Video-based technology can be of great help in the care of older adults, but at the same time raises several questions of a legal nature. At SU Law, two PhD students are currently studying these issues within the framework of an EU major research program.

The VisuAAL project, funded by the European Commission, aims to raise awareness and understanding of how video-based technologies can make care of older adults more effective, in the hope of bridging the gap between users’ demands for personal privacy and functionally useful digital care (AAL technologies). This is a highly topical issue, given that the life expectancy of Europe’s population is constantly increasing – as are the costs of caring for them.

Through deeper insight into ethical, legal, privacy and societal issues, VisuAAL hopes that the existing concerns about a “Big Brother” society, where recorded material will be stored and used by unauthorized people for the wrong purpose, can be mitigated and that the benefits of AAL technology can be realized.

A total of 15 doctoral students in various disciplines are funded by VisuAAL, two of them at the Department of Law, Stockholm University, where they are most closely associated with the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute. Professor Peter Wahlgren and Associate Professor Liane Colonna are the Principal Investigators of the project, meaning that in addition to managing the day-to-day activities of the project, including all of the deliverables, they were responsible for writing the grant application and negotiating the contract that made it possible to accept the two doctoral students in the spring of 2021.

–  We are very pleased to have Zhicheng He and Maksymilian Kuzmicz as PhD students at the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute. Their projects address important issues that are highly relevant at a time when AI-based technologies like computer vision are becoming more prevalent in society, says Liane Colonna.

Studying the legal framework for health data management

Zhicheng He is a native of China. His PhD project “Video-based AAL technologies and colliding legal frameworks” involves a comparative legal study between the EU and Chinese legal framework on how health data may be collected, stored and analyzed in the context of using digital technologies in assisted living facilities. He says it is an urgent topic because mapping the complex legal framework surrounding this area can help us better exploit and enjoy the benefits of emerging IT technologies;

–  In recent years, I have witnessed the enormous potential of new IT technologies in the healthcare field, both in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and in addressing healthcare issues related to the visuAAL project. All of these advances are heavily dependent on the processing of health data, and I therefore believe that this topic is extremely important.

So far, Zhicheng has presented his research in VisuAAL at four international conferences. In 2022, he published a part of his research in a paper (“Privacy-enhancing Technologies for Active and Assisted Living: What Does the GDPR Say?“) for which he also received the “Best Workshop Student Paper Award” in PETRA 2022. Now he is looking forward to attending the upcoming VisuAAL PhD conference organized by the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute at Stockholm University in April.

Benefiting from senior and junior researchers

–  I really enjoy the free, equal and open research atmosphere at Stockholm University.  Stockholm University provides very good support for PhD students, which has been very helpful for my research.  I am also very glad to be affiliated with IRI. In my opinion, IRI offers new perspectives to legal research. Researchers here are conducting forward-looking and cutting-edge research with an international outlook.  As a lover of law and IT, I feel at home at IRI, says Zhicheng.

Being part of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Innovative Training Network (ITN) also offers great benefits, says Zhicheng. VisuAAL provides training, courses and workshops on scientific and complementary skills relevant to the different PhD projects within the network.

– VisuAAL is highly international, with a well-structured training program for PhD students, including great opportunities for international exchange. VisuAAL is also very interdisciplinary. We have great supervisors and researchers from various fields, such as legal, computer science, and social science.  All members of visuAAL are experts in their respective fields. I have learned a lot from them, says Zhicheng.

Examines how the law should balance interests

Doctoral student Maksymilian Kuzmicz‘s project titled “Video-based AAL technologies and balancing of interests” has the overall aim of examining how the law should balance interests in the context of video-based technologies in digital health care. Broadly speaking, this involves balancing an individual’s right to privacy with the benefits of providing care remotely, for example via video meetings. Like Zhicheng, he says that being part of VisuAAL is an advantage when studying these issues.

–  Being Maria Skłodowska-Curie Fellow gives me network of people working on the same problem but from perspective of different sciences. That allows me to understand the issue better, and conduct interdisciplinary research. That aspect of dialogue is vital for me. That’s also a reason why I appreciate participating in scientific conferences says Maksymilian and continues; 

–  For example, now in March I was attending at CSUN Assistive Technologies Conference, which is the biggest assistive technologies event in the US. Presenting my papers gives me the possibility to inspire and be inspired, discuss and broaden my horizons. Doing a PhD has really given me an opportunity to grow as a person and researcher – at the same time, I can work on issues relevant for the current world.

