Simone Casiraghi wins prestigious EURA young scholars prize for his PhD research

[Prize] Researcher Simone Casiraghi has been awarded by EURA (European Centre of Excellence on the Regulation of Robotics & AI) the EURA young scholars prize for the paper The ‘Ethification’ of ICT Governance. Artificial Intelligence and Data Protection in the European Union. The paper is co-authored with Professors Niels van Dijk and Serge Gutwirth.

That was the 2nd edition of the prize for researchers under 35 years old. Casiraghi received the award at the 'Regulating UncertAInty' conference, which took place on 8-9 April 2021 online, where he also presented the winning paper.

Abstract of the winning paper: Several European Union’s initiatives have resorted to ethics as a way to govern and regulate Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The proliferation of invocations of ‘ethics’ in legal and policy discourses, especially concerning the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be referred to as the ‘ethification’ phenomenon. This article aims to elucidate the benefits and drawbacks of this phenomenon, and its effects on the articulations of law, technology and politics in democratic constitutional states. First, the article provides a mapping to locate where the ethics work is being produced in the EU. Second, it distinguishes different types of ethics based on the mapping. Third, the ethification phenomenon is analyzed through the concepts of boundary and convergence work, where ethics acts as a ‘normative glue’ between interests of different practices to reach a common goal, but also tracing or obfuscating boundaries from the law. Finally, it inquiries into the nature of ethics as a practice and some consequences of ethification for the law.