2-9 December 2024

Jan De Bruyne is professor IT law at the KU Leuven and Head of the Centre for IT & IP Law (CiTiP). During his stay at ENS, he will focus on two ongoing (research) projects. On the one hand, he aims to finalize an article on the liability for damage involving AI. He will especially assess whether the AI Liability Directive proposal should be relaunched, taking into account the ‘tort law reality’ in which the proposal has to operate. He will thereby assess the remaining challenges to come to harmonized rules on AI liability and provide some recommendations to remedy existing gaps. The stay will allow him to connect with Professor Hacker who has also been working on liability for damage involving AI in various articles and reports.

In addition to working on this article, Jan De Bruyne will also continue to work on the requirement of transparency under the AI Act, and more specifically on presenting the result following the  policy prototyping assessment conducted by the Knowledge Centre Data & Society. Policy prototyping refers to a novel way of rulemaking, comparable to product or beta testing. By employing a prototyping approach, policymakers and stakeholders can create tangible and practical prototypes of proposed policies, allowing them to test and refine the policy measures before full-scale implementation. 

8-15 July 2024

Seth Masket is a professor of political science and the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. He is the author of Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020 (Cambridge, 2020), The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy (Oxford, 2016), and No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures (Michigan, 2009), as well as a co-author of a recent textbook on political parties. He studies political parties, campaigns and elections, and state legislatures. He contributes regularly at Politico, Mischiefs of Faction, and the Denver Post. He is currently working on a book project examining the Republican Party’s interpretations of the 2020 election and its preparations for 2024.

During his stay at ENS, he was hosted by the Chair for Digital Democracy (Prof. Ulrike Klinger and Dr. Mike Cowburn).

8-14 July 2024

Lilian Edwards is a Scottish UK-based academic and frequent speaker on issues of Internet law, intellectual property and artificial intelligence. She is on the Advisory Board of the Open Rights Group and the Foundation for Information Policy Research and is the Professor of Law, Innovation and Society at Newcastle Law School at Newcastle University.

She worked at the University of Strathclyde from 1986 to 1988 and the University of Edinburgh from 1989 to 2006. She became Chair of Internet Law at the University of Southampton from 2006 to 2008, and then Professor of Internet Law at the University of Sheffield until late 2010, when she returned to Scotland to become Professor of E-Governance at the University of Strathclyde, while retaining close links with the renamed SCRIPT (AHRC Centre) at the University of Edinburgh. She resigned from that role in 2018 to take up a new Chair in Law, Innovation and Society at Newcastle University. She was part seconded for 2021-2022 to the Ada Lovelace Institute to lead their work on the proposed EU AI Regulation.

During her stay at ENS, she was hosted by Prof. Philipp Hacker at the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

[Picture source: Newcastle University]

10-30 June 2024

Jean-Christophe Boucher is an Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy and at the department of political science at the University of Calgary. His current work focuses on applied machine learning to understand how the digital world shapes our society. He is currently responsible for projects funded by the Department of National Defence (DND) to study information operations; the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to understand civil-military relations in Canada; and holds grants from Alberta Innovates and the Vaccine Confidence Fund, and Merck to study vaccine hesitancy on social media to develop better communications strategies and tools to increase vaccine uptake. He holds a BA in History from the University of Ottawa, a MA in Philosophy from the Université de Montréal and a PhD in Political Science from Université Laval. He specializes in international relations, with an emphasis on foreign policy, international security, and data analytics.

During his stay at ENS, he was hosted by Prof. Ulrike Klinger at the Chair for Digital Democracy.

1 May - 31 July 2024

Jeremias' research focuses on technology, innovation policy, and the future of work in the European Union and beyond. He is a Fellow of Magdalen College. Jeremias read law at Oxford, Paris, and Harvard Law School, and has held visiting teaching and/or research positions at institutions including Hong Kong University, the Max Planck Institute Hamburg, Renmin Law School Beijing, University College London, the University of Vienna, and Yale Law School.

At ENS, he was working on a book project exploring novel forms of algorithmic contestation - moving beyond traditions of the ‘human in the loop’ to ensure meaningful scrutiny, and thus legitimacy, of automated decision-making systems, and exchanged with researchers working in associated fields. He was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker, Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

2 - 27 June 2024

danah boyd is a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and society. She is working on a book about the US census, exploring how infrastructural data are made - and how they are made legitimate. She received her Ph.D in Information from the University of California, Berkeley and founded Data & Society. Her previous work explores topics ranging from algorithmic manipulation to kids' social media practices.

During her time at ENS, danah was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker. Her project explored privacy in a networked world. She was also toying with ideas related to sociotechnical degradation.

18 - 25 June 2024

Paula Bialski is an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland. She is an ethnographer of digital technologies, looking at contexts of usage as well as production, and she frames her research within science and technology studies in particular.

