co-chairing the second workshop on the same topic, at a very timely moment when discussions around the AI Act are reaching the final stages.
... »On 22 June COHUBICOL PhD researcher Paulus Meessen will present his paper entitled “On Normative Arrows and Comparing Tax Automation Systems” at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2023) in Braga, Portugal.
... »Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt will speak at Düsseldorf AI Conference 2023 on “Chances and Challenges of AI-driven Decision-Making” held on 19-20 June 2023, organized by the Manchot Research Group “Decision-making with the help of Artificial Intelligence” and the Heine Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (HEiCAD) both located at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU).
... »On 8 June 2023, Mireille Hildebrandt will deliver a keynote at the Ninth International MBR Conference in Rome (7-9 June, Sapienza University) on Model-Based Reasoning, Abductive Cognition, Creativity (Inferences & Models in Science, Logic, Language, and Technology).
... »COHUBICOL Postdoctoral researcher Laurence Diver will take part in the Computers, Privacy & Data Protection Conference (CPDP), held on 24-26 May 2023 in Brussels.
... »On 23 May 2023 Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt will present at the “Innovation Days” Conference organised by the Court of Justice of the European Union (22-23 May). At 11 AM she will speak about COHUBICOL’s Typology of Legal Tech and the challenge of Legal Protection by Design.
... »Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt will give a presentation on the 7th of March 2023 at the fourth edition of the Women in Data Science (WiDS) 2023 Conference in Maastricht. This technical conference is organised by the Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University and will feature contributions from women working in data science, AI and related technical fields. The abstract of Prof. Hildebrandt’s presentation entitled ‘A Typology of Legal Technologies: the Challenge of Legal Protection by Design’ reads:
... »Postdoctoral researcher Gianmarco Gori gave a lecture in the context of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Action “imπACT” training programme. Gori’s presentation addressed the distinctions, relationship and interaction between ethics, code and law. In a broad sense, law, ethics and code can all be said to “regulate”. However, they do so in different ways. In the first part of the session, based on several chapters from Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk, Gori has discussed how law, ethics and code have a different force and how, in turn, such force can have a different impact on the protection of legal rights and liberties. The participants to the session were invited to reflect on “what law does” and how this affords a distinctive form of protection. Together with the participants, Gori sought to identify the boundaries between law, code and ethics by discussing the way in which law sustains the tensions between the values of certainty, justice and purpose. In the second part of the session, the participants were invited to work in groups and engage in the analysis of a “hard case”-study, putting to test the conceptual distinctions drawn.
... »Laurence was invited to present at the University of Helsinki Legal Tech Lab’s Law, Tech and Theory Research Seminar on Feb 15-16. His presentation focused on the idea of legal institutional facts as the fundamental building blocks of law, and how their creation is affected by the technologies that are involved in legal practice. This happens at both the practical level (how legal practices and processes are impacted by the use of certain technologies), and at the conceptual level (how we think of legal facts per se). Assessing the desirability and validity of legal technologies requires a framework for thinking about the nature and extent of such impacts, including e.g. the assessment method set out in COHUBICOL’s Typology of Legal Technologies.
... »During the 16th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies BIOSTEC 2023 (16-18 February 2023), Mireille Hildebrandt will deliver a keynote where she will discuss the use of health-related training data for medical research in light of the EU Health Data Space. If such data is deployed as a proxy for ‘the truth on the ground’, we need to address the issue of proxies. Ground truth in machine learning is the pragmatic stand-in or proxy for whatever is considered to be the case or should be the case. Developing a ground truth dataset requires curation, that is a number of translations, constructions and cleansing. What if the resulting proxies misrepresent what they stand for and what if the imposed interoperability of health data across the EU affects the quality of the data and/or their relationship to what they stand for? She will argue that ground-truthing is an act rather than a given, that this act is key to machine learning and assert that this act can have potentially fatal implications for the reliability of the output. Deciding on the ground truth is what philosophers may call a speech act with performative effects. Emphasising these effects will allow us to better address the constructive nature of the datasets used in medical informatics and should help the EU legislature to take a precautionary approach to medical informatics.
... »Postdoctoral researcher Gianmarco Gori has discussed the paper ‘Los derechos humanos como conductor ético para el avance de la inteligencia artificial’ written and presented by Prof. Wilson Engelmann (Universidade do Vale do Rio Dos Sinos - UNISINOS) at the Italo-Brazilian Doctoral Symposium, University of Florence.
... »Postdoctoral researcher Gianmarco Gori has given a lecture ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (and) Law’ to the students of the Winter ELSA Law School on New Technologies and Artificial Intelligence Law. In his lecture, Gori has stressed the need to look at the challenges currently posed by AI by adopting a historical perspective. In this light, he has illustrated a set of elements which recur in Western legal thought, such as the crises of legal information, the distrust of legal interpreters (e.g., breakfast jurisprudence), etc. Gori has examined how such problems, and the way in which they have been framed, constitute the background against which legal automation is conceptualised as a possible solution for the problems of law. In this perspective, Gori has discussed how different understandings of law and its problems have been articulated in the context of Jurimetrics, GOFAIL (Good Old-Fashioned AI and Law), and are now addressed under the contemporary data-driven paradigm.
... »Postdoctoral researcher Gianmarco Gori gave a guest lecture in the course “Legal Professionals in the Digital Age” held by Prof. Gianclaudio Malgieri at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Gori has illustrated how the current legal framework constrains the decisional space in which Artificial Intelligence is designed, developed and used.
