 Hello and good afternoon. My name is Jan Gerlach. I am a lead public policy manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia. We are a affiliated participant of the network of centers that research internet and society. And I'm today very excited to be interviewing Stanley and Leanne from the Swedish law and informatics research Institute. We are sort of joining this call at the occasion of the IGF happening this year, virtually. The IGF is usually a place where the network of centers community comes together to update each other and exchange thoughts and, and, and stories about the research and find collaborative collaborators. A very exciting thing this year unfortunately we're all virtual we're all remote, but I'm nevertheless very excited to meet you, Leanne and Stanley and maybe you can start by telling me a little bit about yourself and what you actually do at Erie. Hi, I am me and Kelowna and I'm a postdoc researcher at the Swedish Institute for law and informatics. I have been at the Institute for almost 10 years now. I started off as a doctoral student and now I'm just about to finish up my postdoc at the Institute, and I'll tell you more about that in a few minutes. My name is Stanley Greerstein and I am a senior lecturer at the Department of Law of Stockholm University, and also associated with Erie Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute. And I've been at the Department of Law since 2006. And also during this time, I've been involved with with Erie and what Erie does. Great, thank you. Great to have you I'm very excited to meet you today. Leanne, do you want to talk us through your work a little bit. Absolutely. I'm going to share my screen now and if you want to jump in I know you wanted this to be like a more informal conversation so I don't want to just talk talk talk so jump in at any time. I just didn't want to forget to tell you about any of the exciting stuff we're doing. In fact, I would say a few words about Stockholm University, which is one of Europe's most dynamic is located in Stockholm one of Europe's most dynamic capital cities. It's a it's a world class city but with a small town vibe at Stockholm University we have 34,000 students 1700 doctoral students and 5000 members of staff. The Department of Law is the biggest law faculty within Sweden, both in number of researchers and both in number of students. And Erie is located at the Department of Law so we're an independent research unit within the Department of Law at Stockholm University. Our work is led by on the one hand this executive board where there's I think seven or eight members. We also have a director which is Professor Peter Walgren, I will get to talking about his work in a little bit. Our work actually started the work at the Institute the activities of the Institute started already in 1968, and have to have been largely project orientated since we were one of the founders of the Swedish Association for it and law, which was formed in 1981. Our Institute was, I should mention that our Institute was founded by Professor Peter Sable who's really truly a legendary figure. He had so much vision to be talking about digitalization and computerization already. It's such an early point in time. He at Erie or Erie was one of the initiators of the trust for legal informatics which is this consortium of about 20 really key public bodies like the law association, the parliament the bar association, the court association, and be initiated by one of this group and for a very long time we headed up the, the trust for legal informatics. We are also as of 2019 we're one of the founding members of AI innovation of Sweden, which is this national initiative to accelerate research and innovation surrounding artificial intelligence. And from research, Erie is definitely engaged with teaching. And I think one of the coolest things that we do is we have a mandatory course in the undergraduate degrees so it's all of the students that come through the Department of Law, have to study information technology so this is not an elective course this is mandatory. And it comes at the end of their studies because it requires a high level of knowledge. Yeah, we administered a master's program for a really long time. That's that has that ended a couple of years ago but we're working on another one right now. And, you know, overall I can just say that Erie is considered a national center of excellence within the field of law and it. Yeah. Okay. Oh, sorry, I forgot the slides. Okay. I don't know maybe I will be quick here I just, I just wanted to briefly mentioned like the kind of from a substantive perspective the things that we're working with so in Scandinavia, we kind of conceptualize. We have two different branches of law and technology so on the one hand we have information communications technology law, and this is like way more legally oriented this is like the side where lawyers feel more ideas I would say. This is like, we take technology and we try to look at, okay, how can you know we remedy legal problems that arise from the use of this technology in society so this is like things like electronic signatures data protection computer crimes computer contracts things like that. I think this is like the side where lawyers feel more comfortable. The other side of what we consider as law and it in Scandinavia is this more much much more technical orientated side which you can call information technology for lawyers AI and law legal informatics. So, here topics would include development of legal knowledge management systems knowledge management models of legal argumentation legal ontologies. So this is like things like how can we use AI automation to support the government right contracts to the tedious work