Imagining the Future of European Digital Infrastructures

The EU is at a crossroads regarding its digital infrastructure. For decades, European institutions and businesses have outsourced their infrastructural provision to American providers. Is this a viable model? 

Policymakers, academics, and professionals seem to doubt it. Given the current developments in tech and policy – including the development of AI and the second Trump Administration – calls for Europe to develop its own digital infrastructure are multiplying. But, while there is a widespread consensus around this idea, how it can be realized is still very much up for discussion. This talk will bring together some of the leading voices in this debate to discuss the future of European digital infrastructures, which sorts of approaches and values should we embrace, and how do we get there.

Speakers

Dr. Seda Gürses - Gürses is an Associate Professor at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM). Her current research focuses on questions around how changes in the business of computing and the production of software has led to our current day computational infrastructures concentrated in the hands of a few technology companies. Further topics she is occupied with include privacy engineering, fairness/debiasing, and quality requirements towards data pipelines. She is also a founding member of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) and the OCW-funded Gravitation Programme Public Values in the Algorithmic Society (AlgoSoc).

Robin Berjon - Berjon is a technologist specialising in the governance of digital tech. He runs Supramundane Agency and is deputy director of the IPFS Foundation. Previously he was VP of Data Governance at The New York Times, where he worked on privacy and safeguarding media independence, and Vice-Chair of the board of the World Wide Web Consortium. His work focuses on building durable democratic governance of technology so that our digital sphere starts operating in the public interest at the planetary scale. He serves as a custodian of Free Our Feeds and is a founder of the EuroStack initiative.

Dr. Edemilson Paraná - Edemilson Paraná is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at LUT University, Finland, where he leads the Research Group on Economy, Technology and Society (GETS). His research interests include the Digital Economy, Digital Finance, Financialisation, and the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence. His academic work has been published in Big Data & Society, New Political Economy, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Globalizations, Platforms & Society, among others. He currently sits on the boards of The Yearbook on Data Autonomy (editorial), Historical Materialism (corresponding editorial), and Global Political Economy (advisory).

The event is moderated by Dr. Corinne Cath.