News

Would you like to share your research with fellow data protection academics worldwide? Call for participants for the 4th DPSN event taking place on 23rd January.  One of our network’s missions is to create a platform for people to get to know each other’s work better.

LSTS researcher Michaël Van den Poel has recently seen his blogpost on the recent C-21/23 Lindenapotheke judgement published by European Law Blog.  Titled, 'Case C-21/23 Lindenapotheke – Competitors can enforce GDPR-based unfair commercial practices, and a broadening concept of health and sensi...

Research from the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) research group has been selected for European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) as part of the 2024 Independent Research Projects initiative.

On the 5th November, Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) visited the Communa sites in Forest to learn about the community projects ongoing in Brussels in empty buildings.

LSTS & Dataunion researchers will be presenting on Wednesday 6th November at the Data Life conference in Copenhagen.

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference, Europe is taking place in Amsterdam on the 24th/ 25th October, and LSTS is significantly contributing to its programme.

LSTS researchers Barbara Lazarotto and Pablo Trigo Kramcsák will present their paper ‘Smart City Data: Resolving Public-Private Tensions in Joint Controllership’ at the Digital Legal Talks 2024, an annual conference hosted by the Digital Legal Lab, taking place in Utrecht on 28 November.

FARI – AI for the Common Good Institute will host a session titled “From Silence to Science: Rectifying Women’s Health Data Gaps in Perinatal Violence and Gynecological Cancer,” and invites you to join the discussion led by LSTS doctoral researcher Anastasia Karagianni.

Prof. Mireille Hilderbrandt has recently seen an article published for the Netherlands journal ‘Rechtstreeks’. It contains scientific articles on Case Law, published by the Netherlands Council for the Judiciary, focusing on the practice and development of case law in the Netherlands.

Vanessa Ugolini, post-doctoral fellow in the DATAUNION project, received the ‘Best Doctoral Researcher 2023’ prize in International Studies from the University of Trento. The award ceremony was held in Piazza Fiera, Trento (Italy) on 10 May 2024.

On Tuesday 25th June in Budapest, Professor Mireille Hilderbrandt delivers a keynote on 'The Future of Legal Method. A New Hermeneutics for Computational Law', at the Conference of the Society of Internet Platforms.

LSTS researcher Anastasia Karagianni recently presented a work-in-progress paper at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX) in Stockholm, titled 'Pixels of Perfection and Self-Perception: Deconstructing AR Beauty Filters and Their Challenge to Unbiased Body Image?'...

EDPS (European Data Protection Supervisor) are soon to be celebrating their 20th anniversary - two decades of safeguarding citizens' privacy and data protection rights.

Now online, an interview with Professor Gloria González Fuster on estadodiario.com (an online platform dedicated to the legal world and legal market in Chile).

Titled 'Consumer Law and the Regulation of the Free Flow of Data: Upsetting the Balance of the European Data Protection Framework' - the article looks at how regulation of data is now spread over various legal disciplines as the free flow of data and the creation of a ‘genuine single market for dat...

Paul De Hert and Rosamunde van Brakel published an opinion piece observing that massive data storage of Internet traffic seems inevitable in Europe, while more and more governments insist on decrypting encryption so they can see messages.

Zuzanna Choinska graduated with a law degree from the Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Warsaw. Currently, she is a Ph.D.

Prof.

We invite expressions of interest for an international workshop on Teaching with Data Rights, hosted by the Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) on Friday 9 February 2024, in Brussels (Belgium).

Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt's ERC Advanced Grant project COHUBICOL has published the final version of its Research Study on Computational Law. Written by postdoctoral researchers Pauline McBride and Laurence Diver, the study is one of the core outputs of the project.

Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt has contributed a chapter in the recently published Research Handbook on Law and Technology (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023).

Prof. dr. Mireille Hildebrandt (Co-director LSTS) has written a Technology Law JOTWELL review of LSTS researcher Hideyuki Matsumi's and George Washington University Prof.