MORE ABOUT VISUAAL

The VisuAAL research projects are expected to last until spring 2025. Results in the form of articles and participation in conferences are regularly presented on the website:www.visuaal-itn.eu/

Source: VisuAAL-projects at SU Law examine legal aspects of AAL technologies – Department of Law

The Quest for Scientific Methods: Sociology of Law, Jurimetrics and Legal Informatics, by IRI’s Director Peter Wahlgren, is available at Bloomsbury Collections – Combining the Legal and the Social in Sociology of Law – An Homage to Reza Banakar

The article is included in
Combining the Legal and the Social in Sociology of Law
An Homage to Reza Banakar
Håkan Hydén, Roger Cotterrell, David Nelken and Ulrike Schultz (eds)
Bloomsbury, 2023

The notion of intelligence remains intriguing to researchers and practitioners, yet still somewhat mysterious. After over a century of research into the topic, there is still no widely accepted definition. Many say that intelligence is the ability to solve problems, but exactly what problems do they have in mind? Is it the ability to collect reward in Markov decision processes, determine truth in first-order arithmetic, find patterns in progressive matrices, or something else? Could it be argued that some problems are more natural than others in this context?

According to evolutionary theory, animal intelligence, including human intelligence, evolved in response to demands for problem-solving in nature. Moreover, natural selection favors the genes of animals that can reproduce in a relatively broad class of ecosystems. To be able to reproduce, animals must solve a continuous stream of problems during their lives, e.g., finding food, avoiding predators, mating, and parenting. This suggests that human intelligence primarily evolved for solving everyday problems related to survival in ecosystems ranging from the tropics to the polar regions.

Artificial Intelligence started as an attempt to reproduce parts of human intelligence in machines and, like the notion of intelligence, it suffers from or enjoys a certain vagueness regarding its definition, targeted problems, performance measures, and relations to neighboring research fields.

Today, AI researchers are increasingly focusing on generality. They build systems that can translate between many languages, play many games, manipulate many objects, predict many video frames, and diagnose many diseases. They design autonomous cars that can drive in many cities, dialogue systems that can answer many questions, and robots that can navigate many homes. They want their systems to learn quickly, generalize well, and never stop learning.

Since 2008, the Artificial General Intelligence Society has organized annual conferences on the AI topic. The 16th AGI conference (AGI-23), will be held as a mixed virtual/F2F event in Stockholm, Sweden on June 16 – 19, 2023.

Source and more information: https://agi-conf.org/2023/

The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm has grown to become one of Europe’s leading technical and engineering universities, as well as a key centre of intellectual talent and innovation. The School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH has currently an open position as Postdoc in (Socio)legal studies of technology/Human-Computer-Interaction. Last application date is Feb 15, 2023.

Source and more information: Postdoc in (Socio)legal studies of technology/ Human-Computer Interaction (varbi.com)

The leading topic of IRI§23 is: Legal Informatics as a Legal Methodology Science

The survey clearly showed: In 2023 it should be Salzburg again when (hopefully!) the end of the pandemic, after 2020 – with stomach ache and courage – „the IRIS“ could just be carried out on site. IRI$23 is not forgetting the online friends though, there will be streams of all (most) sessions with lots of opportunities to get involved via chats, Q&As, etc. The team of the Legal Informatics working group, Juridicum, University of Vienna, is working on solutions, also in cooperation with ReMeP and Weblaw.

Source and more information: https://iris-conferences.eu/iris23_22-25feb23

The 37th Nordic Conference on Law and Information Technology runs under the theme of “Humans, data and law: tectonic plates in motion“.

Over recent times, the European regulatory landscape has experienced several quakes with proposals such as the Digital Services Act, Digital Market Act, Data Governance Act, Data Act, Artificial Intelligence Act as well as other soft-law initiatives, attempting to adjust to the fast-paced developments in our digital society.

