On Monday the 22 April, the LINAS Doctoral Training Programme (LINAS DTP) at QUB hosted our second annual student-led conference.

When we began our preparations for this year’s conference, we knew that we needed an excellent Keynote Speaker and corresponding theme which reflects the inter-disciplinary work that we do at LINAS.

Dr Edoardo Celeste, an expert in Digital Constitutional Law from Dublin City University very kindly accepted our invitation to be our Keynote Speaker. Turning to our theme; after many scribbles and variations of phrasing we decided on: ‘The Automation Generation.’ This theme encompassed the inter-disciplinary nature of LINAS, with research spanning across Law, Computer Science, Maths, Physics, History, Anthropology, Politics, Psychology and Sociology.

After advertising our call for abstracts, we accepted presentations from 16 high calibre speakers from an array of universities across the UK, Ireland, Poland, Belgium, Spain and Denmark. After many months of planning, Monday the 22^nd came around very quickly.  To top it off, we were delighted to welcome all our speakers in-person.

The day began promptly at 9.15am, with Professor Kieran McEvoy delivering opening remarks. Professor McEvoy warmly welcomed everyone to our conference and talked about our research, everyday life in the ‘Mitchell Institute’ (where the LINAS Scholars are based), and the collegiality that we have fostered on the programme.

Soon after, Dr Celeste delivered a fascinating keynote talk entitled: ‘Digital Constitutionalism Theories: Methodology and Research Agenda.’ The Canada Room was full!  Everyone was engaged with this thought-provoking talk surrounding Digital Constitutional Law, which focused on the myriad ways in which constitutional law is impacted by digital technologies.  In addition, how associated rights have collectively altered the digital ecosystem. Dr Celeste highlighted the importance of this ‘constitutional moment’, and research to stimulating the ongoing conversation about how constitutional principles should be formulated for the digital society.

Following a short tea-break, we began the LINAS Forum.  Due to last year’s success, we decided to repeat the forum style again.  Our First Year LINAS Doctoral Scholars had the opportunity to introduce themselves and their research, with Dr Deepak Padmanabhan taking on the role of chair.  We heard presentations from: Caragh Duffy, Felix Elliott, Adam Kirk-Smith, Anna Hollis, Habeeb Ramos, Cecile Harrault, and last but certainly not least, Samantha Darrah! They each offered excellent summaries of their work to date!

Due to the high volume of excellent applications to our conference, we decided that it would be a real shame to not make the most of our day, time and many helping hands! To facilitate this, we organised parallel panel sessions across the mid-morning and afternoon. To ensure the smooth running of the parallel panel’s we needed two reliable MCs who know how to talk! I had no doubts that David Mark and James Sweeney would be the correct people to ask. They both did an excellent job, as everything ran extremely well and according to plan – of course assisted by our fantastic Josh Weston, Valerie Miller, Louise Milligan and all the LINAS Doctoral Scholars throughout the day. (Thank you all very much!)

Professor Muiris MacCarthaigh chaired Panel 1 in the Canada Room, with presentations surrounding the ‘Public Sector, Accountability and Society’.  We heard a variety of interesting presentations covering regulation, accountability types in AI schools, climate awareness through digital technologies and understanding the cyber security governance for autonomous vessels. This was excellent and a series of thought-provoking questions and answers followed the final presentation.

This occurred at the same time as Panel 2 in the Moot Court Room. Presentations explored the ‘Implications of AI on the Creative Industry’ and was chaired by Professor Giancarlo Frosio. Unfortunately, I missed the presentations in the Moot Court Room, for being unable to be in two places at once! Nevertheless, I heard that all four presentations were fascinating and that lively discussions were had, regarding AI and its impacts more specifically on patent law, gaming, music and the online space.

It was great to see everything take shape and fall into place on the day without any hiccups – that I was made of aware of any way! Over our lunch break we wanted to capture a group photo with as many of our speakers and attendees as possible, as well as a photo of the organising committee.  I ran (literally) to ask if a friendly passer-by could take a few photos of our rather large group.  I think most people have their eyes open in this one …!

We returned after a lovely lunch for Panel 3 and 4.

Panel 3, ‘Surveillance, Threat and Victimisation’ was chaired by Dr Teresa Degenhardt in the Canada Room. This was a super interesting panel (although I spoke on this panel and therefore may be slightly biased…) that discussed issues regarding cyber-crime and victimisation in online spaces/social media, the use of surveillance technologies in public and private spaces and female privacy rights. Similar themes and issues were raised throughout the four presentations; therefore, questions were facilitated across the four presenters after the final presentation, which became more of a panel discussion. 

Panel 4, ‘AI Through Scientific Discovery’ was chaired by Dr Sanda Scott-Hayward in the Moot Court Room. These four fantastic speakers discussed a variety of themes across their panel including: are objects in space real or bogus, machine learning and open quantum networks, preventing errors in AI regulatory debates and using tangled program graphs to detect abnormalities through ECG Classification.

Some re-charging was required with tea, coffee and light refreshments, before beginning our final panels of the conference.

Professor John Morison chaired Panel 5, ‘AI and the Changing Legal Order’ in the Canada Room.  Presentations discussed the impacts of AI on the judicial duty to state reasons, addressing bias and challenges in judicial analytics, navigating the digital jurisprudence era and distributed autonomous organisations.  Once again, questions were facilitated across all four presenters after they had finished due to the similarities of themes and issues raised.

At the same time, Dr Mike Bourne chaired Panel 6, ‘Regulation and Application of Data in Society’ in the Moot Court Room.  With three excellent speakers on this panel, discussions surrounded the legal challenges of AI in the public sector, the proportionality debate in the digital age and finally the function of data protection in society.

Similarly to the start of the day, everyone returned to the Canada Room for closing remarks.  This was facilitated by Professor John Morison, to reflect on the day and the interesting discussions had throughout. It was lovely to have so many people in one room, from so many different places, learning from each other and sharing networks!

Post-conference, all speakers and attendees were invited for some drinks to have the opportunity to chat and reflect on what we had learned from each other more informally.  It was particularly great to get chatting to those who had travelled to Belfast for the first time! Everyone seemed to really enjoy visiting QUB, attending the conference and getting to meet each other. We hope that year on year the LINAS Conference will continue to be a success, and bring together early career researchers working in similar areas, from near and far to share their latest findings!

Many thanks once again to all who were involved with the organisation, to our presenters, attendees, the LINAS Team, the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute and the Leverhulme Trust.

 

Anna Montgomery is in the second year of her LINAS Doctoral Training Scholarship. 

The LINAS Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) seeks to develop a cohort of Doctoral Scholars who can address the implications of massive-scale data processing, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for both the actual operation of algorithmically driven public decision-making in wider society, and within science and engineering.