Dr Rossana Ducato

Biography

Rossana is Senior Lecturer of IT Law and Regulation at the University of Aberdeen, School of Law. She is also research fellow at the UCLouvain Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire Droit Entreprise et Société (CRIDES), where she teaches on the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet module "Clinic on EU Digital Rights, Law, and Design".

Her research interests are always pursued in a comparative vein and range from Privacy and Data Protection to Consumer protection, Intellectual Property Law, Law and Design, and Law and Behavioural Science, with a special focus on the problems related to new technologies and their impact on society.

She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles and chapters in scholarly books about issues related to law and technology with particular attention to the platform economy, Big and Open Data, cloud computing, drones, research biobanks, and health information technologies.

Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher in Law at Université Catholique de Louvain and Université Saint-Louis de Bruxelles (Belgium) and at the University of Trento (Italy). Over the years, she has accepted as visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg (scholarship holder); the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS), UC Berkeley; the Institute for Information Law (IvIR), University of Amsterdam; Waseda University, Tokyo (Canon Foundation in Europe fellowship); CREATe, University of Glasgow.

Research Overview

Rossana's research interests include:

• IT Law
• privacy and data protection
• intellectual property law (in particular, copyright and database protection)
• consumer protection law
• law and design
• law and behavioural sciences

Current Research

• The regulation of AI (in particular, XAI, and algorithmic discrimination)
• Legal implications of deceptive design practices online (so-called dark patterns)

Funding and Grants

• Canon foundation fellowship (2023)
• The Royal Society of Edinburgh research network grant for "SCOTLIN - Scottish Law and Innovation Network" (co-applicant) (2021-2023)
• Erasmus+ Jean Monnet grant for the Network "SHINE - SHaring economy and INequalities across Europe". Partners: University of Valencia, UCLouvain, University of Barcelona, University of Bologna, University of Palermo (2019-2022)
• Erasmus+ Jean Monnet grant for the Module "European IT Law by Design" (2018-2021)
• International Development Research Center (IDRC) grant for the study "Protection of users in the platform economy. A European perspective". Project developed within the research network "Policy frameworks for digital platforms – Moving from openness to inclusion", lead by IT for Change.
• Innoviris grant "ATTRACT brains to Brussels" for the project "The Internet of Platforms: an empirical study on private ordering and consumer protection in the sharing economy" (2017-2020)