Time to take a step back and take a look: how are the tectonic plates of Law and Information Technology moving in the 2020s? What is their interplay, what are common issues, what are common solutions? What is a Nordic perspective? And also: how should our legal education reflect the new technological world?

Welcome to Copenhagen from 31 October to 2 November 2022. More information will be added to the conference website soon: http://jura.ku.dk/ciir/nclit2022

AI and Law is an IRI project funded by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program– Humanities and Society (WASP-HS). The ambition is to strengthen and ensure a logical development of an international research environment of excellent quality, able to operate at the forefront of AI and ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Social Impact) research. More information about and the IRI project here.

Read more about the Wallenberg programmes and the network meeting:
DDLS
WASP-HS
Networking meeting between the Wallenberg programs Data-driven Life Science (DDLS) and WASP-HS – SciLifeLab

Stanley Greenstein recently published a short piece on Verfassungsblog entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence, Human Flourishing and The Rule of Law’. The piece can be accessed here: https://verfassungsblog.de/roa-human-flourishing/

The article belongs to the debate » The Rule of Law versus the Rule of the Algorithm

The 35th Nordic Conference on Law and Information Technology was held in Stockholm, 11–12 November 2020. As on previous occasions, The Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI) had the privilege of arranging the conference in conjunction with The Foundation for Legal Information (Stiftelsen för rättsinformation) and The Swedish Society.

The overall title of the conference was Law in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. The main theme was how an increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is influencing the meaning of previously established legal concepts not yet adapted to a society increasingly reliant on AI. In this respect, the conference was divided up into four sessions each focusing on a selected aspect, namely, session 1 on Data Protection, session 2 on Transparency, session 3 on Liability and finally session 4 on Regulation.

Read or download a full version of the Nordic Yearbook below.

Digital Futures postdoc fellowships aim to support talented early-career researchers in pursuing their research ideas in a new research group and institution. The programme of funding aims to provide networking opportunities and career development which will boost successful postdoc fellows’ future careers. The call targets applicants who have recently completed or who soon will complete their doctorate degree (between September 2019 and September 2022). It is a mobility program with an emphasis on early career researchers moving to a new institution to continue their research.

Source and more information: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/research-calls/open-calls/open-call-up-to-six-postdoc-fellows-in-technologies-for-digital-transformation/

Contact at IRI: Liane Colonna Liane.Colonna@juridicum.su.se

Stiftelsen för Rättsinformations årliga konferens tar denna gång avstamp i rättsinformationen, den nya tekniken, specifikt kraftfulla språkmodeller, och digitaliseringens inverkan och användning på densamma. Genom inspel från och panelsamtal med experter inom såväl juridikens, etikens och teknikens områden riktas blickarna framåt i den alltmer automatiserade och digitala vardagen där inspel rörande såväl etik som teknik relateras till rättsinformationen och dess utmaningar, möjligheter och hinder i det framtida Sverige.

När: Torsdag 11/11 kl 09.00-16.30
Var: Hörsalen, Kungliga Biblioteket, Humlegårdsgatan 26

Källa och mer information: https://rattsinfo.se/konferenser/

The Department of Law, Stockholm University, announces a position as a doctoral candidate in law with a focus on public international law and labour law with special emphasis on artificial intelligence. The position is part of the initiative “The Wallenberg Artificial Intelligence Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society” (WASP-HS) PhD in Society.

Deadline for applications: 30^th October 2021.

Source and more information: https://www.su.se/english/about-the-university/work-at-su/available-jobs/phd-student-positions-1.507588?rmpage=job&rmjob=16045&rmlang=UK

Natural language models are a technology associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that are increasingly being used within society to perform various tasks. While traditional tasks include spelling auto-correct, audio-to-text conversion, speech recognition and machine translation, the models are becoming increasingly powerful and their sphere of operation increasingly wider. These models are able to identify patterns and hidden insights in data sets too large for humans to manage. While these models can be put to good uses, such as extracting insights from health data, in the wrong hands or used for unintended purposes, they potentially also pose a danger to society.

This seminar is arranged by the DHV-hub at Stockholm University. The DHV seminars are inter-disciplinary in nature, and are open to all scholars interested in digital artefacts and environments and their significance for society and humanity.

