D!ARC Lectures 24.11.2022 Automating Criminal Justice

24th of November 2022     4 till 6 p.m.   HS 5

Abstract

Prof. Dr. Aleš Završnik

Automated decision-making processes already influence how decisions are made in the financial industry, as well as in education and employment. Applied to social platforms, they have contributed to the distortion of democratic processes, such as general elections. This trend is a part of “algorithmic governmentality” (Rouvroy and Berns, 2013) and the increased influence of mathematics on all spheres of our lives. It is a part of “solutionism”, whereby tech companies offer technical solutions to all social problems, including crime. Despite the strong influence of mathematics and statistical modelling on all spheres of life, the question of “what, then, do we talk about when we talk about ‘governing algorithms’?” (Barocas et al., 2013) remains largely unanswered in the criminal justice domain. How does the justice sector reflect the trend of the “algorithmisation” of society and what are the risks and perils of such? The purpose of the talk is to, first, examine the more fundamental changes in knowledge production in criminal justice settings occurring due to over-reliance on the new epistemological transition, and second, to show why automated predictive decision-making tools are often at variance with fundamental liberties and also with the established legal doctrines and concepts of criminal procedure law.

CV

Dr. Aleš Završnik is the Director of the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana and Full Professor at the Faculty of Law University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His research interest lay in the intersection of law, crime, technology, and fundamental rights.

Dr. Aleš Završnik was EURIAS / Marie Curie Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum (ETHZ) in Zürich (2017/18) and also postdoctoral fellow of the Norwegian Research Council at the University of Oslo and at the Max-Planck-Institute für ausländisches und internationals Strafrecht in Freiburg i. Br.

Among several others, he led a research project “Automated Justice: Social, Ethical and Legal Implications” (Slovenian Research Agency, 2018–21) and “Human Rights and Regulation of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence” (Slovenian Research Agency and several Ministries, 2019–21).

He edited several books, such as Big Data, Crime and Social Control (Routledge, 2018) and Automating crime prevention, surveillance, and military operations (Springer, 2021) and published several articles in the field of law, technology and human rights, such as the article “Algorithmic Justice” (European Journal of Criminology, 2019). He organised several conferences in these research areas over the last 15 years, e.g. Automated Justice: Algorithms, Big Data and Criminal Justice Systems in Zürich (2018) and Big Data: Challenges for Law and Ethics in Ljubljana (2017).

Završnik collaborated with the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) on the preparation of the “Ethical Charter on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Judicial Systems” (2018). He is an independent Ethics Expert with the European Research Council (ERC) (from 2017).

Address:

Prof. Dr. Aleš Završnik

Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, Ljubljana

Poljanski nasip 2

SI-1000 Ljubljana, SLOVENIA

P: +386 1 4203 251

E: ales [dot] zavrsnik [at] pf [dot] uni-lj [dot] si

F: +386 1 4203 245

W: www.inst-krim.si

Invited Talk: Efficiency Effects of Mergers: Harmonising Merged Production

Prof. Mikulas Luptacik (Vienna University of Economics and Business) holds a talk on “Efficiency Effects of Mergers: Harmonising Merged Production” on Sat. 19 November 2022 at 2:15pm in room B02a.2.05 (Lakeside Park). Guests welcome!

The model of potential gains from mergers provides a useful decomposition into technical efficiency, returns to scale, and the harmony effect. While technical efficiency and returns to scale have been well elaborated, interpretation of the harmony effect remains open. We provide analytic insight into the aforementioned decomposition. We express the harmony effect as a function of the relative difference between the structures of the firms involved and the relative difference in their sizes. These factors can play an important role and, in some cases, can even outweigh a potentially negative merger outcome due to decreasing returns to scale. Furthermore, we show that the sign of the harmony effect is dependent not on the specific form of the production function but rather on its shape. In the case of a concave production function, the harmony effect contributes in a positive sense to the gains from mergers. Incorporating information on given input prices, the harmony effect is described as the product of technical, price, and allocative efficiency. The potential effects of the technical-physical based harmony effect are illustrated for the Slovak hospital sector. This application provides a detailed look at the reallocation process.

Invited Talk: The Optimal Momentum of Population Growth and Decline

Prof. Gustav Feichtinger (Vienna University of Technology) holds a talk on “The Optimal Momentum of Population Growth and Decline” on Sat. 19 November 2022 at 1:00pm in room B02a.2.05 (Lakeside Park). Guests welcome!

Some fifty years ago, Nathan Keyfitz (1971) asked for the amount a growing human population would further increase if its fertility rate would be reduced immediately to replacement level and remains there forever. The reason for this demographic momentum is an inertia of age structures containing relatively many potential parents due to past high fertility. Nobody expects such a miraculous reduction of reproductive behavior, but a gradual decline of fertility in fast-growing populations seems inevitable. Since any delay in fertility decline to a stationary level leads to an increase of the momentum, we consider an intertemporal trade-off between costly birth control and the demographic momentum at the end of a planning period. Using the McKendrick partial differential equation for the age-structured population dynamics, an appropriate extension of Pontryagin’s maximum principle is applied. The results of such a distributed parameter control framework can also be applied to determine efficient pro-natalistic measures for shrinking populations.

study&relax@ubk

You are open-minded, communicative, love comfortable studying or team work and want to have all the necessary books right next to you? Then you’re spot on!

We have redesigned our large reading room on level 2 (Z.2.10) and offer, from 7. 11. 2022 onwards, a centrally-located room free for you to use:

There, you will find a meeting and communication area for group projects, private get-togethers, relaxed breaks and whatever else you can think of!

 

One non-rest area – many chances:

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As of 7. 11. 2022, our motto is: DON’T shut up and sit down!

 

Get together, chat, eat, drink, study or just get comfortable in a relaxed atmosphere – and all this with a certain something: more than one million items for study purposes, job and life within your reach!

For larger activities (games evening, reading group, tutorials, poetry slams, stand-up theatre, aso) please contact our information desk on level 3 or send us an email at info [dot] bibliothek [at] aau [dot] at with your plans so that we can book the area for you.

 

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Please don’t forget that lockers are obligatory!