Collaborations

The CompuLaw project addresses the regulation of computations (processes and systems) through an innovative legal & technological framework: it provides epistemic, technical and normative guidance for the de-velopment of computable laws and law compliant computations.

The context is the ongoing transformation of the social world into a hybrid infosphere, populated by a huge and growing number of increasingly pervasive, autonomous and intelligent computational enti-ties. The scale, speed, ubiquity and autonomy of computations make it impossible for humans to di-rectly monitor them and anticipate all possible illegal computational behaviours. The law can hold the hybrid infosphere under its rule – providing protection, security and trust – only if it be-comes computation-oriented: legal and ethical requirements must be integrated with, mapped onto, and partially translated into, computable representations of legal knowledge and reasoning.

HEART (HEalth related Activity Recognition system based on IoT) is  an industrial PhD program structured in six individual research projects, closely interrelated, conducted by six excellent young researchers (four PhD students in ICT, one in Legal studies and one in International business). The final result of HEART will be the development of an integrated activity recognition platform for (personal) health services, addressing the above-mentioned challenges and able to successfully compete both in the European and Chinese market.

SHiELD (European Security in Health Data Exchange) will unlock the value of health data to European citizens and businesses by overcoming security and regulatory challenges that today prevent this data being exchanged with those who need it. This will make it possible to provide better health care to mobile citizens across European borders, and facilitate legitimate commercial uses of health data.

SHiELD will address these security and compliance challenges by i) providing models and analysis tools for automated identification of end-to-end security risks and compliance issues and supporting privacy and ‘by design’, ii) defining an open and extensible data exchange architecture based on epSOS, able to support security measures to address these risks, iii) developing security mechanisms to deal with new and emerging risks, such as inference attacks on sensitive data, and risks from relatively unprotected mobile edge devices, and iv) providing faster and more cost effective methods to verify and monitor compliance with multiple sets of applicable regulations;

The SHERPA (Shaping the ethical dimension of smart information systems) project will investigate, analyse and synthesise our understanding of the ways in which smart information systems (SIS; the combination of artificial intelligence and big data analytics) impact ethics and human rights issues. It will develop novel ways of understanding and addressing SIS challenges, evaluate with stakeholders, and advocate the most desirable and sustainable solutions.

SHERPA will: (1) represent and visualise the ethical and human rights challenges of SIS through case studies, scenarios and artistic representations, (2) work with a range of stakeholders to identify their concerns and preferred solutions (via interviews, a large-scale online survey, a Delphi study, a stakeholder board), (3) develop and publish a workbook on responsible development of SIS, (4) present technical and regulatory options (e.g. terms of reference for a regulator), (5) validate and prioritise the proposals through multi-stakeholder focus groups, and (6) advocate, promote and implement the most promising solutions through targeted dissemination and communication activities.