Her new book “Middle Tech: software work and the culture of ‘good enough’ is an ethnography about how a collective group of people working at a run-of-the-mill corporate tech company collaborate, communicate, care, and compromise in order to make software work.

At ENS, she was seeking to connect to others who look at software maintenance and repair. She is also a musician and songwriter with the band Paula & Karol and published 5 studio albums. 

3-4 June 2024

Orla Lynskey is an Associate Professor at LSE Law School and a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe, Bruges. She will take up a Chair of Law and Technology at University College London Faculty of Laws in September 2024.  She is joint Editor-in-Chief of International Data Privacy Law, a Privacy Law Scholars Committee programme committee member and on the Editorial Committee of the Modern Law Review. Her research focuses on EU Digital Law and Policy, with a particular focus on data protection, data governance and regulatory theory. Her most recent article in the Iowa Law Review (co-authored with Professor Michal Gal) examines the legal implications of synthetic data. 

During her fellowship at ENS, Orla continued to work on two projects: an article on 'Governing the Data Commons' and a collaborative research project on the Preservation of Public Values in Privatised Digital Systems. 

2 June – 10 June 2024

Nora Ni Loideain is Senior Lecturer in Law and Director of the Information Law & Policy Centre at IALS. Her research focuses on European human rights law, EU law, and technology regulation, particularly within the contexts of privacy and data protection. She is also an appointed member of the UK Home Office Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group (BFEG). This group provides independent expert advice on the ethics and law underpinning biometrics and forensics policy development for public security and law enforcement in the UK. In 2024, she was co-author of a policy report on the use and regulation of AI-based systems in law enforcement published by the Alan Turing Institute: ‘The Future of Biometric Technology for Policing and Law Enforcement.’

During her stay at ENS, she examined the regulation of AI-based biometric systems in the EU and the UK within the context of law enforcement and the role of the right to private life as enshrined in the EU and ECHR legal orders. This doctrinal and comparative analysis focuses particularly on the EU AI Act and the Article 8 ECHR case law of the European Court of Human Rights. She was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker, Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

20 May - 02 June 2024

Mykola Makhortykh is an Alfred Landecker lecturer at the Institute of Communication and Media Science. In his research, Mykola focuses on politics- and history-centered information behavior in online environments and how it is affected by information retrieval systems and AI.

During his fellowship, he focused on the representation of mass violence by generative AI systems and the degree to which it is subjected to different forms of social bias. Specifically, he continued working with Professor Miglė Bareikytė on their project on the entanglement between AI-driven datafication, war representation and propaganda.

06 May - 02 June 2024

Domingos Soares Farinho is currently researching for a book/ series of papers on EU Digital Regulation. One of his research topics is the interaction between AI law and technical aspects that influence legal regulatory interventions, such as

• the influence of legal interpretation theories on the definition of criteria for defining the data set for AI models,
• the regulation of different AI models and the impact on the design of legal powers of public authorities and
• the scope and reach of regulatory interventions to correct biases. 

During his stay at ENS, he focused on the interaction between the DSA and the AI Act, especially concerning algorithmic content moderation in the context of collaborative co-regulation. He was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker at the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

08-27 April 2024

Siarhei Liubimau is Associate Professor and Lead of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism at the European Humanities University in Vilnius. He explores through the infrastructure lens the relations between digital platforms (both big commercial and bottom-up civic tech), everyday, and non-democratic politics. His project at ENS looks at the quantitative and qualitative aspects of Instagram usage in Belarus and Venezuela from the perspective of repressive measures taken by both states in the digital sphere. 

Siarhei was hosted by Professor Migle Bareikyte, with whom he co-organized the DAAD Summer School “Platformization, Digital Disinformation and Non-Democratic Politics: Belarus in Comparative Perspective” in July 2024 at the EHU in Vilnius.

01 October 2023 - 31 March 2024

Julia Reinhardt works on governance of Artificial Intelligence and the practical implementation of the upcoming European AI Act by small AI businesses and startups. As a Fellow at ENS and hosted by AI Campus Berlin, she conducts interviews with AI engineers and connects them with digital civil society. She is also a certified auditor for algorithms and autonomous systems and a certified privacy professional as well as a former diplomat.

At ENS, she was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker of the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

[Photo Credits: Stefanie Loos]

01 October 2023 - 31 March 2024

Paul Trauttmansdorff has recently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies at the University of Bologna. He has previously completed his PhD at the Department for Science & Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. His research has explored how imaginations of future borders become incorporated into the construction of large-scale databases.

During his fellowship, Paul was hosted by Professor Jan-Hendrik Passoth at the Chair for Sociology of Technology. His research focuses primarily on the concept of interoperability between biometric data, its controversial political character and history, as well as its projected hopes and promises in the governance of mobilities.

