CS Special Seminar: Corinna Coupette "Code for Law and Law for Code: Toward Responsible Regulation for Complex Social Systems"

Code for Law and Law for Code: Toward Responsible Regulation for Complex Social Systems

Corinna Coupette
KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm Resilience Center
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Abstract: Contemporary information societies constitute complex adaptive systems that are strongly shaped by two interacting sets of rules: law and code. Recent advances in computing methods and technologies, combined with the increasing availability of data concerning every aspect of our lives, create unprecedented opportunities to tackle our world’s biggest challenges, but also unprecedented risks for individuals, societies, and our planet at large. To seize the opportunities and mitigate the risks, we need a productive exchange between computer scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, and legal scholars. In this talk, I will discuss different approaches to establishing such an exchange, from computational legal studies to ethical algorithm design. I will further describe how these approaches will help us achieve two long-term goals: developing a critical computational systems theory of law, and devising a transdisciplinary regulatory framework for responsible computing.

Bio: Corinna studied law at Bucerius Law School and Stanford Law School, completing her First State Exam in Hamburg in 2015. She obtained a PhD in law (Dr. iur.) from Bucerius Law School and a BSc in computer science from LMU Munich, both in 2018, as well as an MSc in computer science in 2020 and a PhD in computer science (Dr. rer. nat.) in 2023, both from Saarland University. Her legal dissertation was awarded the Bucerius Dissertation Award in 2018 and the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society in 2020, and her interdisciplinary research profile was recognized by the Caroline von Humboldt Prize for outstanding female junior scientists in 2022. Corinna is currently a Digital Futures Postdoctoral Fellow at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Stockholm Resilience Center, a Fellow at the Bucerius Center for Legal Technology and Data Science, and a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. The overarching goal of her research is to understand how we can combine code, data, and law to better model, measure, and manage complex systems (e.g., contemporary information societies). To this end, she explores novel ways of connecting computer science and law, such as using algorithms to collect and analyze legal data as networks, or formalizing and implementing legal and mathematical desiderata for responsible data-centric machine learning with graphs.