... »Gori teaches on computer crimes in Florence (7 Dec 2022)
... »The FARI AI for the Common Good Institute and Easy Brussels organised a series of discussions and talks about Rules as Code and Digital-Ready legislation. Rules as code (RAC) is an approach to create and publish regulations, legislation and policies as machine and human readable. The event gathered experts and public servants from across Europe to discuss and share experiences about the digitisation of rule-making.
... »COHUBICOL Postdoctoral Researcher Gianmarco Gori delivered a talk on “Automated administrative decisions: legal protection and argumentation strategies in the European legal framework” in the panel ‘Direito e Tecnologia. Refexoes na Europa e no Brasil sobre as decisoes robos e os algoritmos’ at the Seminario Atuação em Cortes Internacionais: CIDH (Corte lnteramericana de Direitos Humanos) e CEDH (Corte Europeia de Direitos Humanos) in Rio de Janeiro.
... »The Child Friendly Justice European Network (CFJ-EN) through Defence for Children International Belgium (DCI-Belgium), organised the Annual Seminar ‘A 360° View on Child Friendly Justice’, convening child rights stakeholders on Friday 14 October 2022 in Brussels, Belgium.
... »To mark its 30th anniversary, the Academy of European Law (ERA) is convening leading legal practitioners, lawmakers and policymakers to explore the legal challenges arising from new sovereignty concepts that have moved to the centre of public debate in recent years, including ‘budgetary sovereignty’, ‘strategic sovereignty’ and ‘digital sovereignty’.
... »In September we gave the first glimpse of our forthcoming Typology of Legal Technologies, a significant output of the COHUBICOL project.... »
The Conference on Regulating Personalisation at the Institute of Transformative Private Law (22-23 September 2022) at the University of Amsterdam explored practices that illustrate the promises and perils of online personalisation as a result of the widespread use of emerging technologies in order to identify potential regulatory cornerstones to address personalizing techniques. The event created a medium for discussion on how to establish a conceptual regulatory framework in the face of systematic involvement of personalisation into contemporary society.
... »Diver spoke at the Scottish Law and Innovation Network (SCOTLIN) last month, setting out the main contours of his new book, Digisprudence: Code as Law Rebooted (EUP 2022, open access). The talk was moderated by our COHUBICOL colleague Pauline McBride.
... »Gianmarco Gori presented on “Law, Rules, Machines” at the 11th British Wittgenstein Society Conference: ‘Wittgenstein and AI’, at the New College of the Humanities (London), 29-31 July 2022. The abstract can be found here at p. 22.
... »The word compliance entered our daily vocabulary, pervading the regulatory strategy and discourse in the European Union law. But what does it mean? What is its role in the legal system? Can it be performed in an automated way?
... »Mireille Hildebrandt presented on The New Methodenstreit in Machine Learning at the International Conference on Explaining Machines, at the University of Bielefeld, Germany (the place where famous sociologist Niklas Luhmann worked for most of his professional life). The Conference is part of the TRR 318 Constructing Explainability research project, a collaboration across different regions and disciplines, bringing together computer science, social science and the humanities. The project is led by Elena Esposito and Tobias Matzner. See Elena Esposito’s salient and important article in CRCL, on Transparency versus explanation: The role of ambiguity in legal AI.
... »International legal scholarship has over recent years started to pay much closer attention to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the international legal order. However, to date, the focus has primarily been on AI as a topic of regulation by international law. Comparatively speaking, there has been less discussion about the use of AI in the (law-making) processes and institutions of international law (referred to as ‘international computational law’).
... »Facial recognition is used not only by the private sector. Its evolution has attracted the public sector too, especially law enforcement and border management. This has generated many debates on the impact on human rights. Public safety and expression of consent by people are classic justifications behind the use of such identification technology. But questions remain: Is it necessary? Is it the best/right remedy? Is it proportional? Is it effective? And, ultimately, is the expressed consent informed consent?
... »This year saw a big step in the fight against cybercrime with the adoption of the second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention, the European Union’s AI Act proposal which regulates (restricts) the use of AI for law enforcement purposes, and the strengthened efforts towards a UN treaty on cybercrime.
... »The EuADS Summer School Data Science for Social Media is opened by a public lecture by Mireille Hildebrandt titled The Whisper Challenge - The Rule of Proxies.
... »In April 2021, the EU Parliament published a proposal, the AI Act (AIA), for regulating the use of AI systems and services in the Union market. However, the effects of EU digital regulations usually transcend its confines. An example of what has been named the “Brussels effect” - the high impact of EU digital regulations around the world - is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May 2018 and rapidly became a world standard. The AIA seems to go in the same direction, having a clear extraterritorial scope, in that it applies to any AI system or service that has an impact on European Citizens, regardless of where its provider or user is located. The AIA adopts a risk-based approach that bans certain technologies, proposes strict regulations for “high risk” ones, and imposes stringent transparency criteria for others. If adopted, the AIA will undoubtedly have a significant impact in the EU and beyond. A crucial question is whether we already have the technology to comply with the proposed regulation and to what extent can the requirements of this regulation be enforceable.
... »Part of the drafting of the regulatory framework on Artificial Intelligence of Brazil, the Federal Senate organises an international seminar on 9-10 June on the Challenges in Artificial Intelligence Regulation: international contribution to the Brazilian lawmaking process.
... »The Meet the Author debate organised by Brussels Privacy Hub is proud to host Prof. Jaap-Henk Hoepman with his book Privacy is Hard and Seven Other Myths - Achieving Privacy through Careful Design.