On 12 June 2023, EUTOPIA PhD co-tutelle fellow and LSTS researcher Alessandra Calvi (d.pia.lab, LSTS, VUB; lab. ETIS UMR 8051, CYU) presented a paper entitled “Enhancing AI fairness through impact assessment in the European Union: a legal and computer science perspective” co-authored with Prof.

Seliha Buelens is the winner of IAPP’s Westin Scholar Award for VUB for the academic year 2022-23.

Prof.

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).  The topic of the...

Lander Govaerts, Lucas Melgaço, and Lior Volinz will be at the IEA Paris May 22 - 23 and present at the ' Human Agency, Digital Society and Data-Intensive Surveillance ' colloquim co-organised by Anders Albrechtslund (Aarhus University), Rosamunde Van Br...

Are you passionate about privacy and data protection? Do you wish to receive the Westin Scholar Award 2023 for VUB?

LSTS postdoctoral researcher Gori has published 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 paper by Simone Casiraghi titled “Anything new under the sun? Insights from a history of institutionalized AI ethics” was published on the journal Ethics and Information Technology.

Rosamunde Van Brakel has been appointed as visiting professor at the Centre for Criminology, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, UK for a month and will be visiting from 24 April 2023 till 19 May 2023. During her time there she will give a seminar on harms of algorithmic policing. 

The PROTECT MSCA ITN  is coming to an end and its closing symposium, titled ‘Governing Artificial Intelligence Designing Legal and Regulatory Responses’ , will take place on May 23 in Brussels.

The Health and Ageing Law Lab (HALL) is organising its inaugural HELT (Health, law, and Technology) Symposium 2023. The symposium will take place on 26th April 2023 at the ‘Sparks Venue – Rue Ravenstein 60’ in the center of Brussels.

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.

On 20 February (at 8pm) Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt will participate in a debate (in Dutch) held at De Balie in Amsterdam on the topic of "menselijk recht in tijden van datasturing and natuurgeweld" (human-made law in the era of data control and natural disasters).

The VUB Chair in Surveillance Studies in collaboration with CENSUS, IEA, and supported by SSN, organises an international, trans-disciplinary and multilingual symposium on Human Agency, Digital Society and Data-Intensive Surveillance at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study,&nbs...

The report documents the main findings of a workshop on the Police-Use of Surveillance Technology hosted by the VUB Chair in Surveillance Studies.

The preliminary schedule for the VUB Chair in Surveillance Studies' upcoming seminars is now available on their website.

During the 16th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies BIOSTEC 2023 (16-18 February 2023), Prof.

Please note that the LSTS website is undergoing some reconstruction from 16/12/2022 to ca. 15/01/2023. The website will still be available in its current form to all visitors, but new content will not be added during this time.

Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt has been invited to give a keynote at IURIX2022, the annual conference on the intersection of law, Artificial Intelligence and Information Systems, under the auspices of the JURIX Foundation for Legal Knowledge Systems.

The United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) brings people together from various stakeholder groups to discuss public policy issues relating to the Internet.

In June 2022, Dr 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 futur...

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.   Postdoc researc...

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’...

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?

The 17th IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management takes place virtually from 30 August to 2 September 2022.

In July 2022, Prof.

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?

In June dr Joanna Mazur from the University of Warsaw visited LSTS. Dr Mazur presented her current work on data protection and cross-border transfers in regional trade agreements in a WRG session that took place on June 22.

In April 2020 Google and Apple announced a joint project under whose constraints countries could develop proximity tracing apps, called Exposure Notifications (EN).

The Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) Research Group is happy to witness the launch of a new Blog on its website. The LSTS Blog can be accessed from the landing page of the LSTS website or simply here.

Prof. 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 philosopher Luhmann worked most of his life).

The project ‘SOCIO-BEE’ where VUB participates with the Health and Ageing Law Lab (HALL) as sub-group of the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) Research Group was show-cased in the VUB Annual Report 2021 by the Vice-rectorate Innovation & Industry Relations as a ‘success case’.

The latest issue of the European Health and Pharma Law Review (EHPL) has published the paper of Anastasiya Kiseleva written together with Professor Paul Quinn "Are You AI’S Favourite?

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.

