Keynote speech 1

Professor Emerita at Vrije Universiteit and Radboud University 

Mireille Hildebrandt is a lawyer and legal philosopher specialising in the implications of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making for law, democracy and the Rule of Law. She was a Research Professor and co-director at the Research Group Law, Science Technology and Society studies (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels, appointed by the VUB Research Council and has been teaching law to master students of computer science at the Science Faculty of Radboud University. 

Hildebrandt wrote the first comprehensive textbook on ‘Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk’, published in Open Access at Oxford University Press (2020) and foresaw the current explosion of generative AI and personalised environments in her 2015 monograph on ’Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law’. 

She was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for her project on ‘Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law’, bringing together lawyers and computer scientists to research the normative impact of upstream design decisions on downstream uptake. In that context she co-founded the new Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational Law (JCRCL), of which she is co-editor in chief, together with renowned legal scholar Frank Pasquale. 

Hildebrandt has been teaching, writing and speaking on the nexus of law, philosophy and computer science, combining theoretical research on the side of law and democracy with an in-depth understanding of the challenges of building and deploying AI for the public good.