Archive for year: 2023

Early-Stage Researcher Soumia Zohra El Mestari attended the fifth AAAI/ACM conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES) hosted at Keble college, university of Oxford in the United Kingdom from August 1st to 3rd 2022.

Soumia applied and was selected to attend the doctoral programme that was organized by the conference. As part of the student programme, Soumia participated in various workshops along with PhD students from different disciplines namely: Ethics, Law, Philosophy, and computer science.

The participants took part in many group working sessions along with mentors who are distinguished scientists in their fields. The workshops were followed by lunch roundtables with mentors.

During the last day of the conference, Soumia presented her PhD work around the usage of Privacy Enhancing Technologies(PETs) in machine learning pipelines as a tool to achieve the EU vision of trustworthy AI systems.

She first began by discussing the various conceptions of privacy in the context of data driven solutions, the different threat points throughout the machine learning pipeline and how these threat points can be exploited to maintain strong privacy attacks that can not only lead to heavy leakage bills but also may be invisible to detect. Then, the presentation also discussed the various PETs used to mitigate those attacks along with the pros and cons of each mitigation strategy.

Finally, Soumia concluded her presentation by stressing on the fact that the effective identification of the threat points can be a key element to solve some of the privacy issues. However, solving some privacy issues may come at the cost of other trustworthiness elements such as fairness and transparency. Hence, building a trustworthy AI pipeline is a challenging task since the acceptable tradeoff between those trustworthiness elements remains hard to measure.

Early-Stage Researcher Qifan Yang (ESR 1) presented her work about personal data value and protection systems in the Symposium on Frontier of Smart Nomocracy jointly sponsored and hosted by the Journal of Xi’an Jiaotong University (Social Science), Journal of the East China University of Politics & Law, SJTU Law Review, and Journal of Cyber and Information Law in Xi’an (China) on the 12th-13th of November.

As a part of the panel “Data Property Rights and Data Trading System”, she analyzed the value distributions of personal information among different subjects and across various transaction parties in the data collection, processing, and analysis process from the perspectives of communication and information economics.

Unlike ordinary trading objects, data has both basic use value “information collection” (eliminating the information asymmetry between the parties in the transaction) and potential use value “data analysis and prediction”. Personal data have little use value for information producers but have exchange value for other parties in the transaction to achieve information symmetry or expand the advantages of information asymmetry. Other available data in the market have basic use value for individual users to obtain information, but it is difficult to generate exchange value through individual collection or analysis because of its openness and accessibility. The company or platform can realize both the basic value and the potential value through data aggregation, data fusion, etc.

On the 3rd-4th of December, ESR1 Qifan Yang’s research “Personal Data Wavering between Privacy and Efficiency: Is Propertization a Good Answer?” won the third prize at the China Economic Law Annual Conference organized by China Economic Law Society in Wuhan (China). It illustrated the causes for de facto property rights in personal data, the attribution of de facto property rights in the free market, and its endogenous flaws through the Coase theorem and property theory based on law and economics.

ESR Fatma Sümeyra Doğan attended a conference workshop held in Copenhagen on 11th December 2022 titled: Towards Health Futures: Innovating with Health Data as part of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). The program had three parts and the first part started with two presentations from professionals who working on health data. The first presentation was given by Katharina Lauer from COVID-19 Data Portal by the ELIXIR project. In her presentation, we received insights about challenges they faced during the pandemic, for instance, lack of standardization and different interpretation of law across data-sharing infrastructures. The second presentation was given by Nikolas Molyndris from Decentriq which is a newly founded company to enable secure data connections between different partners by using privacy-enhancing technologies such as confidential computing and federated learning.

The program continued with the panel session with esteemed scholars Elizabeth J. Davidson, Katharina Lauer, Silvia Masiero, Aleksi Aaltonen and Daniel Fürstenau in moderation of Hannes Rothe. During the panel session discussion continued around the different aspects of health data in numerous disciplines. Aleksi Aaltonen pointed out that clinicians’ main focus is on the treatment of the patients however, we should shift our focus also to data collection and interpretation as this will benefit us more in the future so clinicians should be educated in this manner. Silvia Masiero mentioned that from health data, we can learn about society as well as the patient. In this sense, being discriminated against while receiving health services will also have a secondary effect. She also talked about this concept, which she defines as data injustice, and that we need to make efforts to reduce this effect. Katharina Lauer remarked on the different layers of health data and a novel area called ‘planetary health’ which we will be hearing more about in the future as a result of climate change and migrations due to these changes. Elizabeth J. Davidson referred that health data is integrated into every part of human existence and thus has enormous importance. In this regard, while technology is advancing and sharing data is getting easier day by day, hesitations around sharing must be evaluated carefully. Daniel Fürstenau flagged up the inconstant nature of health data and this feature must not be disregarded while collecting and processing health data.

After the panel session, Fatma presented her work in the roundtable session. Her study titled: Secondary Use of Health Data: A Comparative Analysis of GDPR and European Health Data Space. She focused on provisions of secondary use in the European Health Data Space and how these provisions will interplay with GDPR and made a comparison of the two legislations. Her starting point was as being a newly introduced term, how should we interpret the secondary use under GDPR and EHDS proposal. The fact that even EHDS does not offer us a definition was the main point of her discussion and she received valuable feedback after her presentation from the other participants of the roundtable.