The LSTS organised a WRG session on data protection and cross-border transfers in regional trade .  The session will take place on  22 June, 12:00 to 13:45 .

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 cy...

On June 15, LSTS-HALL member Danaja Fabcic Povse will present at the Harvard Law School - Petrie-Flom Center’s annual conference “Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Diagnostics and Therapeutics Outside of Traditional Clinical Settings”.

The EuADS Summer School Data Science for Social Media is opened by a public lecture by Prof.

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.

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. Prof.

On the 9th of June at 12.15 Prof. Dr. Gloria González Fuster will join, together with a panel of prominent scholars and experts, the workshop "Fight the Power!

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 . In this book, he debunks eight persistent myths about privacy.

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, Prof.

Prof. Dr. Gloria González Fuster has been interviewed by the French magazine L’ADN on the topic of feminist data protection.  The article can be accessed here, while the full video interview can be watched here.  

LSTS and the Health and Ageing Law Lab (HALL) are looking for a motivated researcher to join their team. As part of their duties, the successful candidate will be conducting innovative research primarily in the area of data protection law, contributing to commissioned reports, advising up...

The Brussels Laboratory for Data Protection & Privacy Impact Assessments (d.pia.lab) is calling for PH.D. position on legal foresight in relation to the data economy for food systems.

Professor Gloria González Fuster will hold a talk on the GDPR and CJEU case law at te seminar on data transfers at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid on 13 May 2022 at 10:00 AM. The full program can be consulted here. It is still possible to register until the 10th using this l...

The 12-lecture intensive course at the Buchmann Faculty of Law is titled ‘Critical Reflections on Computational Law’, and covers a wide range of practical and theoretical aspects of computational ‘law’ and legal tech.

Two LSTS researchers, Olga Gkotsopoulou and Lina Jasmontaite made it through the pre-selection rounds and will compete at the annual VUB Doctoral Derby Finals, presenting their research projects to a wide audience!  After three hybrid preselection sessions, 9  VUB&nbsp...

On 9 May 2022, LSTS PhD researchers Laura Drechsler and Olga Gkotsopoulou will present their ongoing PhD research at the Pint of Science Festival in Brussels.

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?

Dr. Laurence 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.

In a recent publication in the Journal of Things We Like (Lots) - JOTWELL, Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt reviews the article Is That Your Final Decision?

Advances in Natural Language Processing and machine learning have made it possible to design predictive models that can be used to assist judicial proceedings.

HALL organizes the workshop at the conference of the European Association of Health Law to be held in Ghent from 20 until 22 April 2022.

This year, several LSTS and HALL researchers speak at the conference of the European Association of Health Law to be held in Ghent from 20 until 22 April 2022.

This year, three   LSTS researchers , Lina Jasmontaite, Nikolaos Ioannidis and Olga Gkotsopoulou,   are participating  at   the VUB Doctoral Derby –  the annual VUB-wide  competition about  communicating  scientific research to a general audience!

In 2 months, the Brussels Privacy Hub is going to hold the 2022 edition of its Summer Academy for Global Privacy Law.

The Yale Technology and Ethics group invites Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt to give a talk on Regulating AI by way of AI. Better law(s) or the end(s) of law?

On the 31st of March, 2022, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) will held a co-organised conference on the topic of "Anticipatory compliance".  The conference marks the closing event of the Horizon 2020 Project PANELFIT.

In her talk, Prof. 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.

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. COHUBICOL's PI Mireille Hildebrandt will give a k...

COHUBICOL in collaboration with the Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law CRCL is organising an international conference on Computational 'law' on edge on 3-4 November 2022 in Brussels and invites computer scientists and lawyers, as well as social science or humanities scholar...

Prof.

LSTS co-director, Prof. Dr. Gloria González Fuster will be speaking at the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) public hearing on the “General Data Protection Regulation implementation, enforcement and lessons learned”, on 17 March 2022.

Lina Jasmontaite participated in the  second episode of the podcast prepared by the trainees of European Data Protection Supervisor and the European Data Protection Board (EDPS-EDPB).