... »During the conference ‘Opportunities and Risks of Digital Transformation in Finance and Beyond’ organised by the Centre Responsible Digitality ZEVEDI on 2-3 June 2022, Mireille Hildebrandt will discuss the issue of proxies that is key to any Recommender System but more generally to any AI system. Proxies map what they stand for but they are not the same thing. Proxies are appropriate depending on the specific purpose and may have far reaching negative consequences if recycled for other purposes. Fairness requires a computational proxy to be taken into account by a machine learning system - and even by a multi agent system or a straightforward automated decision system. In her talk Hildebrandt will discuss how recommender systems optimise for two very different types of preferences: those of users and those the providers. In the end this means that proxies will be chosen in a way that rewards preferences that are lucrative from the providers’ point of view. Without a keen eye for the political economy of these kinds of systems it will not be clear that and how the preferences that are inferred are simultaneously nudged. Such nudging is often based on the design of a particular choice architecture that determines what users can and cannot act upon. EU law aims to configure another choice architecture, namely that of the providers of these systems, restricting their choice to provide recommender systems that do not manipulate users into dedicated behaviours but genuinely empower them to follow their own mind. See the underlying paper.
... »What is the materiality of the digital? In which ways do digital technologies change the design, production, experience and use of physical environments? Can atoms be translated into bits? Is computation grounded by matter? How does the digital extend or limit material practices? Under which circumstances do digital technologies appear as ambiances, environments or tools? When is friction productive? How does intuition relate to automation? Will the future be detwemined by programmed matter or by decaying data?
... »Diver will present at the Artificial Intelligence and Justice Administration Day on 22 April, organised by the Catalan Center for Legal Studies and Specialised Training. He’ll talk about the mediation of law by statistical legal technologies, and how automation bias raises problematic questions around access to law and our collective recognition of fundamental legal concepts and the Rule of Law.
... »The Yale Technology and Ethics group invites Mireille Hildebrandt to give a talk on Regulating AI by way of AI. Better law(s) or the end(s) of law?
... »In her talk, Mireille Hildebrandt will argue that what matters is not computable. However, it can be made computable, and in different ways. This difference in turn matters, it makes a difference for those who will suffer or enjoy the consequences. To make things computable developers need proxies, as computing systems cannot deal with the ambiguity of the languages we live in. Decisions on disambiguation and the choice of proxies have far-reaching implications, There is a politics in these design decisions that requires our keen attention. This is where transparency and agonistic debate are pertinent.
... »The Australasian Society for Computers and Law and the UNSW Allens Hub for technology, Law & Innovation is organising Rules as Code 2.0 - Global plenary for networking and co-designing solutions to RaC’s and society’s grand challenges.
... »The first edition of the Winter School on ‘Algorithmic State, Market and Society’ focuses on cutting-edge issues in the field of law and technology focusing especially on automated technologies.
... »The Hamburg Network for AI & Law (NAIL) has invited Mireille Hildebrandt to give a presentation on the ethical, legal and economic issues raised by the use of machine learning methods in ‘recommender systems’ for commercial applications such as e-commerce and will be based on her recent paper The Issue of Proxies. And why EU law matters for recommender systems.
... »How to build in legal protection into the development and deployment of AI Systems, constructing them with more than good intentions, yet based on norms agreed by a democratic legislature.
... »On 16 December Desara Dushi gave a lecture at the Winter School on Computational law and Cybernetics organized by the Law Faculty of the University College Beder in partnership with South East European Dialogue on Internet Governance (SEEDIG). The three-day program focused on cutting-edge issues in the field of law and technology. In her lecture Desara talked about the impact of artificial intelligence on the legal profession. She focused on what legal technologies are currently available, how can they assist lawyers in their daily tasks, without leaving aside the legal and ethical concerns that are raised by AI systems, and the many risks that legal technologies pose for the future of the legal profession, the protection of human rights and the rule of law itself.
... »In recital 6 of the proposed AI Act, the Council’s draft aims to generally exclude ADM systems under the heading of excluding ‘classic software systems and programming’ from the Act:
... »Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a rapidly growing branch of AI research, with the capacity to learn to exploit our dynamic behavior in real time. From YouTube’s recommendation algorithm to post-surgery opioid prescriptions, RL algorithms are poised to permeate our daily lives. The ability of the RL system to tease out behavioral responses, and the human experimentation inherent to its learning, motivate a range of crucial policy questions about RL’s societal implications that are distinct from those addressed in the literature on other branches of Machine Learning (ML).
... »ELSA Nijmegen invited Mireille Hildebrandt to give a lecture on privacy as the right to an incomputable self.
... »Laurence will discuss the illegitimate regulation of behaviour by code and AI architectures, reflecting the analysis in Digisprudence: Code as Law Rebooted. The discussion then flips the story, to consider the effects of code in law: what happens to legal normativity when its foundations start to shift from one type of technology to another, and how can we identify and anticipate the changes?
... »The 6th International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing organised by the Turing Center of the ETH Zurich brings together an interdisciplinary community to critically address the entanglement of computing practices with the main cultural challenges our epoch is facing. The global and collective nature of such problems (e.g. climate change, global pandemics, systemic inequalities, resurgence of totalitarianism, to name a few) requires a comprehensive perspective on computing, where social and cultural aspects occupy a central position. For these reasons, thinking about machines asks today for an interdisciplinary approach, where art is as necessary as engineering, anthropological insights as important as psychological models, and the critical perspectives of history and philosophy as decisive as the axioms and theorems of theoretical computer science.