22 August - 5 September 2023

Professor Sarah Hammer is Executive Director at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, leading financial technology initiatives and Wharton Cypher Accelerator, which supports leading global businesses that are leveraging financial technology. Hammer is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Affiliated Scholar at the Penn Program on Regulation.

Sarah Hammer is a board member of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) at the United Nations.  Previously, she was Managing Director of the Center for Innovation in Finance and Senior Director of the Alternative Investments Program at Wharton. Hammer earned a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, an M.B.A. from the Wharton School, and a Master of Studies from Oxford University.

During her visit to ENS, Hammer studied applications and legal issues related to artificial intelligence in financial services, including banking and asset management.

17 - 21 July 2023

Professor Theriault is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently researching the effect of interpersonal relationships within the U.S. Congress. 

Professor Theriault has published five books: Congress: The First Branch (with Mickey Edwards; Oxford University Press, 2020), The Great Broadening (with Bryan Jones and Michelle Whyman; University of Chicago Press, 2019), The Gingrich Senators (Oxford University Press, 2013), Party Polarization in Congress (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and The Power of the People (Ohio State University Press, 2005). He has also published numerous articles in a variety of journals on subjects ranging from presidential rhetoric to congressional careers and the Louisiana Purchase to the Pendleton Act of 1883.

While in residence at ENS, he worked on two different projects. First, he continued his research into measuring the social relationships in the U.S. Senate as a step toward determining if they can help the institution solve problems even in an era of party polarization. Second, he worked with his former student, Mike Cowburn, a postdoctoral researcher at ENS, on a project that evaluates how primaries have contributed to party polarization in Congress. He was the guest of Professor Ulrike Klinger.

01 - 31 July 2023

Daniel Kreiss is the Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a principal researcher of the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Kreiss is the co-author of Power in Ideas: A Case-Based Argument for Taking Ideas Seriously in Political Communication Research (2021, Cambridge University Press), first author of Recoding the Boys’ Club: The Experiences and Future of Women in Political Technology (Oxford University Press, 2020), and author of Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012). Kreiss co-edits the Oxford University Press book series Journalism and Political Communication Unbound and is an associate editor of Political Communication. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University.

As a Visiting Professor at ENS, Daniel worked to co-organize an internationally attended symposium and workshop on theorizing the far-right in the areas of digital studies, media studies and political communication. Daniel is interested in foregrounding questions of power, social difference, democracy, and inequality in the study of political communication. He was hosted by Professor Ulrike Klinger at the Chair for Digital Democracy.

01 - 31 July 2023

Sarah Jackson is a Presidential Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Co-Director of the Center for Media, Inequality & Change. Her work considers how media, journalism and technology are used by and represent marginalized publics, with a focus on how communication arising from Black, feminist, and activist spaces contributes to U.S. culture and politics. She is the author of Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press (2014), co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (2020) and is currently working on Carnegie-supported research that traces the power and innovation of African-American media-makers.

As a Visiting Professor at ENS, she worked to co-organize an internationally attended symposium and workshop on theorizing the far-right in the areas of digital studies, media studies and political communication. She is concerned with pushing the field forward on conceptual and ethical problems raised by relying on theories from the margins to study groups working to entrench antidemocratic relations of power. She was hosted by Professor Ulrike Klinger at the Chair for Digital Democracy.

26 June - 28 July 2023

Jens Frankenreiter works and teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is an Associate Professor of Law. Jens’ research utilizes empirical methods to study the intersection of business law, contract law, and comparative law. He is particularly interested in the changes that globalization and new technologies visit upon these fields. His work draws on methods from economics, statistics, and data science to improve our understanding of contracting, private and public lawmaking, and legal institutions. A particular focus of his work is on the use of large amounts of texts and other forms of big data.

He was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker at the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

23 June - 7 July 2023

Dora Kaufman is Professor of social and ethical impacts of AI at the Intelligence Technologies and Digital Design Program at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil. She also writes as a columnist for the Época Negócios Magazine (Globo Group) and for major media such as Globo, Valor Econômico and Folha de São Paulo. Moreover, she is involved in elaborating the AI regulatory framework in Brazil, author of several books, including "Will Artificial Intelligence Overtake Human Intelligence?" (2019) and "Demystifying Artificial Intelligence" (2022). Her current research focuses on developing AI governance, AI guidelines, AI code of conduct and an AI ethics committee for organizations in Brazil.

