Stefaan Verhulst

Coursebook by BJ Ard & Rebecca Crootof: “Technology law (“techlaw”) is the study of how law and technology foster, restrict, and otherwise shape each other’s evolution. New technologies raise questions for every area of the law, and the strategies and rhetorical arguments deployed to regulate technology and its impacts are helpful tools to have across legal contexts. Accordingly, this coursebook identifies common techlaw questions and presents a methodology for thoughtfully resolving them.

This coursebook is intended to be accessible and useful to all students, regardless of career interests or prior experience with technology. Each chapter includes “Comprehension Checks,” intended to be addressed by the reader in context, and “Discussion Questions” and “Putting It All Together” closers, which we have found to be helpful springboards for class discussion…(More)”.

Study published by the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and the Europeana Foundation: “This document identifies a pathway to establishing the core of the European Books Data Commons: a shared infrastructure that would make the full text of millions of digitised public domain books held by libraries across Europe available for re-use in forms optimised for AI developers and researchers working with large-scale language datasets. If implemented, the EBDC would constitute a significant contribution to the European Commission’s 2025 Data Union Strategy, which aims to ensure that European AI developers have access to high quality data including cultural heritage collections.

The remainder of the document is structured as follows. Section 2 sets out the proposition — the demand for digitised public domain books and the supply-side constraints that currently prevent access to existing collections. Section 3 presents the recommended implementation scenario, arrived at through a process of developing, testing, and progressively refining a set of options with library partners and the steering group. Section 4 addresses the governance of the system and its relationship to related European initiatives. Section 5 outlines the way forward, including a two-track implementation approach, an integrated timeline, and indicative cost estimates. Section 6 makes the case for acting now to build the European Books Data Commons…(More)”.

Project developed by iMMAP, CartONG, HOT and Kobo with the formal support and endorsement of ICVA Network, InterAction, H2H Network and Sphere: “… Humanitarian Information Landscape Assessment (HILA) is an innovative framework designed to measure the health of humanitarian information ecosystems and identify the systemic barriers that prevent evidence-based decision-making on the ground.

Building on country-level applications, the global HILA combines a standardized online survey for humanitarian practitioners with a live public dashboard — updated in real time and repeated twice a year to track change over time.

The result is a global monitoring system — not a one-off snapshot — providing humanitarian leaders, donors, and operational partners with a unique, comparable evidence base to guide investment, coordination, and response…(More)”.

Report by DemNext: “Cities are messy, complex, diverse, beautiful places – they are where most people live. Even for those who don’t live in a city, there are policies, budgets, and place-based strategies implemented by decision makers which shape the places they call home. From the neighbourhoods we live in, the public services we have access to, and how we move around, cities and regions are the places where decision making impacts us greatly. At the same time, most people don’t have opportunities to truly shape these decisions. Citizens’ assemblies offer a way to tackle this when they are embedded as part of our democratic infrastructure.

Establishing an ongoing citizens’ assembly while building supportive civic infrastructure requires a completely different mindset than implementing a one-off assembly. It needs to be approached like a marathon, not a sprint. Investing early in what comes after a first assembly is fundamental to building new democratic institutions. Doing so leads to catalytic ripple effects that impact how we fund, innovate, reimagine, and intentionally cultivate new forms of democratic infrastructure.

Those ripple effects begin with decisions made long before assembly members convene for the first time. Starting with this mindset makes it easier to consider how a citizens’ assembly, and those involved in implementing it, are not only people delivering a process, but catalysts for wider change with enduring impact. (Chwalisz & McKinney, 2026).

To us, this means establishing citizens’ assemblies not as one-off events, dependent on political will at a moment in time, but as new institutions, to which power can be shifted. It’s about the establishment of an institution that is embedded in law, parliamentary rules, or binding policy frameworks and the shift in norms and cultures that goes along with this.

We offer guidance and inspiration about how to get there, reflecting on the lessons from DemocracyNext’s Cities Programme and our experience as advisors to two cities and two regions across three continents – Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, Vilnius, Lithuania, Kerewan, The Gambia, and Central Oregon, USA. We also dive into the impact that the assembly has on members and others involved in the entire process...(More)“

Report by the UK Government Office for Science (GO-Science): “… first developed a set of AI 2030 scenarios in 2023, which were published in 2025 (Government Office for Science, 2025). These aimed to help policymakers navigate uncertainty surrounding the future of AI and prepare for its risks and opportunities. They have been used widely across government and are in regular demand.

Since 2023, the AI landscape has changed profoundly, with AI capabilities, investment, and adoption having increased significantly, alongside dramatic shifts in geopolitics. GO-Science has therefore produced an updated set of scenarios to account for these developments, outlined in this report…(More)”.

