Gregory Lewkowicz is professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles, member of the Perelman Centre and director of the SMART Law Hub at the Faculty of Law and Criminology (ULB). He is a senior researcher at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence for the Common Good (FARI) in Brussels. He teaches the course ‘Smart Law: Algorithms, Metrics & Artificial Intelligence’ at the Ecole de droit de Science Po Paris. He also teaches at Paris II Panthéon-Assas and the Université de Liège. He is a Koyré Senior Research Fellow in Economic Law and Artificial Intelligence at the 3IA Chair at the Université Côte d’Azur. He is a recurrent lecturer on the digital transformation and law programs in executive education at HEC-Paris.

His research takes a pragmatic look at the interaction between law and digital technologies (SMART Law), global and transnational law and the contemporary transformation of law and the legal professions. He leads several research projects on algorithmic law and the application of artificial intelligence techniques to the drafting, analysis, implementation and sanctioning of legal or related standards. He is also involved in a number of research and development projects with public and private partners. He regularly advises public authorities and businesses on digital strategy and regulation.

Gregory Lewkowicz is editor of the “Penser le droit” collection at Bruylant. He is a member of the board of the European Academy of Legal Theory and of the Pôle Académique d’Enseignement Supérieur de Bruxelles. He is a member of the advisory board of AI4Belgium. He set up the Observatory of the Brussels Bar and chaired the European Incubator of the Brussels Bar from 2017 to 2022.

Associate Professor of AI and Data Law, and Worldline Chair on the Future of Money at HEC Paris. David Restrepo Amariles is director of the Smart Law Hub and Chairholder at the Hi! Paris Center of Data Analytics and Artificial intelligence. Member of the Collegium – Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, where he sits at the Class Technology and Society. He serves as Chair of the Artificial Intelligence Group (SIG) of the American Academy of Legal Studies in Business, and co-convene the Law, Society and AI Seminar Series at HEC Paris-IP Paris.

His teaching portfolio includes courses on Policy and Regulation of Digital Finance, Blockchain, Innovation and Policy, Data Analytics and AI, and Data Law and Technology Compliance, delivered jointly with the Stockholm School of Economics (CEMS), Ecole Polytechnique (MSc Data Science for Business), and the MIT (LL.M), and standalone in the MSc in International Finance, and the Major in Digital Business. At executive education, David Restrepo Amariles directs the Deloitte program on AI and Data and has led tailored made programs for leading firms and public organisations, including trainings for central banks and high public officials. He is the director of the Certificate on the Future of Money and Payments. He is Adjunct at Sciences Po Paris and Visiting Professor at Japan National Institute of Informatics.

His research analyses the strategies of organisations to leverage emerging technologies and create value in the context of ethical frameworks and regulatory contraints. David Restrepo Amariles combines approaches from strategy, computer science and informatics, law, sociology, and science and technology studies. He has conducted R&D projects with public partners such as the French Cour de cassation and European Commission, and private partners such as Atos, Baker McKenzie, Dechert LLP, Natixis, BNPP, Circle, Axa.

Dr- Alexandra Andhov is a distinguished authority in Law and Technology. She currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. Alexandra’s expertise lies in understanding and regulating emergent technologies, encompassing areas like blockchain, crypto assets, and artificial intelligence. In the realm of academia, Alexandra infuses her teaching with an entrepreneurial spirit. She has pioneered courses centered on start-up law, blockchain regulation, and computational legal thought. Beyond her academic pursuits, Alexandra stands as the founder of the Copenhagen Legal/Tech Lab. This initiative serves as a nexus for research and education, championing legal innovation within the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty of Law. In 2019, Alexandra’s academic excellence was further acknowledged during her tenure as a Fulbright Scholar at Cornell Law School.  At present, Alexandra plays a pivotal role on several advisory boards for fintech companies, international NGO Finance Watch, and is a member of the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime and its Digital Assets Taskforce. In September 2023, Alexandra has been appointed as International Affiliated Scholar with the Blockchain Law for Social Good Center in San Francisco. Her proactive involvement with the Nordic start-up ecosystem, coupled with her advisory roles, stands as a testament to her dynamic and forward-thinking approach in her domain.

Researcher in Computer Science with experience in Formal Methods, Distributed Systems, and Business Process Management. Hugo Andres Lopez Da Coste mainly specialises in process-oriented technologies, their theoretical formalisation (process calculi), their formal verification, their adoption via software tools (engineering), and their empirical validation. He does this using a cross-disciplinary and a cross-sectorial approach. His research objectives involve the maturing of a new generation of process technologies that can adapt to citizen needs, while still be compliant with regulations and laws. Such technologies should have a digital component, in terms of software tools that support the digitalization of work processes. Finally, technologies should be understandable, even for people that do not have a computer science background.