As a Visiting Professor at ENS, she worked on a comparative study of European AI regulation (AI Act) and Brazilian AI regulation concerning similarities and differences in processes and content. She was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker at the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

1 June - 15 June 2023 | 1 July - 7 July 2023

Sandra Wachter is Professor of Technology and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she researches the legal and ethical implications of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as internet and platform regulation. Her current research focuses on profiling, inferential analytics, explainable AI, algorithmic bias, diversity, and fairness, as well as governmental surveillance, predictive policing, human rights online, and health tech and medical law.

As a Visiting Professor at ENS, she conducted ciritical studies on important technological issues around privacy, algorithmic decision-making, automated fairness and bias. She also has a strong focus on providing concrete solutions to enable better governance of emerging technologies. She was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker at the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

1 June - 7 July 2023

Professor Brent Mittelstadt is Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford where he co-leads the Governance of Emerging Technologies (GET) research program, working across ethics, law and emerging information technologies. His prior work has addressed the ethics of algorithms, AI, and Big Data; fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning; data protection and non-discrimination law; group privacy; ethical auditing of automated systems; and digital epidemiology and public health ethics.

As a Visiting Professor at ENS, he analyzed the effectiveness of technical and organisational accountability tools for trustworthy AI as well as the feasibility of future professional liability regimes for developers. He was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker at the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

12 - 19 June 2023

Stefan Eich is Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University where he researches the political theory of money and the politics of financial capitalism. He is the 2022/23 Richard B. Fisher Member at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton. He has written about the history and politics of digital money, global monetary reform, economic democracy, and climate finance. Eich is the author of The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 APSA Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Prize. 

As a Visiting Professor at ENS, he worked on the politics of the “de-risking state” by investigating the underlying concept of risk that has emerged as a central category of contemporary governance from climate finance to the regulation of new technologies. This forms part of a larger project on John Maynard Keynes and the politics of uncertainty. He was hosted by Professor Philipp Hacker at the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society.

1 April - 30 June 2023

Alla Kozhyna is Doctor of Science in Public Administration and Professor of the Department of Public Management and Administration at the National Aviation University in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Her current research focus is on digitalization in public spheres and digital inclusion as a challenge for European societies and governments, including the improvement of digital literacy for public servants and the influence of digital technologies on the quality of life of vulnerable and marginalized populations.

As a Visiting Professor at ENS, she worked on a comparative study of European countries with the aim to strenghten German-Polish-Ukrainian scientific cooperation. She was hosted by Professor Jan-Hendrik Passoth at the Chair for Sociology of Technology.

Check out the interview about her stay at ENS on the Viadrina website.

19 September 2022 - 10 February 2023

Professor Robert Geisler is doctor habilitated in sociology, Associate Professor in Governance and Public Policy at the University of Opole, Poland and expert evaluator in the EU funding program Horizon 2020. In recent years, he has been involved in a number of research projects in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation, networked organizations, organizational culture, business ethnography and big data analysis.

As a Visiting Professor at ENS, he analyzed sharing economy case studies as examples of digital entrepreneurship in the EU. He was hosted by Professor Jan-Hendrik Passoth at the Chair for Sociology of Technology.

18 July - 17 October 2022

Justyna Stypinska has recently worked as a researcher and lecturer at the department for Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin. She has completed her PhD at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków on the topic of “Ageism in the labor market. A sociological-legal analysis.” Her research focuses on multiple forms of age discrimination and age inequalities in contemporary societies, especially in their most recent digital forms.

At ENS, she was hosted by Professor Ulrike Klinger at the Chair for Digital Democracy. There, she conducted research on age bias in algorithms and artificial intelligence, as well as ageism in the tech industry and Silicon Valley.

09 May - 22 June 2022 | 03 October 2022 - 30 January 2023 | 06 March - 27 March 2023

Prof. Dr. Dariusz Jemielniak holds a professorship of Management in Networked and Digital Societies at Kozminski University and is a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Moreover, he is a Board of Trustees member of the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, and a corresponding member of Polish Academy of Sciences.

During his time as a Visiting Professor at ENS, he worked on collecting comparable datasets from German social media in the areas of medical, scientific and political disinformation, and collaborate with PhD researchers on a Thick Big Data approach.

01 March - 15 May 2022

Mennatullah Hendawy is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University in Cairo.

As an interdisciplinary urban researcher, she is working at the intersection of cities, technology and sustainability with a focus on visualization, digitalization and mediatization. At ENS, she was hosted by Prof. Ulrike Klinger at the Chair for Digital Democracy. 

01 March - 30 April 2022

Nina Amelung has completed her PhD in Sociology at TU Berlin in 2018 and is currently affiliated with the Social Science Department of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. At ENS, she worked on her current project “Social and political implications of transnational biometric databases in migration and crime control (AFFECT)” and extend research collaborations linked to the STS MIGTEC network co-initiated with ENS researcher Dr. Silvan Pollozek.

Check out the interview about her stay at ENS on the Viadrina homepage.