People

Researchers:

 University of Bergen:

Assoc. Prof. Kjetil Rommetveit (Coordinator). Kjetil Rommetveit holds a PhD in philosophy of science and technology, and has studied philosophy, law and science and technology studies (STS). He has been a visiting researcher at Ludwig Maximillian University (Munich), Boston University, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Edinburgh. He has coordinated, managed and been the principal investigator in several European projects (TECHNOLIFE, EPINET) dealing with ethics, governance and RRI, especially in relation to ICTs (such as wearable sensors, robotics and Geographical Imaging Systems). He has broad experience with interdisciplinary research, policy advice and public debates in Norway and in Europe. His research and publications are in the field of governance of emerging digital science and technology, including the interdisciplinary integration of SSH perspectives and RRI. He is the main author of the report HISTERA – What can history and philosophy teach us about the prospects of a European Research Area? He leads the work on social acceptability of smart meters in a recently started research project of the Smart cities and Communities project (ERA-Net), he has performed ethics and project review for Horizon 2020, and for ERC Advanced Grants.

Dr. Nora S. Vaage is an art historian and interdisciplinary researcher at the University of Maastricht (UM). She did her PhD at the SVT center, a on a topic that has given her a skillset well suited for interdisciplinary work, including an in-depth knowledge of the history and philosophy of science, and the ability to read research papers and follow discussions within multiple fields. Her sustained research interest is the relationship between knowledge, values and society, and this interest tends to take her across disciplinary boundaries. Vaage holds a bachelor’s degree in Aesthetics, and her master’s thesis in Art History (which received the highest honors) discussed Eduardo Kac’s transgenic artworks. Before starting her PhD, she had a 6-month project position building a database for the art owned by UiB. Vaage has lectured in a number of subjects including theory of science, Man: Nature and Culture, visual rhetoric, and the ethics of images at the University of Bergen. 

 

Dr.Bruna de Marchi sociologist, is presently an associate researcher at the Center for the Study of the Sciences and Humanities (SVT – Senter for vitenskapsteori) in the University of Bergen, Norway (http://www.uib.no/svt/en). She also teaches in the University of Ferrara and the Politecnico of Milano, in Italy. For many years, she was charge of the Mass Emergencies Programme at the Institute of International Sociology of Gorizia (ISIG), Italy. In the early 1990s, she was with the European Commission Joint Research Centre at Ispra, as a seconded national expert. She conducted extended research on disasters and industrial accidents, environmental and health emergencies including in collaboration with urban planners, engineers and experts in risk assessment, to explore the interactions between human and technological systems

 

Ms. Sissel Småland Aasheim is administrative research coordinator at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities and will assist the management team. Aasheim is trained as a social anthropologist and has extensive experience with project management.

 

 
  

 

 

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya:

Prof. Daniel López, PhD in Social Psychology, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Education and researcher at Care and Preparedness in Network Society (CareNet), research group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). He has been involved in CUIDAR, DEMOCIT AND EFORTT. He has been Marie-Curie Postdoctoral researcher at LSTS (Vrije Universitet Brussel) working on ethical and social aspects of ICT innovations for older and disabled people (VALUE-AGEING) and visiting researcher at CSISP (Goldsmiths College, University of London).

 

 

 

Prof. Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, Urban Political Economist; PhD in Geography (Manchester) and BSc in Economics (UAB), director of the Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory at IN3. He has been the academic leading partner of iCITY (FP7) and currently leading a national project on SMART FUTURES. He has been postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University and visiting researcher at University of Illinois at Urbana and Antwerp University.

 

 

 

Prof. Miquel Domènech, PhD in Philosophy and Letters, is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Psychology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).He is currently leading TECSAL, co-leaded EFORTT and is the Coordinator of STS-b research group.

 

 

Maxigas received his Phd in the Interdisciplinary Study of Network and Knowledge Societies from Universidad Oberta de Catalunya, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (UOC/IN3).  He is a Lecturer in Critical Digital Media Practice at Lancaster University and a post-doctoral researcher at UOC/IN3. His research and teaching focuses on hacker culture and cybernetics, framed broadly in the context of the sociology and anthropology, history and geography of technology in use.  His current research lines include the European history of hacking, the role of cybernetics in shaping computing cultures, and the Luddite aspects of hackerdom, i.e. how innovators use old technologies.