He works as an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark. Previously he was Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen, industrial posdoct at the IT University of Copenhagen and DCR Solutions, the Technical University of Denmark, and at the University of Lisbon. Hugo completed his Ph.D. at the IT University of Copenhagen.

Professor at LIX, Ecole Polytechnique in France and director of the Data Science and Mining (DaSciM) group. Dr Vazirgiannis holds a degree in Physics and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Athens (Greece) and a Master’s degree in AI from Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh (UK). He actively collaborates with industrial partners in the area of analytics and machine learning for large data repositories in various application domains (including recommendations, meeting summarisation, influence metrics for scientific and social networks, predictive maintenance, and others). He has published three books and more than 160 papers in international refereed journals and conferences. He has organised major conferences in the field of data mining and machine learning (such as ECML/PKDD), while he participates in the leading PCs of AI and ML conferences – such as AAAI and IJCAI. He has received the ERCIM and Marie Curie EU grants, the Tencent “Rhino-Bird International Academic Expert Award” in 2017, and he has held the AXA Data Science Chair since 2015. His current research interests are in machine/deep learning and combinatorial methods for graph analysis (including community detection, graph clustering, node embeddings and influence maximisation), text mining (including graph of words, word embeddings with applications to web advertising and marketing, event detection and summarisation).

Tenure-track Assistant Professor of Legal Tech in the Department of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich. Before joining TUM in January 2021, Matthias Grabmair worked as a Legal Data Scientist at the German legal informatics company SINC (2019-2020). Prior to that, he spent four years at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, where he worked with Prof. Eric Nyberg as a Visiting Researcher, Postdoc, and Systems Scientist (2015-2019). He holds a diploma in law from the University of Augsburg, Germany, and a Master of Laws (LL.M.) and Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh under the supervision of Prof. Kevin Ashley.

Dr. Grabmair is the Section Editor for Machine Learning of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Law and co-founded the ASAIL Workshop Series on Automated Extraction of Semantic Information in Legal Text, for which he also chairs the Organising Committee as of 2019.

Associate professor at Télécom Paris in the Data, Intelligence and Graphs (DIG) team, Nils Holzenberger works on natural language processing and machine learning. He is also affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University, where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Ben Van Durme and Prof. Raman Arora.

His research interests include representation learning and unsupervised learning for speech and text, as well as statutory reasoning and legal language understanding. He has published several papers in prestigious conferences and journals, such as ACL, CoNLL, ICASSP, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, and Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

He has also participated in various shared tasks and challenges, such as NIST TAC SM-KBP, ICAIL, and Grounded Sequence to Sequence Transduction. He has collaborated with researchers from different domains and institutions, such as law, fluid mechanics, linguistics, and computer vision.

Peter Fratrič is a postdoctoral student in Artificial Intelligence & Law at HEC Paris within the Smart Law Hub, currently engaged in a collaborative project with Telecom Paris de Mines. He previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Complex-Cyber Infrastructure (CCI) lab at the Informatics Institute of University of Amsterdam, where he also completed his Phd in the area of agent-based modelling with applications to law and finance. Peter’s background originates in applied mathematics. His initial research experience was gained during his studies at Slovak University of Technology, where he obtained his Master degree in Mathematical and Computational modelling.

His main research focus is placed on artificial intelligence & law in the context of crime and financial regulation. For his research, Peter is utilizing agent-based modelling paradigm to develop models of socio-economic infrastructures where emergent behavioral norms can be studied. These norms can expose vulnerabilities of the system and provide regulatory insights. Peter aspires to incorporate autonomous normative agents into the toolkit for financial regulation and law, aligning with his long-term research objectives.

Raphaël Gyory is a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (IRIDIA), and previously practiced as a lawyer at the Brussels Bar. Raphaël’s research focuses on artificial intelligence and law, and in particular on the development of software, algorithms and methodologies to foster cooperation between legal experts and engineers.

Simone Casalena graduated cum laude from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 2023 with a master’s degree in international law. During his studies, his interest in the intersection of law and technology led him to become a research assistant at the Perelman Centre (ULB) and the Smart Law Hub. In this capacity, he collaborated on innovative projects highlighting the interactions between law and technological advances. In particular, he has contributed to the SimpLex, GDPR120Q and LASO (HospitaL-centric AI Selection and Operationalisation blueprint approach) projects.

