WHAT: TWed Talk: "Law as Code: From Legal Text to Machine Actionable Policies and Norms"
WHO: Sabrina Kirrane
WHEN: 4:00p, Weds, 09 Sep 2026
WHERE: Winslow 1140
EVENT PAGE: https://tinyurl.com/twed-09Sep2026
WEBEX: https://rensselaer.webex.com/meet/erickj4
Please join us 4:00p, Weds, 09 Sep for a very special TWed Talk as we welcome visiting scholar Dr. Sabrina Kirrane, an associate professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, where she is a member of the Institute for Complex Networks, the Competence Center for Applied AI and Scientific Computing, and the Research Institute for Crypto Economics. Pizza and salads arrive at 3:30p, the talk begins at 4:00p
DESCRIPTION: The European Commission (EC) is responsible for developing strategic policies and proposing new laws for the
European Union (EU), as well as the ongoing governance of policies and norms. A prominent example is the Common European Data Spaces initiative, which aims at making high quality data available for access and reuse. This initiative, which spans several domains (e.g., health, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, mobility, finance), is facilitated via the Data Governance Act, the Data Act, as well as domain-specific legislation, such as the European Single Access Point Regulation and the European Health Data Space Regulation. In such a setting the global Law as Code initiative, which strives to encode legal norms in a manner that facilitates automated processing, holds great potential. Nevertheless, despite recent advances in artificial intelligence, the adherence to and governance of norms is particularly challenging, not only due to the complexity and lengthiness of legal documents, but also due to the interconnected nature of norms within and across legal texts. In this talk we explore: (i) how hybrid natural language processing techniques tailored for the legal domain are used to automatically extract norms from legal text; and (ii) how knowledge graphs and machine actionable policies can be used to encode policies and norms in a manner that facilitates automated compliance and governance. In both cases, we compare and contrast various techniques and initiatives and highlight open research challenges and opportunities.
BIO: Dr. Sabrina Kirrane is an associate professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, where she is a member of the Institute for Complex Networks, the Competence Center for Applied AI and Scientific Computing, and the Research Institute for Crypto Economics. Her research interests include legal information extraction and knowledge representation; machine actionable policies, automated compliance checking, and governance; information disorder detection; algorithmic transparency, explainability, and bias detection; and intelligent software agents. Dr. Kirrane co-founded the Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web - Policy and Technology (PrivOn) workshop series, which was co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference between 2013 and 2017. Additionally, she is on the editorial board of the Semantic Web Journal and the Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge. Over the years, she has also been on the organising committee of the ISWC, ESWC, RuleML+RR, and Semantics.
LINKS:
- Sabrina Kirrane's website: http://sabrinakirrane.com/