... »The Symposium Human Rights in the Digital Sphere brings together speakers from different legal systems and jurisdictions, experts and governmental representatives to exchange views, while tackling the complexity of protecting human rights in the digital sphere in our daily lives activities.
... »Are you a computer scientist and wish to get key insights into
... »Smart products, such as smart household appliances, smart health devices or highly automated vehicles, are increasingly finding their way into everyday life. These products raise a number of economic and legal challenges, e.g. regarding product development, consumer acceptance, data privacy and data security, liability and regulation. The main aim of the ZiF research group at the University of Bielefeld is to investigate these topics in more detail, and the opening conference ‘Economic and legal challenges in the advent of smart products’ offers a platform for disciplinary and interdisciplinary exchange.
... »In the framework of the 1st TAILOR Conference, Hildebrandt will discuss the relationship between the 7 key requirements for trustworthy AI of the HLEG on AI and the proposed AI Act. Her first point will be that for these requirements to become real we need to turn them into legal obligations with legal effect. She will focus on some of the core legal requirements for high risk AI systems that seem pivotal for TAILOR: the risk management system, the quality management system, data governance, human oversight and accuracy, robustness and cybersecurity. Her second point will be that many of these requirements are prime examples of legal protection by design; AI systems should be tailored in ways that combine functionality with practical and effective protection against risks to safety, health and fundamental rights.
... »The AI4EU project is organising a workshop to explore how we can get closer to a Trustworthy AI culture sharing investigations and good practices moving along the trajectories suggested by Trustworthy AI guidelines: public debate, education and practical learning.
... »The DFG Research Training Group ‘DynamInt’ organises a two-day workshop ‘Markets, Governance and European Law in the Algorithmic Era’ at the Humboldt University of Berlin on 15-16 July 2021, in the context of the European Law School - Summer School 2021.
... »The LETS Lab, School of Law & Criminology, University of Greenwich are hosting an online conference on ‘Digital Rights 2.0: A Decade of Transformations for the Rule of Law’. The event aims at establishing a venue for sharing and discussing with the research community the ways in which human rights have been shaped by emerging technologies in the past decade: a decade that exposed the conceptual fragilities of the rule of law in data-driven environments and has been characterised by a disillusionment with human rights narratives
... »The Institute for Digital Law Trier (IRDT) of the University of Trier brings together experts in the international and interdisciplinary online conference concerning the EU Commission’s proposal of an Artificial Intelligence Act of 21 April 2021, to discuss the following questions, among others:
... »Diver and Hildebrandt spoke at last week’s virtual breakfast event on ‘digital-ready lawmaking & ethics’, hosted by the EU Commission’s Legal Interoperability team, who are working on the ‘Better legislation for smoother implementation’ project. The discussion included numerous experts from various domains, and considered the cross-over between law and ethics, and how this complicates questions of digital-ready laws and digital-ready law-making. What ethical conditions are necessary for the development of laws, and how do technologies reflexively inform our answer to this question? And what impact might the provisions on high-risk AI in the EU’s proposed AI Act have in this context?
... »The EU Digital Strategy sketches an ambitious approach to sculpt Europe’s digital future - covering areas and issues as diverse as the digital economy and value extraction from industrial data, to the impact of digital transformation on the environment, to the shaping of open and democratic societies. Yet, the optimal content and implementation of digital policy in Europe - of any form - is always subject to fierce contestation. A policy as ambitious as the EU Digital Strategy is no exception.
... »The EU proposal for a future regulation on AI focuses on fundamental rights, conformity assessment, supervisory authorities, certifications and other key points. This regulatory mix will be discussed during the webinar ‘AI Regulation in the EU: What is the right mix?’
... »AI4Belgium Ethics & Law is bringing together AI policy experts to provide insights about the content and consequences of the AI Regulation.
... »What is the status of integration of ‘legal tech’ in the legal practice? What does the implementation of intelligent legal software mean for the relationship between the legal practitioner and the client? And what does it mean for the relationship between the litigant and the law? These and other questions will be addressed by Mireille Hildebrandt in her talk at the Flemish Association of Lawyers.
... »The WG Hart legal workshop on ‘New Perspectives on Jurisdiction and the Criminal Law’ organised by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies will take place on 26-28 April 2021.
... »‘Courts of the future - the future of courts’ is an online workshop series organised by the Leibniz Institute for Media Research - Hans Bredow Institute that takes a deep dive into the role of technology in and in front of courts, of platform courts and of the use of courts to effect social changes.
... »The Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW) and the University of Amsterdam is organising the Spring School ‘Judging the Robojudge: Ethical and Legal Perspectives on Using Artificial Intelligence in Legal Decision’ on 7-9 April 2021.
... »The Simons Collaboration on the Theory of Algorithmic Fairness has invited Mireille Hildebrandt to its TOC4Fairness seminar series to speak on The framing powers of ML.
... »The ‘Democracy in a digital future’ international conference on 25-26 March 2021 will bring together experts, academics and political representatives to address the role of government and public policy in upholding democratic, rule-of-law procedures and human rights amidst technological developments.
... »During the Belgian Artificial Intelligence week (15-19 March 2021), Mireille Hildebrandt will present the European perspective on AI, law and the future of AI regulation. She will be joined by Prof. Catherine Régis who will bring in the Canadian perspective and Prof. Gregory Lewkowicz who will moderate the debate.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt will have a ‘fireside’ chat with computer scientist Richard Buckland of University New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney on why law matters for computer science education and research.
