Teachers

We are extremely happy and proud that the following renowned scholars have accepted to teach at the summerschool: The case studies are developed by:

Teacher Biographies

Tamar Sharon

Tamar Sharon
Tamar Sharon is Professor of Philosophy, Digitalization and Society at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where she co-directs the Interdisciplinary Hub for Digitalization and Society (iHub). She researches how digitalization destabilizes public values – such as solidarity, autonomy and democracy – and how best to protect them. She has done research on posthumanism, self-tracking and the Quantified Self, and most recently on Big Tech expansionism into new societal spheres such as health and education as “sphere transgressions”. Tamar is a member of the European Commission’s European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) and the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences.

Sjoera Nas

Sjoer Nas
Sjoera Nas is a senior privacy consultant. She has worked for the Dutch data protection authority for almost 12 years, as internet and telecom expert. She was responsible for many national and international investigations, involving for example Google, Facebook and Microsoft. She has been rapporteur or co-rapporteur of many opinions of the Article 29 Working Party related to internet and technology. In May 2018, she switched to the Dutch privacy consultancy Privacy Company. She acts as an external DPO for a number of public sector organisations, and has conducted multiple Data Protection Impact Assessments on Big Tech cloud services for the Dutch government and for the Dutch education sector. Her extensive DPIA reports on the data processing by Google (Google Workspace), Zoom, AWS and Microsoft (Windows, Office, Intune, DKE and Copilot), are publicly available via http://www.slmmicrosoftrijk.nl/ and via http://www.surf.nl/ . Her work was covered by an article in the NYT. During the summer school, she hopes to exchange learnings from a new DPIA on a privacyproxy for multiple generative AI-models for the Dutch education sector.

Jennifer Cobbe

Jennifer Cobbe
Dr Jennifer Cobbe is Assistant Professor in Law and Technology in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. Before joining the Law Faculty, she was a Senior Research Associate in the Computer Science Department at Cambridge as part of the Compliant & Accountable Systems research group. Jennifer holds a PhD in Law and an LLM in Law and Governance from Queen's University, Belfast. She is generally interested in critical, interdisciplinary work on questions of power, political economy, and the law around internet platforms and informational capitalism, technological supply chains and infrastructures, and AI and automated decision-making.

Joris van Hoboken

Joris van Hoboken
Joris van Hoboken is a Professor of Information Law at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam. Joris works on questions related to law and digital infrastructure, including at the intersection of fundamental rights protection and the governance of platforms and internet-based services. Previously, Joris worked at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB), and at the Information Law Institute (ILI) at New York University Law School, the NYU Stern Center for Business & Human Rights and CornellTech. He obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam on the topic of search engines and freedom of expression (2012) and has graduate degrees in Law and Theoretical Mathematics. Joris was a member of the EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy, and a member of the Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online and Freedom of Expression. He is the founding director of the DSA Observatory project, with a focus on upcoming implementation and enforcement of the DSA and questions of access to justice and content moderation, and the principal investigator of the Research Group for the Law and Governance of Quantum Technologies.

Seda Gürses

Seda Gürses
Seda is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management. Her work focuses on privacy enhancing and protective optimization technologies (PETs and POTs), privacy engineering, as well as questions around software production in computational infrastructures, social justice and political economy as they intersect with computer science

Seeta Peña Gangadharan

Seeta Peña Gangadharan
Dr. Seeta Peña Gangadharan is Associate Professor in media and communications at LSE. Her work focuses on inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization, as well as questions of democracy, social justice, and technological governance. She co-leads two projects: Our Data Bodies, which examines the impact of data collection and data-driven technologies on U.S. marginalized communities, and Justice, Equity, and Technology, which studies data-driven technologies and infrastructures in European civil society. She is also Affiliated Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and Affiliate Fellow and Advisory Board Member of Data & Society Research Institute.

Velislava (Veli) Hillman

Velislava (Veli) Hillman
Dr. Velislava (Veli) Hillman teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London and is founder of Education Data Digital Safeguards (EDDS), a social enterprise dedicated to assessing AI and educational technologies. Building on her fellowships at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, her research explores the effects of algorithmic and data-driven systems on children’s learning experiences, teaching practices and the quality of educational technologies from socio-technical, human rights, pedagogical and design perspectives. She collaborates with organizations such as EdTech Impact, Open Development Cambodia and ChildFund Australia on projects related to education policy, online child protection, digital transformation, and the integration of AI in educational settings. Reflecting the broad and international scope of her work, she has also consulted for global institutions including UNESCO, UNICEF and the OECD, and is an academic fellow with the Asia-Europe Foundation. Dr. Hillman is the author of Taming EdTech, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Cynthia Liem

Cynthia Liem
Dr Cynthia C. S. Liem MMus is an Associate Professor in the Multimedia Computing Group of Delft University of Technology, and pianist of the Magma Duo. Her research interests are in trustworthy and responsible AI; here, she especially focuses on techniques that make people discover new interests and content which would not trivially be retrieved, and questions of validation and validity in data-driven decision-making. After starting in music information retrieval, today, her research considers broader public-interest domains with high societal impact. She initiated and co-coordinated multiple European research projects on technological enrichment of digital musical heritage, and gained industrial experience at Bell Labs Netherlands, Philips Research and Google. Cynthia received recognition through multiple awards (Lucent Global Science and Google Anita Borg Europe Memorial scholarships, Google European Doctoral Fellowship, finalist of the New Scientist Science Talent Award, Researcher-in-Residence at the National Library of The Netherlands, Women in AI Netherlands Diversity Leader Award, Harper's Bazaar Netherlands Woman of the Year Dyson Pioneer Award), is a member of the Dutch national Young Academy, and still performs as a musician. With her track record in inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative research and public engagement, she became a sought-after educator and communicator, and is a core team member of TU Delft’s Campus The Hague, seeking to better connect engineering expertise to policymaking.

Thorsten Strufe

Thorsten Strufe
Thorsten Strufe is Professor of IT Security at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and an internationally recognized expert in privacy, security, and large-scale distributed systems. He serves as Deputy Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence CeTI (Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop) and is a principal investigator in major research initiatives including the German Competence Center for IT Security KASTEL. His research focuses on enhancing privacy and resilience in social networks and distributed systems, with a special interest in privacy-preserving, decentralized technologies that challenge the dominant data-collection models of today’s digital platforms. With over a decade of leadership in collaborative research, he has contributed to numerous national and international projects funded by the EU, German Research Foundation, and other agencies. His work spans interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of technology, ethics, and society, with projects addressing topics from secure communication and anonymous networking to user behavior and data protection in online environments. He has authored and co-authored numerous publications in leading journals and conferences, and his research has been recognized with several best paper awards. Before joining KIT, he held academic positions at TU Dresden, TU Darmstadt, University of Mannheim, and EURECOM, shaping research and teaching in privacy and network security across Europe. He actively engages in global academic communities, fostering international partnerships and dialogue on building secure and trustworthy digital infrastructures.