 

 

Sara Degli Esposti is Research Fellow at the Centre for Business in Society (CBiS), Coventry University. With a background in sociology and business economics, Sara’s research explores issues related to technological innovation, techno-social imaginaries, algorithmic accountability and risks of discrimination and human rights violation in the digital economy. Former Executive Director of the Spanish Information Security Advancement Society, Sara has both managerial and research experience in the field of privacy and cybersecurity. Her work sheds light on legal compliance decisions — e.g. the impact of EU General Data Protection Regulation on corporations employing big data — as well as public understanding and acceptability of surveillance technologies.

 

Israel Rodríguez-Giralt is currently Full Research Professor at the IN3 – Open University of Catalonia (UOC). His field of research is the so-called STS (Science and Technology Studies) and the study of new forms of technical democracy. His work revolves around the forms social experimentation, citizens’ mobilization and public debate in highly-uncertain and disputed situations, such as environmental crisis, emergencies, disasters, and public controversies. He is interested in how citizens, sometimes non-experts, engage in knowledge production and innovation to the issues that affect them. He has recently applied this approach to the understanding of disabled people activism in Spain and in the UK, and to community and grassroots disaster and emergency management.

 

Vrije Universiteit Brussel:

Prof. Serge Gutwirth is professor of Human Rights, Comparative law, Legal Theory and Methodology at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where he studied law, criminology and also obtained a post-graduate degree in technology and science studies. From 2003 to 2013 Gutwirth was the holder of a ten-year research fellowship in the framework of the VUB Research Contingent for his project Sciences and the democratic constitutional state: a mutual transformation process. At the beginning of this fellowship he founded LSTS, which he still leads. His interests include privacy and data protection and more generically, the role of law amongst other practices such as science, technology, politics and ethics. In addition Gutwirth does research in the field of theory of criminal law and in human rights. Gutwirth has been (co-)promotor of numerous research projects at European, national and subnational level (FP6, FP7, IUAP, FWO, IWT-SBO, …). He (co-)authored five books, was the (co-) editor of a range edited volumes and has published numerous articles in Dutch, French and English. He is and has been a member of several editorial boards of scientific journals and scientific commissions. He is currently Vice-Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Law and Criminology

Niels van Dijk is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Law Science Technology and Society (LSTS) and at the Institute for Computer and Information Sciences (ICIS) at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is also a lecturer in legal philosophy at the Saint-Louis University (FUSL) in Brussels. Niels van Dijk holds a PhD degree in law by the VUB, and LLM and MA degrees in law and philosophy by the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses mainly on the challenges posed by new digital technologies to intellectual rights, privacy and data protection and the broader role of law within these developments. Further fields of his competence include: legal theory, philosophy of science, STS, impact assessments and ethnography of legal institutions. As a researcher he has participated in several national and European (FP 6 & 7) projects. He currently holds a postdoctoral mandate from the Flanders Research Foundation for the research project “Rights in Design. The technological reconstitution of privacy and data protection”. He further is a member of the Steering Committee of the Belgian network for Science & Technology in Society studies. In 2015 he received the biannual VWR Dissertation Award (2013-2014) for best PhD thesis in legal theory in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Ms. Alessia Tanas is a Ph.D fellow at the Centre for Law Science Technology and Society (LSTS). She is an expert on the EU policy and regulatory framework for energy and has eight years professional experience in the EU energy sector in Brussels. Her academic interest focuses on the ethical aspects arising from energy use in Europe and the resulting implications on the EU agenda. She currently participates in the European research project PARENT on smart grids that attempts to engage users in behaviours conducive to the reduction of their energy consumption. This involves an interdisciplinary assessment of the impacts of smart energy management technologies on ethical, social and legal norms related to privacy, data protection and other fundamental rights.

 

The University of Edinburgh:

Prof. Charles Raab professorial Fellow in Politics and International Relations (formerly Professor of Government) and Director of CRISP (Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy). He engages in research on topics involving information practice, policy and regulation. These include privacy/data protection, surveillance, security, ethics, and resilience, on which he has prolifically published books, articles, and chapters. He has advised on or helped to write governmental and public agencies’ reports and investigations, including those of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), the Office of the Information Commissioner (UK), the Equality and Human Rights Commission (UK), the New Zealand Law Commission, and the UK House of Lords’ study, Surveiillance: Citizens and the State (2008-09). He has advised on many academic projects, co-chairs the UK police service’s Independent Digital Ethics Panel for Policing (IDEPP), and is a member of the EUROPOL Data Protection Experts Network (EDEN). His EU Framework project collaboration included PRIME, IRISS, PRISMS and SIAM, and he has held grants from the ESRC, the NSF, and government departments. At Edinburgh, he is associated with ISSTI and with the Centre for Research on Security (CeReS).

