This project seeks to scope several approaches to deal with Automated Decision-Making and Decision-Support Systems-Related Risks (ADM/DSS RR) through norms and provide an evaluation of those approaches for their consideration in regulatory contexts.

The standpoint is to look at risk control of those systems beyond ethics or social principles and focus the discussion on the possible interventions from the regulator’s perspective.

The overarching questions and sub-questions guiding this project are:

• What is risk in an ADM / DS System?
  – Is it possible to define it?
  – How is it different from technological risk?
  – How is it different from the concept of risk in
  management?
  – Are all “potential harms” risks of and ADM/DSS?
  – Is there a concept of risk usable for regulatory
  purposes?

If you have been harmed by bad automated decision-making, from robots to loan assessments, what can you do to right the wrong? What can the law do to help you? A growing number of public controversies about discriminatory, unpredictable and dangerous automated decision-making has raised questions about the most effective methods of accountability.

The project seeks to understand how companies, public agencies and civil society address the environmental conditions and limitations facing the establishment and management of data centres and submarine cables in urban and coastal areas.

A central part of data centre management is heat management: servers produce heat, and as they are gathered in large numbers in close areas, temperatures rise raising the risk of fire. To overcome this, data centre operators have various techniques to cool down these facilities and avoid any risks of data loss caused by fires. Moreover, when landing, telecom subsea cables risk to damage the local biodiversity (especially marine plants).

Thus, this project will ask: what shapes the environmental impacts of data centres cooling infrastructures? What are the ecological implications involved with the landing of a telecom submarine cable or the creation of a new data centre? How are these ecological impacts made visible to stakeholders? To what extent do environmental assessments succeed in reconciling the various interests at stake (security of infrastructures, maritime trade, marine biodiversity) in the passage of a telecomunication cable? How do ecological and infrastructural vulnerabilities of both data centers and telecom submarine cables shape the world-wide interconnection of data at the heart of the digital economy?

The Governing ADM Use Project was an ‘umbrella’ project designed to seed the work of the ADM+S Institutions program in the rapidly evolving area of ADM and AI regulation. The project conceives the challenge of governing ADM use as a multi layered network incorporating the regulation of the use of ADM by government authorities, the regulation by government of ADM use in the commercial and private sector, and the interaction of ADM-specific regulation and governance with a range of other areas of law, regulation and governance that impinge and interact (more or less directly) with the specific governance of ADM/AI.

This project examines possibilities for democratic practice, institutions and governance given automated decision-making (ADM). It focuses on challenges to and opportunities for liberal and democratic institutions and governance presented by ADM. The project aims to bridge analysis of ADM’s deployment across different domains with scholarly literature on republican and positive freedom, the rule of law and liberal democratic rights.