Book by Chris Haufe: “There is in certain circles a widely held belief that the only proper kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge. This belief often runs parallel to the notion that legitimate knowledge is obtained when a scientist follows a rigorous investigative procedure called the ‘scientific method’. Chris Haufe challenges this idea. He shows that what we know about the so-called scientific method rests fundamentally on the use of finely tuned human judgments directed toward certain questions about the natural world. He suggests that this dependence on judgment in fact reveals deep affinities between scientific knowledge and another, equally important, sort of comprehension: that of humanistic creative endeavour. His wide-ranging and stimulating new book uncovers the unexpected unity underlying all our efforts – whether scientific or arts-based – to understand human experience. In so doing, it makes a vital contribution to broader conversation about the value of the humanities in an increasingly STEM-saturated educational culture…(More)”.

Report by Akash Kapur, and Gillian Rosenberg: “The AI conversation is dominated by a preoccupation with frontier capabilities. Yet a more consequential challenge is the gap between what AI can do and what it is actually doing in the world. This adoption gap is particularly acute in the Global South, where AI is deployed amid resource constraints, limited state capacity, and fragile institutions. This report sets out to map these adoption challenges, in order to understand how AI can be better embedded into existing workflows and social structures. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and case studies, it builds this case through granular, ground-up evidence, pushing back against the abstraction that so often characterizes the field.

Key Findings

• AI adoption is fundamentally a problem of alignment with real-world systems, not model capability; contextual fit matters more than benchmark performance.
• Adoption is a whole-of-society challenge that cannot be resolved at the technical layer alone.
• Constraint is generative as well as limiting: Resource scarcity is producing distinctive forms of innovation—frugal engineering, modular compute, edge deployment, participatory data collection—that may have relevance well beyond the Global South.
• Adoption gaps are unevenly distributed and tend to compound for already excluded populations, particularly women…(More)”.

Paper by Santiago Andrés Azcoitia: “…we examine whether the Data Governance Act (DGA) regime on data intermediation services is adequate to achieve its intended purpose of fostering trust, neutrality, and sustainability in data sharing. We review the state of the art in data intermediation technologies in both industry and academia and discuss its interplay with the regulation. We identify friction points with existing data markets and anticipate challenges in emerging contexts, such as intermediaries delivering machine learning models or using confidential computing techniques. Finally, we explore potential amendments to, or interpretations of, the DGA required to promote a data intermediation model that is both economically viable and neutral…(More)”.

Paper by Michael B. Hawes et al: National Statistical Organizations (NSOs) and other groups often use the term “for statistical purposes only” in communication with prospective respondents, data users and other stakeholders. This term also provides an important anchor for many NSO decisions on operations and ethics. Although public communication often omits a clear operational definition of this term, this paper will show that reviews of underlying laws and policies identify two predominant criteria: (1) production of statistical information about relatively large population aggregates, with the intention of creating a general public benefit; and (2) protection of the confidentiality of data collected about data subjects and a related prohibition against the use of information provided by or about data subjects for legal or regulatory action against those individuals or organizations. We then explore how this term exists, and is often interpreted, within a much broader landscape of legal requirements and of scientific and professional codes of practice, and provide a broader definition for consideration based on these and other ethical frameworks. This paper closes by highlighting several areas that warrant further discussion to better position NSOs to navigate these challenges in the future…(More)”

Article by Hossein Bahadorizadeh & Mohammad Reza Malek: “Effective flood management in urban planning relies on accurate, timely data, which can be sourced from social media platforms for real-time post-flood damage information. However, many social media content lack location, creating a significant challenge for spatial analysis. This study addresses this gap by proposing a novel framework to infer the locations of post-flood events extracted from social media content, leveraging flood vulnerability maps and a structured knowledge base. The methodology involves four key steps, extracting flood-related events using hypergraph-based clustering; creating bounding boxes for potential event locations by integrating flood-related keywords, spatial proximity, and temporal patterns; constructing a knowledge base incorporating flood vulnerability criteria; and inferring event locations by comparing non-geo-tagged events against the knowledge base rules and aligning them with spatiotemporal bounding boxes. By analyzing 150,000 social media posts from flood-affected regions in southwestern Iran, such as Ahvaz, between April 6–16, 2019, the method identified 27 flood and 1200 post-flood events; of the 970 non-geo-tagged events, 69 were inferred inside the study region, while the remaining 901 were inferred out-of-region and were not mapped. Evaluation metrics, including 70% Precision, 77% Recall, and 74% F1 Score, show the model’s effectiveness in flood event detection, while spatial accuracy metrics, such as 2.15 km Mean Error Distance and 0.65 Mean Intersection over Union, confirm its reliability in location inference. The study highlights social media data’s potential for real-time flood management, especially in areas with scarce geotagged content…(More)”.