A member of the Brabant Wallon Bar, Simone is now a lawyer with Rawlings Gilles. His practice focuses on technology and information law, as well as the law of obligations and company law.

His interests and research focus on the interaction between the law and new technologies, particularly with regard to the processing of personal data and its impact on data subjects.

Ritha is a Sciences Po law school graduate student with an undergraduate degree in finance and business analytics from McGill University. With a multidisciplinary background she is interesting in bridging the gap between law and technology affecting all fields and participate in ongoing efforts to develop a comprehensive global governance framework that protects the values we care about.

Rajaa EL HAMDANI holds master’s degrees in Applied Mathematics and in Mathematics, Vision, and Learning (MVA) from École Centrale Paris and École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, respectively. She is a member of the Smart Law Hub team. From 2017 to 2019, she led the AI department at Justice.cool, focusing on natural language processing for legal documents. Her experience also includes data science consultancy at Wavestone from 2016 to 2017.

Her research interests are in AI & Law, with a particular focus on natural language processing applications for legal documents. She has co-authored papers addressing the integration of AI in law, including “Compliance Generation for Privacy Documents under GDPR: A Roadmap for Implementing Automation and Machine Learning” (2019) and “Performance in the Courtroom: Automated Processing and Visualization of Appeal Court Decisions in France” (2020). Currently, she is pursuing her Ph.D. at Télécom Paris, deepening her expertise in legal NLP, knowledge graphs, and graph machine learning.

Youcef Bouharaoua is a Data Scientist with a passion for the world of data and all areas involving this ‘new gold’. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) with distinction.

He began his professional career as an IT expert at the National Bank of Belgium, where he also wrote his dissertation on anomaly detection in EMIR derivatives. He then worked as a Data Scientist / Data Scientist Engineer at the Colruyt Group before co-founding HAYO Labs.

Since September 2020, he has also been an External Exercise Assistant in the Computer Science Department of the ULB Faculty of Science. He joined the Perelman center as part of the SIMPLEX project.

Pablo Marcello Baquero is Assistant Professor at HEC Paris and a Fellow at the Hi! Paris Center on Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Science, Business and Society. During 2023-2024, he is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

His scholarly interests are in the fields of law and technology, private law and international business transactions. His research examines how legal institutions and technologies can support practices of innovation in a socially and economically inclusive way, contributing to disseminate to most firms the opportunities to produce in the frontiers of innovation and extending the benefits of advanced technologies to society at large in a lawful and ethical way.

His work adopts a dual approach, examining how laws and regulations should govern emerging technologies; and researching inside the “black box” of algorithms and technical applications, to both uncover how they operate and could be designed to comply with legal and regulatory objectives.

Sébastien Meeùs is a doctoral student in law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in a joint PhD with the Université de Montréal (UdeM). He is a research assistant at HEC Paris in the Smart Law Hub, at ULB in the Perelman Centre and at UdeM in the Cyberjustice Laboratory. He is also a teaching assistant for the Data Law course at ULB. Sébastien holds a Master’s degree in Economic and Social Law from ULB and a Master’s degree in Information and Communication Technology Law (DTIC) from the University of Namur (taught at CRIDS), both with Distinction.

His interests and research focus on the legal impact of web3 and video games and on the shaping of the digital habits by metaverse. During his research mandates, Sébastien worked on the development of techno-legal compliance tools (GDPR-120, JusticeBot) as well as participating in reflections on normative power and its articulation in digital environments in Canada, the European Union and around the world following a global law approach. His thesis examines the interoperability of the rules of law in the digital ecosystems of web3.

Committed to sharing knowledge in an original way, Sébastien launched the Legal Pixels YouTube channel to discuss the special relationship between law and the digital worlds. He also was awarded the ULB 2023 Scientific Communication Award for his CyberLex videos.

Photo @HDReporters

Anissa holds a degree in international and public law from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She is currently specializing in European law and European studies at the Institute of European Studies (IEE-ULB). During her studies, she was particularly interested in environmental, human rights and personal data protection.  After working on the Simplex project, she returned to the Smart Law Hub team as a research assistant for the development of a Belgian Brain Data Hub.

Glenda Bergman holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Public and International Law. Her recent experience at Google, focused on Computer Law, adds practical depth to her goal of specializing in artificial intelligence.

Currently, she is deeply engaged in two crucial research projects: standardizing fundamental rights in AI law, and exploring citizen involvement in Rules-as-Code and digital-ready legislation.