New Technologies and Artificial Intelligence Law is the theme of the winter school organised by ELSA Brussels from 20 to 27 February 2022. COHUBICOL's PI Prof.

Prof. Gloria González Fuster will give a talk “Protection des données : une affaire personnelle, des enjeux collectifs ?" at the Séminaire Surveillance et manipulation des goûts et des opinions this thursday 10.2.2022 at 18:00 CET.

Joris van Hoboken’s co-authored paper ‘Smartphone Platforms as Privacy Regulators’ is one of the winners of the 2022 Privacy Papers for Policymakers Awards. The winning authors will join The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) to present their work at a virtual event for 12th Annual Privacy Pa...

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. Prof.

The Hamburg Network for AI & Law (NAIL) has invited Prof.

We are delighted to announce that CPDP2022 will take place from 23 to 25 May at Les Halles de Schaerbeek and Area42, our usual meeting spots. We sincerely hope that you can join us on the new dates to celebrate the beginning of Spring in Brussels and the 15th anniversary of CPDP.

On 28 January 2022 (13:00-15:10 CET), upon the occasion of the Data Protection Day, the Data Protection Law Scholars Network organizes the the first ever international quick meet-up of data protection law researchers. Prof. Dr. Gloria González Fuster will give the welcome speech.

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.

How do young people experience and use the internet and social media? That is the central theme of HACK. 40 young people work for five months on a theater performance, memes and films. They hack social media, the arts, fear, love and life.

Prof. Paul De Hert and Andrés Chomczyk Penedo (twitter account: @achomczyk)have published a blogpost on the Digital Services Act in the EU Law Analysis blog, edited by Prof. Steve Peers (twitter account: @StevePeers).

In December Laurence Diver published his monograph Digisprudence: Code as Law Rebooted with Edinburgh University Press.

The present news item is in Dutch. De eerste adaptatie van het sjabloon van het d.pia.lab voor een verslag van het proces van een gegevensbeschermingseffectbeoordeling (GEB) of, in het Engels, de data protection impact assessment (DPIA) is een feit.

[Books of the Year] As per tradition, every year the members of the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) are invited to reflect on the books that have influenced the most their (academic) lives and/or have been inspirational.  

A new study on biometrics & AI written by Gloria Fuster Gonzales and Michalina Nadola Peeters, titled 'Person identification, human rights and ethical principles: Rethinking biometrics in the era of artificial intelligence' has been published by the STOA.

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: The definition should be based on the key functional characteristics of the software of artificial...

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 d.pia.lab is pleased to announce that the Policy Brief No.

The French Embassy in Belgium, AI4Belgium and the VUB are joining forces to organize a conference examining the role of data governance in the fight against epidemics. Prof. Dr.

This one day workshop focuses on privacy preserving techniques for training, inference, and disclosure in large scale data analysis, both in the distributed and centralized settings.

In this lecture, she will reflect on what it means to develop legal norms to constrain the development, provision and deployment of computational systems. Legal norms are text-driven, whereas computational systems are driven by code and data.

     This year the Privacy Camp celebrates its 10 years of activity, and for its  10th edition invites for a forward-looking retrospective on the last decade of digital rights.

The Symposium 'Genome Editing, Health innovation, and Responsible Regulation' is held online by the Nordic Permed Law on 3&4 of November 2021. Anastasiya Kiseleva is presenting there on “Somatic Genome Editing with the Use of AI: Big Promises but Doubled Legal Issues”.

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.

Professor Paul De Hert together with Georgios Bouchagiar have published a Brussels Privacy Hub Working Paper on ' Facial recognition, visual and biometric data in the US. Recent, promising developments to regulate intrusive technologies ' (Vol. 7, No.

The European Data Protection Law Review published in their latest issue 3/2021 the paper of Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt 'Discrimination, Data-Driven AI Systems and Practical Reason'. To access the full paper, click here.

Irene Kamara won the Standards+Innovation Award in the category Individual Researcher/Innovator for her research in the field of cybersecurity, privacy, and technical standards. Kamara was nominated by NEN, the Dutch Standardisation Institute.