Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Staff Library, ANU College of Law, Building 7, Room 7.4.1.
6 Fellows Road, Acton, ACT, 2601
Contact
Event description
In this seminar, hosted by the ANU College of Law and the ANU Humanising Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge project, Professor Lee Bygrave (Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law - Law Faculty, University of Oslo) will present some of his recent work on "cognitive sovereignty" in a machine learning (ML) context. Human behaviour is increasingly governed by automated decisional systems based on ML and ‘Big Data’. While these systems promise a range of benefits, they also throw up a congeries of challenges, not least for our ability as humans to understand their logic and ramifications.
This seminar maps the basic mechanics of such systems, the concerns they raise, and the degree to which these concerns may be remedied by data protection law, particularly those provisions of the EU General Data Protection Regulation that specifically target automated decision-making.
Drawing upon the work of Ulrich Beck, the seminar employs the notion of ‘cognitive sovereignty’ to provide an overarching conceptual framing of the subject matter. Cognitive sovereignty essentially denotes our moral and legal interest in being able to comprehend our environs and ourselves. Focus on this interest fills a blind spot in scholarship and policy discourse on ML-enhanced decisional systems, and is vital for grounding claims for greater explicability of machine processes.
Please note that this is a hybrid event. If you are unable to attend in person, please register for the Zoom session and tune in to the seminar online.
Materials
Speakers
Featured Speakers
Lee A. Bygrave is a full professor at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law (NRCCL), attached to the Department of Private Law, University of Oslo. For the past three decades, Lee has been engaged in researching and developing regulatory policy for information and communications technology. He has functioned as expert advisor on technology regulation for numerous organisations, including the European Commission, Nordic Council of Ministers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and Norwegian government. He currently heads two major research projects at the NRCCL: VIROS (‘Vulnerability in the Robot Society’), which canvasses legal and ethical implications of AI-empowered robotics; and SIGNAL (‘Security in Internet Governance and Networks: Analysing the Law’), which studies transnational changes in the legal frameworks for security of critical internet infrastructure and cloud computing. Lee has published extensively within the field of data protection law where his two principal books on the subject – Data Protection Law: Approaching Its Rationale, Logic and Limits (Kluwer 2002) and Data Privacy Law: An International Perspective (Oxford University Press 2014) – are widely acknowledged as standard international texts. He has just completed co-editing and co-authoring a comprehensive article-by-article analysis of the EU General Data Protection Regulation – The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): A Commentary (Oxford University Press 2019). His other major publications concern the ways in which information concepts are (mis)understood and (mis)used in law (‘Information Concepts in Law: Generic Dreams and Definitional Daylight’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2015)), the use of contract as a tool for governing internet infrastructure (Internet Governance by Contract (Oxford University Press 2015)), and the emergence of ‘design-based’ regulatory techniques for integrating legal values into information systems architecture (‘Hardwiring Privacy’ in Brownsword et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation, and Technology (2017)).