In the past decade many academic journals have started to require that researchers provide evidence of ethical review when submitting papers, for example when working with human participants or human remains.. In order to support researchers to ensure their projects are able to meet these expectations,…

On Wednesday 25 June 2025 Dechun Zhang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

How ethical is research involving humans and robots? And can research on artificial intelligence cause problems when it ends up in the wrong hands? In any research involving humans or their data, the ethics committee assesses where the issues are. Associate professor at LIACS Suzan Verberne chairs the…

Gianclaudio Malgieri, Associate Professor of Law & Technology at eLaw, was interviewed by EUobserver and Al Jazeera English on the European Commission’s newly unveiled Digital Omnibus package – a set of proposals that would amend the GDPR, the AI Act, cookie rules and parts of the EU’s cybersecurity…

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There are a number of problems in philosophy that seem to share a similar possible solution: 'Why do promises and contracts bind?', 'Why ought citizens and judges obey the law?' and 'Can we realize the gains to be made from cooperation?'. All three problems (as well as some others) share a possible…

Telling sensationalised stories, exaggerating benefits and understating the risks: creating ‘hype’ about something doesn't sound like something a responsible scientist would indulge in. Or could we also use hype in a ‘good way'? What could we achieve by opening up quantum futures for wider discussions,…

A new Special Issue with Transnational Legal Theory edited by Jelena Belic, Matthew Canfield, Henning Lahmann, Rachel Griffin, and Barrie Sander, brings together a collective of perspectives to unpack the promise and perils of human rights as a vocabulary for governing digital platforms.

PURPOSE: The aim of the study was to develop a cheap and fast method to produce hollow microneedles and an applicator for injecting vaccines into the skin at a pre-defined depth and test the applicability of the system for dermal polio vaccination.

The Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University is a partner in the new university-wide Data Science research programme that advocates the use of data science in various fields of research.

New research project “(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics”, recently awarded 1.7 million Euros by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)’s Young Independent Researcher Group program.

Counterterrorism specialists often have to contend with difficult ethical dilemmas. There is currently a lack of any adequate infrastructure within intelligence agencies for discussing these dilemmas, Michael Kowalski writes in his dissertation. PhD defence on 12 March.

This special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik (Brill, 2021) brings together articles that explore new digital ways of analyzing and annotating Old English vocabulary.

Technological developments are rapidly advancing. The Leiden Legal Technologies Program was on the agenda of the Advisory Committee at their second meeting held on 15 October. The decision to start the program in January 2021 was taken unanimously. It was the official moment to announce the completion…

This course in ethics is a continuation of the popular Nationale AI-Cursus from 2018. In which over 300,000 people have since participated.

On 11 June 2020, Sabine Witting defended her thesis 'Child Sexual Abuse in the Digital Era: Rethinking Legal Frameworks and Transnational Law Enforcement Collaboration'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.J. Sloth-Nielsen and Prof. S. van der Hof.

This COIn Grant 2025 awarded project allows Leiden University researchers and students to do research on the world’s largest corpus of digitized Ottoman language periodicals and books.

Scientists are regularly confronted with questions of integrity. A new film teaches students how to handle this issue.

The starting hypothesis of the project is that secrecy is not always inimical to democratic governance as conventional wisdom has it.

The Hague Program for Cyber Norms, a research program at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, published its first policy brief, in which Dennis Broeders, Sergei Boeke and Ilina Georgieva explore the role of intelligence agencies in cyberspace and the (im)possibilities of oversight and regulation…

On Monday 22 January 2024, the University of Florence hosted the conference 'Artificial Intelligence, between Ethics and Law'. Organised by the Department of Legal Sciences, the conference brought together leading experts to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) and…

A CT scanner to treat eye cancer, energy-efficient software for the future and a test to identify male chick eggs. Three projects by researchers from Leiden University are to receive funding from research funder NWO’s Open Technology programme, to which the business sector also contributes.

The GTGC seed grant project on Governing Digital Platforms organised a two-day workshop on 18-19 January 2024, bringing together scholars and practitioners from diverse epistemologies, positionalities, geographic regions, and disciplines – with a focus on ethics and (political) philosophy, anthropology,…

After its highly successful first two editions in 2024 and 2025, we are delighted to announce the third Leiden eLaw Summer School from 22 to 26 June 2026, both in person in Leiden and online. This year’s theme is ‘The EU Digital Omnibus – Streamlining Rules, Sacrificing Standards?’

Eduard Fosch Villaronga, Assistant Professor at eLaw, co-organised together with Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux, Christoph Lutz, Anton Fedesov, and Anto Čartolovni the GoodBrother International Conference on Privacy-friendly and Trustworthy Technology for Society on 28 June 2022 in Zagreb, Croatia.

The Asser Institute organised an interdisciplinary conference on ‘Law and ethics of artificial intelligence in the public sector: From principles to practice and policy’ that took place from 10 to 11 March 2022. Melanie Fink presented a paper co-authored with Michèle Finck.

The fourteen Dutch universities have published a digital magazine in which the researchers explain the Digital Society programme in text and images.

On 15 May the new website about the research programme Digital Society has been launched.

Jingxian Wang, PhD at ICLON, examined technology integration in primary and secondary education. Defence on 6 July.

On 9 May 2018, Roy van Keulen defended his doctoral thesis 'Digital Force: Life, Liberty & Livelihood in the Information Age'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. A. Ellian.

The free AI and Ethics course (in Dutch) is available online to anyone who wants to find out more about the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. One of the eight experts featured in the course is Professor Reijer Passchier. ‘Artificial Intelligence is spreading so fast and has such an impact…