LeADS – New MSCA ITN Project to Train Researchers Competent in Law and Data Science

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Pisa, January 2021 – LeADS, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks project launched in January 2021, will train 15 researchers competent in both law and data science. The project is funded under the European Commission’s H2020-MSCA-ITN programme.

The emergence of data science has raised a wide range of concerns regarding its compatibility with the law, creating the need for experts who combine a deep knowledge of both data science and legal matters. LeADS project will train early-stage researchers to become legality attentive data scientists (LeADS), the new interdisciplinary profession aiming to address the aforementioned need. These scientists will be experts in both data science and law, able to maintain innovative solutions within the realm of law and help expand the legal frontiers according to innovation needs. The project will create the theoretical framework and the practical implementation template of a common language for co-processing and joint-controlling basic notions for both data scientists and jurists.

LeADS consortium brings together 7 beneficiaries and 8 partners from across Europe and will run for 4 years (2021-2024). The project is coordinated by the International and Comparative Law Research Laboratory (LIDER-Lab) at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. The other beneficiaries are the following universities and research institutes: Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) Research Group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, The Interdiciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse at Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, the Civil Law Department and the Intellectual Property Law Institute at Jagiellonian University, the Department of Digital Systems at University of Piraeus, KDD-Lab at the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

The consortium also involves 8 non-academic partners that will support the practical, hands-on training part of the LeADS curriculum: The Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali), the Italian Competition Authority (Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato), Intel Corporation, Indra, Innovation Acts Ltd (Innov-Acts), BYTE COMPUTER S.A., Tellu, MMI S.p.A.

 

Contact details:

Veronica Virdis, LeADS Project Manager

pm@legalityattentivedatascientists.eu

 

The beginning of the LeADS era

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On January 1st 2021 LeADS (Legality Attentive Data Scientists) started its journey. A Consortium of 7 prominent European universities and research centres along with 6 important industrial partners and 2 Supervisory Authorities is exploring ways to create a new generation of LEgality Attentive Data Scientists while investigating the interplay between and across many sciences.

LeADS envisages a research and training programme that will blend ground-breaking applied research and pragmatic problem-solving from the involved industries, regulators, and policy makers. The skills produced by LeADS and tested by the ESR will be able to tackle the confusion created by the blurred borders between personal and commercial information and between personality and property rights typical of the big data environment. Both processes constitute a silent revolution—developed by new digital business models, industrial standards, and customs—that is already embedded in soft law instruments (such as stakeholders’ agreements) and emerging in case law and legislation (Regulation EU 2016/679 and the e-privacy directive to begin with), while data scientists are mostly unaware of them. They cut across the emergence of the Digital Transformation, and call for a more comprehensive and innovative regulatory framework. Against this background, LeADS is animated by the idea that in the digital economy data protection holds the keys for both protecting fundamental rights and fostering the kind of competition that will sustain the growth and “completion” of the “Digital Single Market” and the competitive ability of European businesses outside the EU. Under LeADS, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other EU rules will dictate the transnational standard for the global data economy while training researchers able to drive the process and set an example

The data economy or better way the data society we increasingly live is our explorative target under many angles (from the technological to the legal and ethics one). This new generation is needed to better answer to the challenges of the data economy and the unfolding of the digital transformation scoping. Our Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) will come from many experiences and backgrounds (law, computer science, economics, statistics, management, engineering, policy studies, and mathematics,..).

ESRs will find an enthusiastic transnational, interdisciplinary team of teams tackling the relevant issues from their many angles. Their research will be supported by these research teams in setting the theoretical framework and the practical implementation template of a common language.

LeADS research plan, although already envisages 15 specific topics to be interdisciplinary investigated, remain open-ended.

It is natural in the fields we have selected for which we identified crossover concepts in need of a common understanding of concepts useful for future researchers, policy makers, software developers, lawyers and market actors.

LeADS research strives to create, share cross disciplinary languages and integrate the respective background domain knowledge of its participants in one shared idiolect that it wants to share with a wider audience.

It is LeADS understanding that regulatory issues in data science and AI development and deployment are often perceived (and sometimes are) hurdles to innovation, markets and above all research. Our unwritten goal is to contribute to turn regulatory and ethical constraints which are needed in opportunities for better developments.

LADS aims at nurturing a data science capable of maintaining its innovative solutions within the borders of law – by design and by default – and of helping expand the legal frontiers in line with innovation needs, preventing the enactments of legal rules technologically unattainable.

By Giovanni Comandé