
Alain Strowel is professor at the University Saint-Louis, Brussels and at the UCLouvain where he teaches courses in intellectual property, IT and media law. He also gives courses in two advanced masters in intellectual property and IT law at the KULeuven and Munich IP Law Center. In 2020-2021, he is fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society (Berlin). Alain is a lawyer at the Brussels bar since 1988 and arbiter for WIPO domain names dispute resolution system. He has been appointed as a trustee of the European Law Academy (ERA, Trier, 2012-2019) and was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2012. Since 2019, he chairs the Intellectual Property working group of All European Academies (ALLEA) to which he contributed since 2012. Alain graduated in law, economics and philosophy at the UCLouvain and the University of Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Law from UCLouvain. Today his research focuses on data governance, Artificial Intelligence issues and the regulation of online platforms.

Christophe Lazaro is an Associate Professor of “Law & Society” at the Centre for Philosophy of Law (CPDR) of UCLouvain, where he is conducting an interdisciplinary research on the legal and social impacts of new technologies on human agency and subjectivity (prosthetics, robotics, artificial intelligence). He received his PhD in Law from the European University Institute (EUI). He also has a post-graduate degree in Anthropology and a graduate degree in Philosophy. As an academic expert, he carried out research in several European and national projects and drafted reports for Belgian federal institutions, the European Commission and the Council of Europe. Since December 2019, he is a member of the new Digital Ethics Pilot Committee, which is part of the French National Advisory Committee on Ethics for Life and Health Sciences (CCNE). He is also an affiliated researcher at the Laboratory for Prospective Anthropology of UCLouvain (LAAP). His last book, La prothèse et le droit (IRJS Editions), dedicated to prosthetic technologies and the legal fabrication of hybrid bodies, won in 2016 the French Law Book Award.

Anne-Lise Sibony has been teaching European law at UCLouvain since 2015. Her areas of expertise are the European internal market law, competition law and consumer law. Her research has always been interdisciplinary, from her thesis on the Courts and economic reasoning, in which she examined how competition case law integrates economic reasoning, to her current work on behavioural science and its interplay with the law. Anne-Lise began her academic career after studying law and economics in Paris (where she comes from). She studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and obtained a Master on Regulation from the London School of Economics. With Alberto Alemanno, she co-directed the first book that analyzes the contributions of behavioral sciences to European law (Nudge and the Law: A European Perspective, Hart, 2015). She publishes regularly contributions on internal market and consumer law. Anne-Lise is also a visiting professor at KULeuven where she teaches the course “Behavioral Sciences and the Law”.

Paul Belleflamme graduated in economics at the University of Namur (1991), where he received his doctoral degree in economics (1997). He also holds a Master of Arts in Economics from Columbia University (1992). In 1998, he became lecturer in economics at Queen Mary University of London, where he obtained a Post Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) in November 2001. Since September 2002, Paul is professor of economics at UCLouvain, where he is attached to the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) and to the Louvain School of Management (LSM). Paul’s main research area is theoretical industrial organisation, with a special focus on innovation in the digital economy (which is also the main topic of his blog, www.IPdigIT.eu). Paul has published widely in leading economics journals and, with Martin Peitz, is the author of Industrial Organization: Markets and Strategies (Cambridge University Press, 2010 and 2015). Paul is a fellow of the CESifo Research Network. He is associate editor of Journal of Economics, co-editor of E-conomics and managing editor of Regards Economiques and DialogEco. He also served as associate editor of Information Economics and Policy, and of Review of Network Economics.

Rocco Bellanova is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Visiting Professor at the Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles (USL-B). His work sits at the intersection of politics, law, and science and technology studies. He studies how digital data become pivotal elements in the governing of societies. His research focuses on European security practices and the role of data protection therein. He is member of the Scientific Committee of the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conferences, and co-organizer of the annual Privacy Camp.