Date and time: 28th October 2021, 10:00-12:00, Online

Source and more information: https://su.powerinit.com/Modules/Campaign/Newsletter.aspx?n=16884&e=stanley.greenstein@juridicum.su.se&r=1767695&h=28F01931E0E0BAD8C8FA43BDFB0A6B04

IRI:s co-worker Stanley Greenstein will talk at Stockholm Explorative Talks On-stage on Sep 23 at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm
(The Royal Hall). The event brings together scholars from different disciplines, representing all the 18 universities of Stockholm.

The 18 scholars – who we call The Explorers – will engage each other in an interaction that will see them exchange interdisciplinary perspectives on present issues confronting the planet.

This year’s curators, Gustav Borgefalk and Elisabeth Ericson, will steer an exploration of the theme, ‘Challenges’, which will try to locate new intersectional ideas and insights in the conversations happening on stage. 

To make the discussion freewheeling and encourage spontaneous ideas, The Explorers come totally unrehearsed and meet each other for the first time on stage!

Source and more information: https://staforum.se/en/event-item/stockholm-explorative-talks-on-stage/

The XXXVI Nordic Conference in Law and IT will be hosted by the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law on November 9-10, 2021, at Hotel Bristol in Oslo, Norway.

The conference will be devoted to the overarching themes of security, risk management, and rule of law. It will be held in conjunction with the final conference of the research project ‘Security in Internet Governance and Networks: Analysing the Law’ (SIGNAL), funded by the Research Council of Norway and UNINETT Norid AS.

The overarching themes of the conference have long been integral elements of regulatory discourse on the interaction of law and technology. However, the ongoing pandemic has elevated their prominence in the minds of regulators and the general public. Hence, it is pertinent to consider key recent and ongoing developments in their regulatory manifestations — also in light of responses to the pandemic.

Source and more information: https://www.jus.uio.no/ifp/om/organisasjon/seri/arrangementer/2021/xxxvi-nordic-conference-on-law-and-information-tec.html

Hur samverkan sker mellan olika IT-system för hälso- och sjukvård samt omsorg är av stor betydelse för effektiviteten och kvaliteten i dessa verksamheter och inte minst för enskilda medborgare. Även om digitaliseringen inom dessa områden har kommit långt i Sverige, är det inte alltid klart vad som gäller beträffande informationsutbytet mellan olika aktörer inom vården från en juridisk utgångspunkt. Det är angeläget att data kan utbytas i så stor utsträckning som möjligt inom rättsliga ramar, så att enskilda kan få den vård och omsorg som behövs samtidigt som ett fullgott integritetsskydd kan upprätthållas. Vem kontrollerar data i detta informationsflöde och i vilken utsträckning kan uppgifter delas mellan berörda aktörer? 

Inom DISVO-projektet, gjordes en inventering av problem och möjligheter med sikte på hur tekniska, organisatoriska och rättsliga infrastrukturer samverkar vid vård och omsorg som har digitala förtecken.

Projektet leddes av Uno Fors, professor i data- och systemvetenskap, Institutionen för data- och systemvetenskap och Cecilia Magnusson Sjöberg, professor i rättsinformatik, Juridiska institutionen, Stockholms universitet. I projektet ingick även Katarina Fast Lappalainen från Juridiska institutionen och Martin Henkel och Erik Perjons från institutionen för data- och systemvetenskap. Projektet finansierades av Region Stockholm och Stockholms stad och har utmynnat i nedan rapport.

IRI’s Director, Professor Peter Wahlgren chair a round table discussion on “Low-code / no-code in practice” at the legal informatics conference ReMeP 2021  – Where Research Meets Practice! on September 7.

About the Conference – ReMeP 2021 Legal IT Conference in Vienna

Juris-informatics is a new research area that studies legal issues from the perspective of informatics. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss both the fundamental and practical issues among people from various backgrounds such as law, social science, information and intelligent technology, logic and philosophy, including the conventional “AI and law” area. JURISIN solicit unpublished papers on theories, technologies, and applications on juris-informatics.

Time and place: November 14 – 15, 2021, Raiosha Building, Keio University Kanagawa, Japan (or online)

Source and more information: https://www.kl.itc.nagoya-u.ac.jp/jurisin2021/