Glenda is dedicated to making a lasting impact at the crossroads of legal studies, technology, and governance.

Aurore Troussel is a PhD candidate at the Université de Montréal (Canada) and a visiting PhD student at HEC Paris. She is a research assistant at HEC Paris in the Smart Law Hub. Aurore is a qualified lawyer at the Paris Bar, specializing in competition and privacy law. She holds a master’s degree in European business law from Pantheon-Assas University and in International law and management from HEC Paris.

Before starting her PhD, Aurore worked as a trainee at the European Commission, in a legal tech company (Justice.cool), and in two international law firms. Aurore’s research focuses on the regulation of digital platforms and their regulatory power.

Her PhD explores digital platform tools and architecture to provide insight into the way these powerful firms regulate their users. In her research, Aurore is developing methodologies to audit digital platforms in the context of the emerging EU platform law. Her interests and research also focus on the regulation of artificial intelligence systems. Aurore is conducting research on the use of generative AI in the workplace and potential regulations.

At the Smart Law Hub, Aurore is leading a research project on Content Moderation and the Digital Services Act, as well as a project on GPTs in the workplace.

Damien is a legal scholar specialised in the intersection between law and data, with the central goal of approaching law as data. As such, Damien’s scholarship has focused on building legal datasets fit for dual legal/data analyses, and bridging the gap between the latest advances in data science and the legal domain. He codes in Python and R, and has particular expertise in natural language processing.

Damien’s interests and scholarship includes:

• A doctoral thesis reviewing the use of citations to authorities in international law;
• Research work on legislative inflation at the national and international level;
• The role of legal data analysis in modern legal management; or
• A deep focus on Large Language Models and what they mean for the law profession going forward.

In support of his scholarship, Damien can rely on multiple experiences in several distinct fields:

• As a Senior Analyst for Investment Arbitration Reporter, where he works both as a journalist and data officer;
• As a counsel and practitioner in public international law, representing states and international organisations in international disputes;
• As a consultant on various issues at the intersection of law and data (i.e., for due diligence, start-ups, etc.).

Apart from that, Damien’s favorite animal is the noble pelican.

In June 2024, Seliha Buelens will finish her master’s degree in law at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. During an Erasmus programme of six months in Toulouse (2022), where courses mainly focused on digital law, she decided to deepen her knowledge of artificial intelligence and its interplay with law. Thus, she is now enrolled in a Master’s of Law in Law and Technology, which focuses on the interaction between artificial intelligence and the law. Her master’s thesis discusses dark patterns and fairness. In conclusion, she is deeply intrigued by the social relevance and multifaceted nature of the relationship between law and technology.

Seliha Buelens will be contributing to the Smart Law Hub’s work by carrying out research mainly in the framework of the Rules as Code-project, which aims to develop digital-ready legislation, all while ensuring citizen participation, in the domains of urban planning and housing policies.

Vladimir Apraxine is interested in subjects related to public international law, technology and law, and human rights law. He is specifically passionate about how technologies such as AI and blockchain can disrupt the law and how to reconcile ethical and human-centered values with such tools.

At the Centre Perelman, his work focuses on research about interactions between AI and law.

Prior to joining the Centre Perelman, Vladimir gained valuable experience and knowledge in various areas of law. He graduated in 2021 from a LL.B in European and International Law taught at Maastricht University. He then completed a LL.M in Public International Law at the University of Amsterdam. He also conducted in 2022 an internship at the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) and followed various trainings in international law and AI.

He is currently pursuing an Advanced Master in Intellectual Property and ICT Law at KU Leuven, where he aspires to deepen his knowledge about the regulation of AI generated art.

He is a native French speaker, fluent in English, and has basic knowledge of Dutch.

Virgile is a student in Economic Law at Université libre de Bruxelles. He is also studying Sustainability and Politics at Sciences Po Paris. His other interests include Tech and AI, as well as fundamental rights. At the Smart Law Hub, he is a Research Assistant working on the upcoming EU AI Act.

More specifically, he is focusing on the standardization of fundamental rights for the purpose of certifying high-risk AIs used in critical infrastructure, which encompasses road, rail, and air traffic, as well as the supply of water, gas, heating, electricity, and critical digital infrastructure.

Driss is a final-year student in electronics and telecommunications engineering. He has a keen interest in artificial intelligence. Driss is curious by nature and passionate about computing. He is determined to explore the interconnections between electronics, advanced algorithms, and innovative applications. Driss’s ambition is to contribute to the convergence between artificial intelligence and social impact.