... »On International Women’s Day, Mireille Hildebrandt will do a live podcast with Tatiana Löttiger.
... »On Monday 15 February, Mireille Hildebrandt will give an informal talk at the Stokes Society (of Pembroke College of Cambridge University) where she will briefly introduce her views on ‘Robust AI and Robust Law’, explaining that the notion of ‘robust AI’ provides an interesting perspective on what it would mean to speak of ‘robust law’ and of ‘robust legal technologies’.
... »Computation is poised to transform legal services, legal systems, and the law itself. Making the most of innovation and technology, and understanding the benefits and risks, requires deep collaboration between computer scientists and legal professionals (lawyers, academics, etc.) This interdisciplinary symposium, co-organised by the Northwestern Law and Technology Initiative and the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, brings together researchers working at the intersection of law and computation to explore the effects of computation on law.
... »On 19 January 2021, the Hilary Term AI4Law workshop series at Faculty of Law, University of Oxford will start with the workshop ‘Data-Driven Law on Edge?’ where Mireille Hildebrandt will give a talk followed by Q&A and discussion.
... »On 14 December 2020, Mireille Hildebrandt will speak at the panel on ‘Automating public administration – Public sector use of AI and fundamental rights implications’ at the online conference ‘Doing AI the European way: Protecting fundamental rights in an era of artificial intelligence’ organised by the European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), EU2020.DE, and the Bundesministerium der Justiz und Verbrauchersschutz.
... »Laurence Diver (legal postdoctoral researcher) and Gianmarco Gori (affiliated researcher) will speak at this year’s conference on the Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations. Laurence’s presentation is entitled ‘Technological mediation vs. the rule of law’, and Gianmarco’s ‘Technological mediation and the human in the l(aw)’. They are part of a session proposed by Laurence entitled ‘Law-Computer Interaction’ (Thursday 5 Nov, 1715-1845), and will present alongside VUB colleages Carlotta Rigotti and René Mahieu.
... »On 11 November 2020, Mireille Hildebrandt gives a public lecture on Legal Effect in Computational Law in the series Shifting Powers due to Algorithms and AI, organised by the ‘Normative Orders’ Research Center of Goethe University Frankfurt.
... »On 14 October 2020, Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt will speak at the public seminar Légiférer le risque on ‘Risk reduction as a legal obligation’ and will engage in a discussion with Boris Vallaud, member of the National Assembly of France.
... »On 29 September 2020, Mireille Hildebrandt will give a talk on ‘Legal Protection by Design’ hosted by the special interest group Principles by design (Governing the Digital Society), Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She will focus on how we can develop a set of design principles that contribute to machine learning practices conducive to ‘rule of law’ institutions that aim to enhance human agency and support a pluralistic, fair and resilient human society.
... »On 26th May 2020, a couple of weeks after Google announced its withdrawal from the Sidewalk Toronto Smart City project, Mireille Hildebrandt will speak at a panel, revisiting the Sidewalk Project at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics (C4E).
... »On Friday, 1 May 2020 Mireille Hildebrandt presented at a lunch seminar at the computer science department of her other affiliation (Radboud University), together with Jaap-Henk Hoepman.
... »The COHUBICOL team are at the FAT* 2020 conference in Barcelona, where PI Mireille Hildebrandt is co-chair and postdoc Laurence Diver will take part in a CRAFT session on “When Not to Design, Build, and Deploy”. FAT* is a premier conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency in the tech sector, and has recently widened its scope to include more social science research. FAT* 2020 is the first time the conference has been held in Europe.
... »This time Mireille Hildebrandt will join the illustrious Bitburger Gespräche in Mainz, organised by the Institut für Rechtspolitik of Trier University, to give a dinner speech on the subject of AI, Blockchain and the law. A nice challenge, combining serious reflection with humour, savouring food for thought on a tardy subject without disrupting the appetite of the audience.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt will present her paper on ‘Code-Driven Law: Scaling the Past and Freezing the Future’ at the Lex Ex Machina workshop on Law’s Computability, hosted by Cambridge University’s Jesus College’s Intellectual Forum on 13 December 2019.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt is keynoting at the AI and Big Data Conference at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, 6 December 2019. She will be speaking on ‘Broken Promises of AI’s Modern Approach?’, see e.g. her chapter on ‘New Animism in Policing: Re-animating the Rule of Law?’. Slides available here.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt will give a Public Lecture for the 25th Anniversary of TILT on 12th November 2019 on Why micro targeting does not work and nevertheless disrupts the public sphere.
... »Frederike Zufall is speaking at the 6th AIELN Biennial Conference ‘International Trade Regime for the Data-Driven Economy: How will Artificial Intelligence Transform International Economic Law’ in Taipei, Taiwan, on 26-27 October 2019.
... »On 17 October 2019 Mireille Hildebrandt did a keynote on ‘Access to law in legal tech times’at the Legal Tech Conference in Brussels organised by the Flemish Bar Association. The slides can be found here.
... »Laurence Diver spoke at this year’s Gikii conference, with a talk entitled “Legal Tech, or the Story of Your [Legal] Life”. Based around Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life and its 2016 film adaptation Arrival, the talk explored the implications of ML-based legal prediction. What do we stand to gain and, perhaps more importantly, lose in the adoption of automated predictions? Can we continue fully to count as human being in the face of this ‘actuarial’ approach to justice?