Enguerrand Marique holds a Master of Transnational, Comparative and Foreign Law (UCLouvain). During his master, he spent one year on exchange at Durham University (UK). Enguerrand also read International Commercial Law in the USA (LLM, University of California). Enguerrand started his doctoral researches in September 2016 and is a guest lecturer in business law at the UCLouvain (as of September 2020). Enguerrand’s doctoral research focuses on the improvement of trust in the digital economy through legal tools. With this regard, he assesses especially the scope of digital platforms’ responsibility exemptions, the licenses and certificates that third party providers need to obtain when listing goods or services on the platforms. He also looks at the failure of online reputation systems (e.g. online reviews and ratings) to mirror appropriately the quality of underlying goods and services.

Anne-Grace Kleczewski started her career as a corporate lawyer handling mergers and acquisitions in one of Belgium’s major law firms. Participating at a start-up contest and attending entrepreneurship themed conferences triggered her interest for the peculiarities of businesses operating online platforms, especially as part of the sharing economy. She has researched this topic and its regulatory implications in the framework of a project titled «Collaborative Cities for Collaborative Entrepreneurs ». She is currently working on a doctoral thesis under the supervision of prof. Edoardo Traversa and Alain Strowel, as a researcher at the law faculty of the Université Catholique de Louvain. Her thesis investigates the topic of secondary liability of online platforms under European law, approaching it in the context of the fight against illegal content online and the mounting pressure for greater responsibility to be endorsed by online platforms thereof. This also involves her addressing questions related to the artificial intelligence tools used for illegal content detection and other such purposes. Last but not least, she is currently working at the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law as a legal adviser for Benelux jurisdictions.

Gaëlle Fruy obtained her bachelor’s degree in law at the Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles in 2010 and her master’s degree in law at the Université Catholique de Louvain in 2012. She then enrolled at the Brussels bar where she practiced in the fields of commercial law, consumer protection, intellectual property, as well as new technologies law. She also pursued a complementary master’s degree in new technologies and intellectual property law from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven during this time, which she obtained in 2015. Gaëlle then joined the Private Law Center of the University of Saint-Louis – Brussels as an assistant professor in law of obligations. Her research covers civil and commercial contracts, consumer law as well as civil liability law. In 2020, she was admitted to the doctoral program in legal sciences with the research theme “The relevance and effectiveness of classic consumerist protections in light of the reality of connected and ‘intelligent’ objects” under the supervision of the professors Catherine Delforge and Alain Strowel.

Diana Mocanu is a master’s degree graduate in European Law from „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University in Iași, former trainee at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, former Senior Compliance Associate at Amazon Development Centre Iasi, Romania and keen on issues at the intersection of artificial intelligence and law. She is currently pursuing her PhD under the guidance of Prof. Christophe Lazaro, in the framework of the research project titled ‘Beyond persons and things: the legal status of AI’. Her proposal contends that to systematize the arguments in favor and against the three courses of action that the law could take as to AI (namely, granting personhood, reinforcing thinghood or creating a sui generis legal status) and to contribute new ones is what is needed in order to reach the goal of outlining a ‘portrait-robot’ of what the legal status of AI should look like in the EU.

Luc Desaunettes-Barbero is a Researcher at UCLouvain where he joined the multidisciplinary research project on Platform Regulation and Operations in the Sharing Economy (“PROSEco”). Before joining UClouvain, Luc prepared his PhD on the legal protection of trade secrets at the Max-Planck-Institute in Munich and the CEIPI in Strasbourg. His PhD proposes a comparative analysis of the US and UE legal systems and puts forwards a normative investigation of the justifications for trade secret legal protection. During his research, Luc prepared many different publications and participated in several hearings to inform the German and French lawmakers during the European Trade Secrets Directive transposition process. Luc also contributed to several scientific publications concerning the data-driven economy, artificial intelligence and the TRIPS agreements and he is also the co-authors of two manuals on competition law. He has been involved in several teaching activities and has already delivered courses for several universities, including LMU Munich, the University of Strasbourg, and UCLouvain.