Dr. Antti Silvast works as a research fellow in the interdisciplinary Energy & Society research group in School of Social and Political Science and has a PhD from the University of Helsinki. He also was researcher for UNDERSTAND (a training project for energy emergency operators) funded by DG Education and Culture. His research addresses emerging sustainable energy infrastructures, technical and market coordination of energy systems in particular. He has collaborated with Princeton University; National Emergency Supply Agency Finland; the Finnish Energy Industries and Aalto University, Power Systems Research Group.

 
 

 

Prof. Robin Williams As Director of the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, he promotes the development, conduct and dissemination of interdisciplinary and social science research across many areas including: Information and Communication Technologies; Life Science Innovation; Environmental Innovation and sustainability. He led 5 European Union Framework Programmes projects (Cleaner Technology, SLIM, SIGIS, ITSAFE, China EU Standards) and was partner in many other social science and interdisciplinary projects (PRIME, PRECEPT, II-FP5, PITA, ParcelCall, FLOWS, NO-REST, AT-BEST, MyFIRE). He advised DG Information Society Technologies on the integration of social sciences in Framework Programmes. His research, involving over 60 external awards, is conducted in collaboration with other social scientists and with practitioners and technical specialists from across the Colleges of Science and Engineering and of Medicine. His personal research addresses the design and use of ICTs and the engagement of users therein

Prof. Brian Wynne is formerly a Research Professor of Science Studies at CSEC and at the ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) at Lancaster University. He was the co-founder of CSEC and the associate director of Cesagen. His work has covered technology and risk assessment, public risk perceptions, and public understanding of science, focusing on the relations between expert and lay knowledge, and policy decision-making. Wynne has coordinated and acted as UK partner on several successful EU projectsPersons involved in the project
 

 

 

The University of Surrey:

Professor Nigel Gilbert, Director of the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, has a first degree in Engineering, and a doctorate in Sociology. He has been successful in obtaining research funding for 16 Framework Programme projects since 1989 as coordinator or as consortium member. He has written and edited twenty-three books and about 180 academic papers on topics ranging from the sociology of science to the computerisation of social security benefits and human computer interaction. He is an author of the standard textbook on social simulation, Simulation for the Social Scientist (Open University Press, second edition, 2005, with Klaus G. Troitzsch), and more recently, Agent-based models (Sage Publication, 2008), and is editor of Computational Social Science (four volumes, Sage, 2010).

 

Dr. Kristrún Gunnarsdóttir, Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, has a disciplinary background in Philosophy, Fine Arts, Information Systems Design and Engineering, and a doctorate in Sociology. She worked as an ICT professional (1994-2004) in conceptual-visual design, development and operations management, and on completing her PhD (2010), she became a Research Associate and PI on FP7-funded projects (Science in Society, http://neicts.lancs.ac.uk). She has written on the societal and ethical aspects of ICTs, the logics in visionary work and ICT designs, and the expectations of interdisciplinarity in innovation assessments and RRI. She is also an author of publications on public engagements regarding ICT-based interventions, and on the politics of a free movement of data/information (Springer 2016)

 

 

Dr. Maria Xenitidou, is a research fellow at CRESS with undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications on International Relations, Politics, Identity, Migration and Research Methodology and hold a PhD in Geography from the University of Sheffield (thesis titled “National Identity and Otherness in Greek Speakers’ Talk about Immigration”). Xenitidous main interests are in identity and belonging (including citizenship, migration and claims-making), intergroup relations (including prejudice and racism), sense-making, contingency measures and social innovations, and discursive approaches.

 

 

Tim Watt, is Social Media Coordinator, and in-house journalist for the CANDID Horizon 2020 project. Tim is an experienced content marketer specialising in communicating the benefits of research projects, by enhancing visibility and reputation through engaging writing and other content.