Katja de Vries

Katja de Vries is an assistant professor in public law at Uppsala University funded by the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation. She is also affiliated to the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (Stockholm) and the Center for Law, Science, Technology and Society (Brussels). Her current research focuses on the challenges that AI-generated content ('deepfakes' or 'synthetic data') poses to data protection, intellectual property and other fields of law.

Currently (2020-24) Katja de Vries is conducting research within her individual research project “CreAI: Co-existing with creative Artificial Intelligence within the limits of EU law. Data protection, intellectual property, freedom of expression and cybercrime” funded by the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation.

Katja de Vries and André Holzapfel (Associate Professor at the Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology) are joint principle investigators in the "An Empirical Perspective on Challenges and Opportunities of the European Data Act for SMEs in the Swedish Creative Industry" project (2023-25) funded by WASP-HS in the "Networking Excellence Between Universities" call. In this project De Vries and Holzapfel together supervise a postdoc researcher that is shared between the Department of Law (UU) and Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design (KTH Royal Institute of Technology).

De Vries is also part of:

- "ADM GOV - The automated administration: governance of ADM in the public sector" (2022-26) which is funded within the Research programme "Future Challenges in the Nordics – People, Culture and Society" of the SLS (Society of Swedish Literature in Finland). Principle investigator: Dr. Stefan Larsson (Associate Professor in Technology and Social Change, Lund University). De Vries will be conducting research within ADM-GOV mainly under the period 2024-26.

- "The digital right to repair: a study of legal ideals, public controversies and messy practices" (2023-25) funded by the Swedish Research Council within the call on "research into the social consequences of digitalisation." Principal Investigator: Dr. Sebastian Abrahamsson (Sociology, Uppsala University). The project is a collaboration between the Departments of Sociology (Uppsala University), Industrial Engineering and Management (Uppsala University) and Law (Uppsala University).

Prior to her current position as an assistant professor in public law at Uppsala University, Katja de Vries worked as a postdoc at the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute at Stockholm University (2019-2020), the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University (2019) and the Technologies in Practice research group, Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen (2018). In 2014-2016 she was a fulltime researcher at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) in the Computer Science Department at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (the Netherlands) within the USEMP project. The project resulted in the DataBait transparency tool that showed users of social networks which sensitive and commercially interesting information can be derived from their data.

In October 2016 Katja de Vries defended her PhD thesis "Machine learning/Informational fundamental rights. Makings of sameness and difference" (available upon request). She has published on a wide range of legal and philosophical topics and has co-edited ‘Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn’ (Routledge, 2013). Prior to her doctoral research she studied at Sciences Po in Paris, obtained three masters degrees with distinction at Leiden University (Civil Law, Cognitive Psychology and Philosophy) and graduated at Oxford University (Magister Juris).

De Vries's main research interest are the challenges posed by machine learning to privacy, data protection, antidiscrimination and intellectual property law. Further fields of expertise include: philosophy of technology, legal theory, and science and technology studies (STS). She has taught the advanced BA-course “Law, Ethics and Politics” at the Faculty of Law of Saint-Louis University (Brussels, Belgium), the MSc-course 'Critical Big Data Management' at the IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and contributed to the advanced course in Legal Informatics at the Law Faculty of Stockholm University.

De Vries has participated in several European (FP6, FP7 and H2020) interdisciplinary research projects. Next to her research within the aforementioned USEMP project, De Vries has also been an active member of the European “Living in Surveillance Societies”-network, and has contributed with her research to three other topical EU projects: FIDIS (exploring the future of identity in the information society), SIAM (creating a decision support tool for the acquisition of security technologies in public transportation sites in alignment with ethical and legal requirements), and CANDID (Checking Assumptions aND promoting responsibility In smart Development projects).

Publications:

See Google Scholar

Current research projects:

During June 2020 till June 2024 the lion's share of Katja de Vries' research (0.6 ftp) takes place in her individual research project “CreAI: Co-existing with creative Artificial Intelligence within the limits of EU law. Data protection, intellectual property, freedom of expression and cybercrime” funded by the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation.

From June 2020 till December 2024 Katja de Vries is involved in the AIR Lund project. AIR Lund (Användning av artificiell intelligens inom registerforskning/Artificially Intelligent Use of Registers) is an interdisciplinary research program that studies how artificial intelligence and machine learning methods applied on the Swedish register infrastructure can increase quality and efficiency of health care, while addressing well-founded ethical and legal concerns related to the use of big data and complex algorithms in clinical practice. The main contribution of De Vries in the project is to act as the second supervisor (first supervisor: Stefan Larsson) of PhD student Charlotte Högberg whose research takes a social science perspective on the use of AI in healthcare, for example in relation to the use of AI to interpret mammograms and algorithmic decision-support systems in emergency rooms.

Katja de Vries and André Holzapfel (Associate Professor at the Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology) are joint principle investigators in the "An Empirical Perspective on Challenges and Opportunities of the European Data Act for SMEs in the Swedish Creative Industry" project (2023-25) funded by WASP-HS in the "Networking Excellence Between Universities" call. In this project De Vries and Holzapfel together supervise a postdoc researcher that is shared between the Department of Law (UU) and Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design (KTH Royal Institute of Technology).

De Vries is also conducting research within:

- "ADM GOV - The automated administration: governance of ADM in the public sector" (2022-26) which is funded within the Research programme "Future Challenges in the Nordics – People, Culture and Society" of the SLS (Society of Swedish Literature in Finland). Principle investigator: Dr. Stefan Larsson (Associate Professor in Technology and Social Change, Lund University). De Vries will be conducting research within ADM-GOV mainly under the period 2024-26.

- "The digital right to repair: a study of legal ideals, public controversies and messy practices" (2023-25) funded by the Swedish Research Council within the call on "Research into the social consequences of digitalisation." Principal Investigator: Dr. Sebastian Abrahamsson (Sociology, Uppsala University). The project is a collaboration between the Departments of Sociology (Uppsala University), Industrial Engineering and Management (Per Fors, Uppsala University) and Law (Katja de Vries, Uppsala University).