Diletta De Cicco is an associate at Steptoe & Johnson. Her practice focused in assisting clients to comply with existing EU and national cybersecurity, data and privacy laws such as the NIS Directive, GDPR or the Cybersecurity Act, as well as upcoming developments such as the ePrivacy Regulation or the Digital Services Act. She has experience managing incidents in a cross-border context, where it is necessary to consider multiple cybersecurity, privacy, and other regulatory and enforcement frameworks. Her work helps clients in developing compliance and awareness programs and dealing with global data transfer mechanisms and the negotiation of data processing agreements. Diletta holds a Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E) certification, as well as a Data Protection Officer Certificate from Maastricht University. She is a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), where she acts as the Young Privacy Professional Leader for the Brussels KnowledgeNet Chapter. She is a scientific contributor at CRIDES, UCLouvain. She also plays an active role in the Digital Economy Committee at AmCham EU, which represents interests of American businesses in Europe.

Charles Helleputte heads the EU cybersecurity, data, and privacy practice at Steptoe. Charles provides practical and pragmatic advice to clients faced with increased accountability requirements towards users, helping organizations testing new responses, such as broader use of standards or certification mechanisms across the data lifecycle in a wide range of industries (regulated and not regulated). He is also experienced in representing clients before national and EU supervisory authorities and courts, including the Working Party No. 29 (now the European Data Protection Board). Charles holds a Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E) certification. He is the co-chair of the Brussels KnowledgeNet Chapter of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) and an appointed Legal Expert at ENISA, the European Union Cybersecurity Agency. He plays an active role in the Digital Economy Committee at AmCham EU, which represents interests of American businesses in Europe.

Pratiksha Ashok has joined the PROSECO Project (Platform Regulation and Operations in the Sharing Economy) in November 2019 as a PhD Researcher. Her research interests include consumer protection, platform and data law. She completed her Bachelor’s in Business Administration and Law in 2017 at Christ University, India where she continued to pursue her LLM in Corporate and Commercial Laws. She has written two dissertational theses on “A Paradox between Party Autonomy and Public Policy” and “Corporate Criminal Liability”. She is also a member of the Karnataka State Bar Council, India, 2017 and the Bar Council of India, 2018. In July 2019, she graduated from The University of Cambridge with a Master of Corporate Law.

Christine Frison is a FNRS post-doctoral researcher at the Law Faculty of UCLouvain, an associate researcher in the Government & Law research group (Law Faculty, University of Antwerp, Belgium) and an associate fellow at the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law (McGill University, Canada). She holds a Ph.D. jointly conducted at the Center for IT&IP Law (KU Leuven) & Center for Philosophy of Law (UCLouvain), a LL.M (Public International Law, ULB) after carrying out studies in France and the UK. Her area of expertise is international environmental law (IEL) with a focus on agrobiodiversity law/governance. Her latest research dives into digital sequence information on seed varieties, analysing how genetic resources sequencing is governed in international negotiations (Aubry, Frison et al 2021[CF1] ). She taught IEL (ULB, UAntwerp) + occasionally at SciencesPo Paris & other European universities) and has been a consultant for international organisations (e.g. Convention on Biological Diversity, United Nation Environment Program, International Development Law Organisation) & the Belgian Federal Ministry of Environment. She published numerous articles and four books, the last one being “Redesigning the Global Seed Commons: Law and Policy for Agrobiodiversity and Food Security”. She received three awards for her research.

Rossana Ducato is Lecturer of IT Law and Regulation at the University of Aberdeen, School of Law. She is also research fellow at the UCLouvain Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire Droit Entreprise et Société (CRIDES), where she is Module leader of the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet course “European IT Law by Design”.
Her research interests are always pursued in a comparative vein and range from Privacy and Data Protection to Consumer protection, Intellectual Property Law, Law and Design, and Law and Behavioural Science, with a special focus on the problems related to new technologies and their impact on society.
She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles and chapters in scholarly books about issues related to law and technology with particular attention to the platform economy, Big and Open Data, cloud computing, drones, research biobanks, and health information technologies.

Charles Pence is a philosopher and historian of science and technology, working as Chargé de cours and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science and Society (CEFISES) in the Institut supérieur de philosophy and Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He is also co-editor of the journal Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology. He holds an A.B. in philosophy from Princeton, and a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame. He has worked on questions of the ethics of warfare and emerging technologies, especially the question of the responsibilities of scientists in the context of dual-use research.