... »This Fall, Mireille Hildebrandt will be keynoting at three major computer science conferences: ACM-RecSys2019 in Copenhagen, ACM-Multimedia2019 in Nice and ECSS2019 in Rome.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt did a keynote at the European Forum of Official Gazettes The Hague 2019, on ‘Access to Legal Information. Opening Pandora’s box’, 21 June 2019, see slides here.
... »Presentation at the workshop ‘Beyond Differential Privacy’, Simons Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, on ‘What if privacy is incomputable?, 5-11 May 2019 see slides here.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt presented at Silicon Flatirons, Boulder Colorado, a Conference on ‘Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Can We Hold Machines Accountable?’ organised by Margot Kaminski and Harry Surden, where Mireille spoke on whether e.g. RTB is an effective way of promoting one’s goods and services or a hoax built on p-hacking and opacity.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt presented at HEC Paris (École des hautes études commerciales de Paris), at the Conference on Legal DATA Mining, Machine Learning and Visualisation, Legal Protection Against Automation of Law, the slides are here.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt presented at Leiden University, at the Workshop on Fairness and Transparency, towards responsible data science, Saving machine learning from crappy research design, PDF of the slides is here.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt delivered a lecture at King’s College London, on invitation of David Nelken, ‘From Text-driven Law to Data and Code-driven Regulation’, the slides can be found here.
... »Public Lecture Mireille Hildebrandt on ‘The laws of ethics, and the ethics of law’, in the lecture series on ‘Taming the machines’, at Hamburg University, PDF of the slides here.
... »Inaugural Lecture on the magic of computational law, by Mireille Hildebrandt of the Allens Hub of Technology, Law and Innovation at University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. Video here, radio interview here.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt lectured on Law and Digital Technologies at L’Institut du Risk & Compliance (ENS, Paris), in the lecture series on ‘Geopolitique du Risque: Technologies et Incertitudes’, Paris
... »Mireille Hildebrandt lectured on speaking law to statistics at the Bucerius’ Law School (Hamburg) Summer Program on Legal Technology and Operations.
... »Today, we are publishing the final version of the Research Study in Text-Driven Law.
... »The aforementioned paper by COHUBICOL’s Mireille Hildebrandt was published as a chapter in the Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law.
... »Postdoctoral researcher Gori has conducted research on the practices of ML dataset creation, curation and dissemination. The report emphasises how such practices play a crucial role for determining the level of legal protection enjoyed by the legal subjects located downstream ML-pipelines. The report illustrates how some structural features of ML-pipelines can give rise to the problem of “many hands” and to the accumulation of various forms of “technical debt”. The report argues that, lacking appropriate safeguards, a “Legal Protection Debt” can incrementally build up along the different stages of the pipeline. The report therefore stresses the need that actors involved in ML pipelines adopt a forward-looking approach to legal compliance. This requires overcoming a siloed and modulated understanding of legal liability and paying of keen attention to the potential use cases of datasets.
... »Hildebrandt will publish a chapter entitled ‘Boundary Work between Computational “Law” and “Law-as-We-Know-It” in D Curtin & M Catanzariti (eds.), Data at the Boundaries of European Law (forthcoming May 2023, Oxford University Press).
... »Hildebrandt publishes ‘Qualification and Quantification in Machine Learning. From Explanation to Explication’ in Sociologica (2022).
... »Hildebrandt publishes on ‘Ground Truthing in the European Health Data Space’ in Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (Scitepress 2023)
... »Hildebrandt’s chapter ‘Text-Driven Jurisdiction in Cyberspace’ will be published in Transformations in Criminal Jurisdiction: Extraterritoriality and Enforcement, edited by Micheál Ó Floinn, Lindsay Farmer, Julia Hörnle, and David Ormerod QC with Hart Publishing.
... »In June 2022, COHUBICOL postdoc researcher Desara Dushi co-organised in conjunction with the International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence the 1st International Workshop on Imagining the AI Landscape After the AI Act aimed at analysing how the new AI regulation will shape the AI technologies of the future, collecting together input and discussions from multidisciplinary stakeholders.
... »In August, U.S. District Judge Paul W. Grimm of the District of Maryland convened a panel of leading international experts to lend their perspectives on a few difficult societal and ethical questions: What happens when machine-learned and AI-generated data enter the courtroom? Should that evidence be considered reliable?
... »In a recent publication in the Journal of Things We Like (Lots) - JOTWELL, Mireille Hildebrandt reviews the article Is That Your Final Decision? Multi-stage Profiling, Selective Effects, and Article 22 of the GDPR by Reuben Binns and Michael Veale, where the authors discuss the arduous issues of the EU GDPR’s prohibition of impactful automated decisions.
... »Advances in Natural Language Processing and machine learning have made it possible to design predictive models that can be used to assist judicial proceedings. Such technologies transform the legal profession; guaranteeing that this does not disrupt the rule of law, access to justice, fair trial and contestability is a substantial challenge.
... »Laurence’s article ‘Interpreting the Rule(s) of Code: Performance, Performativity, and Production’ has been published open access in Release 3.2 of the MIT Computational Law Report.