Guillaume Wafflard, currently in the final year of his Masters in Computer Science, specializing in Big Data and AI, has a keen interest in blockchain and Web 3.0. His Master Thesis, entitled “A Blockchain-based online voting system for Belgium’s elections”, proposes an online voting system adapted for the Belgian elections, based on blockchain to guarantee security, integrity, anonymity and end-to-end verifiability.

As President of the Cercle Informatique de l’ULB, Guillaume actively participates in various projects and supports the student community. This commitment is reflected in his contribution to Cercle initiatives such as the “parrainage facultaire”, the guide of the new student, the sharing of notes and summaries on the dochub.be website, as well as in his former role as CI Course Delegate. His involvement is also reflected in his position as student-assistant for the programming course, where he gives q&a sessions and help during practical works.
Committed to climate activism, Guillaume has been or is a member of several organizations – inside and outside ULB – working for transition and climate justice.

Currently, as part of Smart Hub Law, he is taking part in a working group on housing.

Zoé Vandenberg joined the ULB Smart Law Hub as a research assistant in September 2023.

She recently graduated with a master’s degree in public law and international law and is currently doing an additional master’s degree at the Institute of European Studies to specialize in European law. During her studies, Zoé took part in an Erasmus exchange program in Ireland (University of Limerick), during which she was able to improve her knowledge of international law and her command of English.

During her master’s degree, Zoé took the legal theory seminar given by Professor Benoit Frydmann, which dealt in depth with the legal issues raised by the development of artificial intelligence. The study of AI as an object of law, but also as a source of new standards, soon aroused her interest. This interest was confirmed by the research work carried out as part of this seminar: ‘Algorithms for predicting the risk of re-offending and the right to a fair trial’, which has now been published (co-author).

Her activities at the Smart Law Hub focus mainly on the use of algorithmic tools in the medical field. These are carried out under the supervision of Prof. Gregory Lewkowicz.

Valentina Dalla Giovanna is a university researcher member within the Smart Law Hub, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), since September 2023, and she is a lawyer at the French Brussels Bar since November 2019.

From a young age, she showed great interest in new technologies and social justice matters. Her experience and international background have reinforced her attraction and curiosity for these subjects.

She obtained her master’s degree in law from the ULB, with a specialization in public and international law, during which she did her Erasmus (exchange program) at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Within the Smart Law Hub, Valentina is involved in applied research projects, with a particular focus on medical data law and artificial intelligence. She collaborates with multidisciplinary teams, particularly on projects aimed at establishing a data altruism organization and on projects related to the adoption of artificial intelligence tools in the healthcare sector, under the direction of Professor Gregory Lewkowicz.

Alongside her activity as a Researcher, Valentina is a lawyer with Rawlings Giles Law Firm, an independent international law firm with a main focus on commercial and corporate law. Her practices focuses on data protection law and on the freedom of speech in the digital age.

Additionally, Valentina Dalla Giovanna also treats cases in medical law, contract law and more broadly on commercial and civil law.  She speaks French, Italian, English and German. She also has a good passive knowledge of Dutch.

Sacha is research assistant in the Smart Law Hub. He works in a team which currently focuses on the standardization of fundamental rights as part of the high-risk AI systems certification process defined by the AI act from the European Union. He investigates especially the high-risk area of migration, asylum and border control management.

Sacha has a master’s degree in law from the ULB, where his research questioned the pairing of the AI with the justice from ontological and ethical perspectives through the ethics for the future of H. Jonas. This year, he is finishing a bachelor’s in philosophy at the ULB which he started in a double curriculum. His interest in philosophy is therefore important. His research interests focus on the limits of algorithms, what resists them and on the conditions of possibility of digitisation.

He is currently engaged in pursuing a Master 1 in cybersecurity at ULB, holding a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the same university. His passion revolves around data protection and IT security, and he dedicates his focus to both the technical and ethical dimensions of cybersecurity. In his current role, he serves as a research assistant in the Smart Law Hub team.

Tom De Clercq is a master’s student in engineering at ULB, specialising in telecommunications. He is passionate about exploring communication technologies and systems.

As part of his responsibilities, he is in charge of developing demonstrations to compare new ‘state of the art’ models with existing ones. At the same time, he has a deep interest in machine learning models and their potential application in society. Tom is also actively involved in a citizen participation project, exploring the possibilities offered by digitalisation to inform and involve the public in the drafting of new laws.