of document review. So where do you, where do you sit then. Yeah, that's interesting because I think I came in my my my doctoral thesis is very. I think more on the traditional side very dogmatic focused on the data protection and now I'm getting much more interested in the second side as my postdoc really concerns privacy by design and how do we embed privacy into computer systems. So I think I'm working a lot more with engineers. Yeah. Yeah, so back to Scandinavia so Scandinavia, you know it's really big. We're really I think ahead when it comes to digitalization in general. And we have us. We work really closely or with our with our neighbors in Finland and Norway and a Denmark and every year we have this Nordic conference and it kind of shifts each year between one of the different countries and this year it's in Stockholm. registration is technically over but if anyone is really eager to attend I'm sure we can make that happen shoot me an email and the topic is law in the era of AI. busy days ahead for you then. Yeah, we were going to have it in real life but now now I think we're down to five that the rules here in Sweden just changed last week so it's kind of a bummer but yeah we're we're going to do it online the show must go on. And so this I just going to. Now I'm going to talk about some of the projects that we're working on at Erie. I'm going to begin with my own project pal privacy aware acceptable life logging services for older and frail people. So, just really quick. There's this global phenomenon population aging we're all getting older that's great but it's going to put a lot of strain on our health care systems. So, the aim of this project is well how can we develop tools, life logging technologies, you know, basically sensors in the home or not in the body, possibly ingested ways that we can monitor individuals within the home environment in order to support their health their well being their independence. The thing is with these technologies is that they're very privacy invasive, and also older people are quite like, they don't want to use them they they are like this is big brother stuff we don't want to use it so. Not only are there legal problems but there's just like users don't really want to adopt to the technology so this project it's it's very multidisciplinary we have engineers we have human computer interaction scientists. We have me representing legal and we're trying to develop life logging technologies that are acceptable and privacy aware. I just mentioned I'm working with privacy by design, and this is just an example of some of the stuff that's being developed within the project. So, like maybe you're monitoring your mom at home, and you know she's she's okay with this monitoring because she's worried she's going to fall. And, but maybe if she falls in the shower she doesn't want you know just anyone to see her naked. So you can you know kind of turn that that woman into some kind of avatar or make her invisible not make her into some kind of exoskeleton and that can all depend on. You know the level that she can make those settings so if it's you know her son it's okay, she can see everything but if it's a nurse maybe you know she wants to see a silhouette. Very timely if I can chop in there. Is this something that you're working on with with a medical school also or does this expertise also do within within eerie. No this the people that are doing the computer vision stuff come from the University of Alicante. That is, I list their names here. But, but fundamentally, I would say this is an example of privacy by design so they are meeting a legal requirement. I will continue on talking about that because that leads me to the next point so University of Alicante Francisco floor is revolta. I, we are also going to work together with them on this next project that I'm super excited to talk about because we are looking for some doctoral students to join the project so visual is this really cool Marie Curie it and which I don't know if you're familiar with the Marie Curie doctoral programs but they are the most prestigious and they're just highly recognized the quality level they're really, really looking for excellent students because they are going to be part of this incredible training network, where we have 15 we're going to recruit 15 doctoral students so all of them three will go to University of Alicante three will go to action University these are human computer scientists, the Alicante people computer vision people. We also have computer vision people at in Austria and you when we also have you asked about are there any medical people and we have the school nursing at at in Trinity College in Ireland. So we're this multi disciplinary consortium and we're going to each have three doctoral students but they're all going to work together really closely there's going to be there's all these different mandatory training schools and all these different internships that we have with different partner agencies like IBM for example, so they're going to be moving around working together, really strengthening their skills together and, and it's very much similar to what I'm doing in my postdoc we're developing tools to support, you know, living at home independently for longer, but here is really specifically on computer vision. Sorry, I think I just have one more before I'm going to pass this on to Stanley. And I just want to say. So, yeah, I just want to say we are with the visual we are recruiting the we just extended the recruitment to November 30, and we really hoped that you want to come move to Stockholm and work with us. I'm also involved in these European cooperation and science and technology actions, but if you're unfamiliar with these, these are research