... »The European Data Protection Law Review published in their latest issue 3/2021 the paper of Mireille Hildebrandt ‘Discrimination, Data-Driven AI Systems and Practical Reason’.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt wrote a ‘Preface on Navigable and Unregulable Space(s)’ for the Italian/English volume on HUMAN SECURITY IN NAVIGABLE SPACES: COMMON CHALLENGES AND NEW TRENDS, edited by Giorgia Bevilacqua, published in the context of the Project on ‘HUMARCYSPASE. Protecting Human Security with non-state-actors in the MARitime and CYber SPAce’.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt applauds the groundbreaking implications of the proposal and its architecture, followed by a short overview and some notes on terminology (the AIA being a complex animal). Based on this she added a series of issues and recommendations.
... »A new article has been published in the Communications of the ACM. ‘Understanding Law and the Rule of Law: A Plea to Augment CS Curricula’ by Mireille Hildebrandt can be accessed here.
... »The WG Hart legal workshop on ‘New Perspectives on Jurisdiction and the Criminal Law’ organised by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies will take place on 26-28 April 2021.
... »In her latest Jotwell post Practical and effective protection’ of human rights in the era of data-driven tech: Understanding European constitutional law, Hildebrandt reviews Janneke Gerards’ book General Principles of the European Convention on Human Rights, a book that “offers a detailed account of why and how individual rights and freedoms matter, what difference they can make, and which complex balancing acts must be performed to ensure legal certainty as well as justice. […] The clarity of explanation highlights the difficult dynamics between public and individual interests, between national and supranational jurisdictions and between the freedom of states to act in the general interest and the freedom from unlawful interference for individual citizens, acknowledging that such individual freedom is also a public good.”
... »This chapter confronts the foundational challenges posed to legal theory and legal philosophy by the surge of computational law. Two types of computational law are at stake. On the one hand we have artificial intelligence in the legal realm that will be addressed as data-driven law, and on the other hand we have the coding of self-executing contracts and regulation in the blockchain, as well as other types of automated decision making (ADM), addressed as code-driven law. Data-driven law raises problems due to its autonomic operations and the ensuing opacity of its reasoning. Code-driven law presents us with a conflation of regulation, execution and adjudication. Though such implications are very different, both types of computational law share assumptions based on the calculability and computability of legal practice and legal research.
... »COHUBICOL is delighted to announce the launch of the Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law (CRCL).
... »Tatiana Duarte (affiliated researcher) published the article ‘Google and Apple Exposure Notifications System: Exposure Notifications or Notified Exposures?’
... »Mireille Hildebrandt published ‘Computationeel tegenspel: de nieuwe ruimte van het recht’ in Actioma.
... »Laurence’s latest article, “Digisprudence: the design of legitimate code” has been accepted for publication in Law, Innovation and Technology. The article is based on his doctoral work, summarising the broad contours of the theory developed there. You can read the abstract below, and find the open access pre-print here.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt will present her paper on ‘Code-Driven Law: Scaling the Past and Freezing the Future’ at the Lex Ex Machina workshop on Law’s Computability, hosted by Cambridge University’s Jesus College’s Intellectual Forum on 13 December 2019.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt is keynoting at the AI and Big Data Conference at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, 6 December 2019. She will be speaking on ‘Broken Promises of AI’s Modern Approach?’, see e.g. her chapter on ‘New Animism in Policing: Re-animating the Rule of Law?’. Slides available here.
... »Frederike Zufall is speaking at the 6th AIELN Biennial Conference ‘International Trade Regime for the Data-Driven Economy: How will Artificial Intelligence Transform International Economic Law’ in Taipei, Taiwan, on 26-27 October 2019.
... »This Fall, Mireille Hildebrandt will be keynoting at three major computer science conferences: ACM-RecSys2019 in Copenhagen, ACM-Multimedia2019 in Nice and ECSS2019 in Rome.
... »Our affiliate researcher Geneviève Vanderstichele obtained a DPhil (PhD) in Law (University of Oxford, without corrections) with a thesis titled ‘The Evolving Role of the Judge in Digitally Assisted Adjudication’. The main research question is how the role of the human judge should evolve when s/he makes judicial decisions with the assistance of so-called legal technologies.
... »On the 6th of June a seminar is taking place on the topic of Databases and Artificial Intelligences: a scholarly and artistic perspective (10 AM - 5 PM). This seminar forms part of the DATAUNION Seminar Series of the DATAUNION project under PI Prof. Rocco Bellanova. It is co-organised by Privacy Salon, our postdoctoral researcher Gianmarco Gori on behalf of the COHUBICOL project, and the event will be hosted by FARI Institute - AI for the common good at BeCentral in Brussels. Please register in advance by sending an email to DataUnion_ERC@vub.be.
... »On Wednesday 24 May 2023 at 14:15 (Area 42 Midi) Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt will moderate a CPDP 2023 Panel on data protection & privacy law and human vulnerability organised by VULNERA - the International Observatory.
... »The 2nd international CRCL: Computational ‘law’ on Edge conference organised by COHUBICOL in collaboration with CRCL has launched its 2023 Call for Abstracts. We seek in-depth analyses that address both the potential and the challenges of computational ‘law’. We are seeking internal critiques in both law and CS, to ensure a grounded conversation across disciplinary boundaries. In line with the ethos of the COHUBICOL project, we particularly welcome analyses that take a normative position as to adherence to key rule of law ‘requirements’, notably concerning (1) the checks and balances between the powers of the state, (2) practical and effective enjoyment of human rights and (3) resilience against instrumentalization against big players, whether public or private. Before submitting, we advise checking out the conference ethos and visiting the COHUBICOL and CRCL websites to check the scope of the domain.
