Francien Dechesne is Associate Professor of Ethics and Digital Technologies at the Center for Law and Digital Technologies (eLaw) of the Leiden Law School. She is Programme Director of the Advanced Master in Law & Digital Technologies, Director of Education at eLaw and initiator and overall coordinator of the university wide Minor Programme on Artificial Intelligence and Society (developed in the context of Leiden’s SAILS network on AI).

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Biography

Francien Dechesne is Associate Professor of Ethics and Digital Technologies at the Center for Law and Digital Technologies (eLaw) of the Leiden Law School. She is Programme Director of the Advanced Master in Law & Digital Technologies, Director of Education at eLaw and initiator and overall coordinator of the university wide Minor Programme on Artificial Intelligence and Society (developed in the context of Leiden’s SAILS network on AI).

With a background in computer science, mathematics and philosophy, her research as well as her responsibilities in education center around interdisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, and its interactions with society: demystification of the technology, identifying and explaining societal impacts (to those affected as well as those involved in the development), and investigating different strategies towards responsible AI.

Since shifting her research from Formal Methods in Computer Science to Ethics and Digital Technologies in 2009, she has worked on projects around privacy by design, value sensitive design, socio-technical cybersecurity, data protection, responsible data-analytics, fairness in algorithmic systems, and (currently) ethics and regulation of AI.

She is currently one of the researchers in the ELSA Lab AI-MAPS, coordinated from Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). At eLaw Leiden, she co-led a project on AI Ethics at the Dutch police (with Virginia Dignum of Umeå University/TU Delft). She coordinated and conducted research in the SCALES project in the NWO Responsible Innovation program. This research project involved the question how to strike a balance between public, commercial and individual interests in data-driven innovations.

She is one of the founding members of the national initiative “Teaching Responsible AI (TRAI)”, advocating for integrated attention to societal implications and responsibility in computer science, data science and AI curricula.

Francien Dechesne holds a PhD in mathematical logic (Tilburg University and TU Eindhoven, 2005). She conducted research on formal methods for verification of security protocols (TU Eindhoven, 2005-2009) and on Ethics and Information Technology (TU Delft, 2009-2014). Before starting her academic career, she worked as IT Management professional in mainframe environments (Pink Elephant bv, 1997-2000). As a student of foundations of mathematics (in particular: intuitionistic mathematics) and philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen, she was visiting scholar at UCLA to study descriptive set theory (VSB Scholarship, 1996).

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