network so this is not money for for doing research it's money for building your network. I'm the action vice chair in the good brother project and I represent Sweden in the net for each friendly project and again this is like developing technologies to assist with the population aging situation and in brief and but what we're doing is we're setting up training schools we're setting up conferences there's opportunities for funding for short stays like five day stays if you want to go to one of the go and study at one of the partner organizations one of the member organizations you can go and do that will pay for it. And all, all you need to do is contact your representative so if you're in Sweden you contact me and say you want to get involved. And, and almost, I think we are 37 countries in Europe so if you're in Europe there's a good chance you can join the network if you're interested, if you're outside Europe, it's still possible to collaborate, but it has to be the rules are a little bit more strict. Yeah, any you want to take it away. Yeah, thank you. I can just start by mentioning that at ED we have two professors who are eminent professors within the area of law and IT they are professors, Peter Volgion and Cecilia Magnusson Herbert, and this is a project that Cecilia Magnusson Herbert is dealing with, which has to do with the notion of embedding law in technology. So, earlier we saw this two circles, IT law and legal informatics and this is the circle that's the intro to the right where we start thinking in terms of method, methodological issues and how one can know what law is it's not only text on paper but law is any type of regulation it can be technology. It can be ethical guidelines or code ethical codes. Standardization is a type of regulation so yeah we look at you know what is law and then we try and build the law into into the technology. It's a project that Cecilia is dealing with that has that as the main goal building privacy into technology. If we go to the next slide, Leanne, this is a project that I am working with explainable and ethical machine learning for knowledge discovery from medical data sources. This is in conjunction with some other institutions here in Stockholm, so we have the department of computer science at Stockholm University and KTH and RISE and in a nutshell, the project entails a bunch of data scientists trying to extract knowledge from medical data sets in order to be able to build predictive models to be able to predict, for example, the adverse effects of prescribed drugs, or maybe trying to predict cardiovascular disease so they can be treated in time. And as I mentioned, it's a group of data scientists and I'm the only lawyer in the group, which is fun sometimes, a little bit frustrating sometimes because we have all these technicians who want to surge ahead and my role is to, on the one hand, kind of, you know, slow down the project if it's going too fast from the legal perspective, make sure that, you know, GDPR is adhered to, but also a main function of mine in this project is to make sure that certain values such as ethical values are built into the technology. So to identify what values the technology should entail and make sure that the data scientists then, you know, when they're building the prototype take into account these values. It can be contextual as well, you know, we have the product being a black box which contains sensitive data if if the patient wants to access the data, what kind of access rights should he or she have. If the medical practitioner wants to access it know what access rights shouldn't tell if an insurance company wants to access maybe the access rights should be different. So it's once again building in values and different levels of accessibility, so to speak. So that is the type of projects that we are involved with. So on the one hand we do teaching but we're also involved in projects and we are then able to take our experience from the projects into the teaching lecture theaters as well. Yeah, that's what I do. Fascinating so so a lot of work actually for both of you sort of bringing values bringing regulatory aspects into technology very timely projects as well I've seen. And, and, but one thing that really stood out for me is that it seems at your, at your institute you're also a little bit of doing sort of the history of internet and society of law and internet and technology work right. Given that it, you've been around area has been around for for more than 50 years so I imagine for the other centers at in the network there's a lot to learn from you. And this is definitely something that I would be be interested in learning more myself like how this did this come about this thought of combining technology and the law at a time when I would say it wasn't that that fashionable yet right. On that point I can also just add that I mentioned the two professors here and they both wrote their dissertations within a I 30 years ago. So they have had a lot of insight then but they also have a lot of experience and they've seen and being with all the ups and downs within the this thing called artificial intelligence before the hype and now within the hype. Yeah, it takes a lot of takes a lot of breath to to follow through right it's one thing to be early but then still being there when when there's a lot more attention to the topic that that is very hard I find fascinating. Well, I think this this was a wonderful overview. It was great to meet you today I think we're already at time unfortunately. But we'll make the recording available and and of course happy to connect everybody to you who reaches out. And again thank you so much for for you taking the time today to chat with me. Great. Thank you for the opportunity.