... »COHUBICOL is organising an event on 24 March 2023 on Prof. Fleur Johns’ new book #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (OUP, 2023). Coming out this spring, the new work presents a study of ‘digital humanitarianism’ and how these practices will impact international politics and international law. In #Help, Johns engages in an in-depth analysis of how digitalization presents challenges as well as opportunities for the humanitarian field. The book seeks to unearth, explicate, and critically assess the implicit yet omnipresent reconfigurations that digital interfaces present us with in the context of humanitarian work. However, unquestionably, the book’s relevance stretches far beyond the humanitarian field and goes right to the heart of the international order, both present and future. Discussing this timely work will be Dr. Delphine Dogot, whose expertise and research will make for an enriching and interesting discussion.
... »In an event held at De Balie in Amsterdam, Mireille Hildebrandt will participate in a debate (in Dutch) alongside other academics (in law, philosophy, and data-driven/algorithmic systems), journalists, and writers. The speakers will discuss the topic of “menselijk recht in tijden van datasturing and natuurgeweld” (human-made law in the era of data control and natural disasters). The debate will take as its starting point and common thread excerpts from the forthcoming book of jurist and philosopher Maxim Februari entitled Doe zelf normaal: Menselijk recht in tijden van datasturing en natuurgeweld. The invited speakers will talk about the issue at the heart of Februari’s new book: how to safeguard fundamental rights and the rule of law in societies facing the daunting issues of climate change and the rise of smart technologies. Central to the evening’s thematic discussion is how to best involve society at large in the discussion on how the rule of law needs to adapt in light of these developments. How can human beings retain some level of control in a world where the forces of nature and technology seem to incrementally erode it? For more information (tickets or livestream, visit the website of De Balie).
... »The COHUBICOL team are at the FAT* 2020 conference in Barcelona, where PI Mireille Hildebrandt is co-chair and postdoc Laurence Diver will take part in a CRAFT session on “When Not to Design, Build, and Deploy”. FAT* is a premier conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency in the tech sector, and has recently widened its scope to include more social science research. FAT* 2020 is the first time the conference has been held in Europe.
... »This time Mireille Hildebrandt will join the illustrious Bitburger Gespräche in Mainz, organised by the Institut für Rechtspolitik of Trier University, to give a dinner speech on the subject of AI, Blockchain and the law. A nice challenge, combining serious reflection with humour, savouring food for thought on a tardy subject without disrupting the appetite of the audience.
... »Laurence Diver attended a high-profile roundtable on AI and the Rule of Law in Athens on 20-21 September 2019. He joined representatives from across academia, industry and government to discuss principles for the trustworthy adoption (or not!) of AI in legal systems, legal practice, and related questions of compliance. The discussion considered recent international initiatives seeking to develop principles for the use of AI in the legal context, a theme centrally relevant to the focus of COHUBICOL.
... »Presentation at the workshop ‘Beyond Differential Privacy’, Simons Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, on ‘What if privacy is incomputable?, 5-11 May 2019 see slides here.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt lectured on speaking law to statistics at the Bucerius’ Law School (Hamburg) Summer Program on Legal Technology and Operations.
... »Diver and Hildebrandt are currently teaching an intensive course at the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University. The 12-lecture course is titled ‘Critical Reflections on Computational Law’, and covers a wide range of practical and theoretical aspects of computational ‘law’ and legal tech. It aims to sensitise students to the interactions between legal philosophy and the philosophy of technology, while maintaining a strong connection to real-world legal technologies and positive law (e.g. Article 22 GDPR and the EU’s proposed AI Act). The course mirrors aspects of the COHUBICOL conceptual approach, and builds on various literature from the project, including Hildebrandt’s book Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk (Oxford, 2020) and Diver’s book Digisprudence: Code as Law Rebooted (Edinburgh, 2022), both open access.
... »New Technologies and Artificial Intelligence Law is the theme of the winter school organised by ELSA Brussels from 20 to 27 February 2022.
... »Laurence will discuss the illegitimate regulation of behaviour by code and AI architectures, reflecting the analysis in Digisprudence: Code as Law Rebooted. The discussion then flips the story, to consider the effects of code in law: what happens to legal normativity when its foundations start to shift from one type of technology to another, and how can we identify and anticipate the changes?
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... »The Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW) and the University of Amsterdam is organising the Spring School ‘Judging the Robojudge: Ethical and Legal Perspectives on Using Artificial Intelligence in Legal Decision’ on 7-9 April 2021.
... »Mireille Hildebrandt teaches on Distant reading of legal text and access to law. This lecture is part of PhD AI Seminars at BeCentral.
... »In the second video in COHUBICOL’s ‘interview with the author’ series, our researcher Emilie van den Hoven spoke to Sylvie Delacroix (@SylvieDelacroix) in the context of our 2020 Philosophers’ Seminar, held earlier in December. For the seminar we convened scholars from philosophy, computer science and law to foster a cross-disciplinary exploration of some of the most pertinent questions in relation to the use of AI in law. The focus of this year’s session was on the ‘interpretability problem’ in machine learning.
... »Our researcher Emilie van den Hoven spoke to Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) in the context of our upcoming 2020 Philosophers’ Seminar. The seminar seeks specifically to explore some of the most pertinent questions around the interpretability problem in machine learning, notably in relation to the use of AI in law. In the interview Pasquale speaks about some of the ideas he developed in his contribution and discusses how notions like meta-expertise, metrics and second-hand naturalism reduce some of the internal goods that are constitutive of law & legal practice. In doing so, he sheds light on how the integration of computation in law challenges the practices that are core to the legal domain.
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