One of the areas of legal expertise our Faculty is established in is European technology law, as the Faculty is home to the  Security, Technology and e-Privacy (STeP) Research Group. The group is involved in research in three main areas in their broadest sense, which are very much inter-related: security, technology, and privacy. Research within these three branches covers a wide variety of topics, such as AI in healthcare, technology and sustainability, cybersecurity, deepfakes, intellectual property in digital assets, surveillance, voice recognition and biometric data, self-driving vehicles, online privacy, energy data, and more.

Much of this expertise in these areas is demonstrated, and honed, through various, multi-million euro research projects and project partnerships. These include:

• CSNN - Cybersecurity Noord-Nederland
• ELSA-NN – ELSA AI lab Northern Netherlands
• DATA CELLAR – Creating an energy dataspace
• CRiTERIA – Comprehensive data-driven risk and threat assessment methods for early and reliable identification, validation and analysis of migration-related risks
• TREIO - TRaining on European Investigation Order
• TReSPAsS-ETN - TRaining in Secure and PrivAcy-preserving biometricS
• KnowGraphs - Knowledge Graphs at Scale
• INSPECTr - Intelligence Network and Secure Platform for Evidence Correlation and Transfer

Expertise is not only demonstrated in the academic sphere and for funding bodies, but also through educational programmes. For example the Future Learn online courses  Understanding the GDPR and Protecting Health Data in the Modern Age: Getting to Grips with the GDPR.   Understanding the GDPR  is ranked as one of the best online courses of all time by online course aggregator class central.

Further expertise through education is demonstrated by teaching in the Technology Law track of our International and European Law LLB programme, and our LLM progammes Technology Law and Innovation, and Health and Technology Law. The STeP group also organizes workshops open to Faculty staff and students - known as STeP Talks -  on a wider variety of topics related to tech law. Together with a speaker from the STeP research group, an invited speaker from a different institution present on current developments in the field of law and technology

Complementing the European technology law focus, the Faculty also has existing projects and programmes focusing on developments in Dutch law on technology. Knowing that technology law is a fast developing field, staff are continously pursuing new projects to further the Faculty's profile in this ever growing important legal domain. Recent projects and initiatives include research on ownership of digital assets,  automatization of witness statements in criminal cases using AI, and human oversight of AI systems.

If you are a law student interested in pursuing a career in the field of technology law and related legal fields, we warmly you welcome you to learn more about our Faculty expertise and programmes through any of our Masters Week or Open Day events held throughout the year. 

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Interested in more information about our LLB and LLM programmes? You can ask questions directly to the Faculty by filling out our information request form.