Digital Rights, Markets and Innovation (DRMI) Conference addressed was a two-day workshop held on December 1-2 2016 at Pharma City Itäinen Pitkäkatu 4. The Conference was organized as a part of University of Turku’s cross-disciplinary profiling and strategic research area Digital Futures.
The idea behind the Conference was to address how in the contemporary Digital Society, markets, big data and technological developments drive legal processes. Technological design choices produce strong path dependencies, regulate individuals and markets, and embed certain legally relevant values to the exclusion of others while at the same time these digital rights also affect economic and technological trajectories: they provide legal constraints for technology, markets and innovation.
Themes for the discussion on the first day were 1) Biomedical Innovation, Digitalization and Future Medicine, 2) Autonomous Robots and Algorithmic Decision-Making, and 3) Big Data and Platform Society. In the second day workshop, doctoral students presented their papers related to the themes of the conference.
Presentation by Legal Researcher Dr. Katja de Vries highlighted some legal issues concerning autonomous decision-making and machine learning. She presented how machine learning, when used for profiling humans, can lead to infringements in terms of privacy, data protection and antidiscrimination law.
From left to right: Mika Viljanen, Bilyana Petkova, Katja de Vries, Tuomas Ojanen and Juha Lavapuro. Photo by Tarja Linden
Prof. Aurora Plomer discussed the EU’s policy on the protection of intellectual property rights arising from projects funded under the latest Research Framework Program 7 in the light of the Commission’s auditing report on the program. The presentation illustrated how the Commission policy could compromise the European ideal of promoting scientific research and innovation through cooperation in research by further augmenting certain problematic aspects of patents in the biosciences.
Research Fellow Bilyana Petkova‘s presentation discussed Big Data and by how through regulatory measures its positive impacts could be harnessed in a manner that would allow reducing its threats to legal inequality and transparency.
Ali Imran and Aurora Plomer. Photo by Tarja Linden
Photo by Tarja Linden
More details about the Conference, covering absracts and short biographies of the keynote speakers can be found from the official Digital Magazine of the Conference behind the link below:
https://www.flipsnack.com/drmiconference2016/drmi.html