By the Virtual Human Rights Lawyer Team
How can legal logic be translated into a robot that can ‘speak’ to a user? How much empathy does a legal chatbot need to demonstrate to users? What data privacy risks are involved with using a human rights chatbot? PILPG-NL’s Virtual Human Rights Lawyer project (VHRL), aims at developing a chatbot to enhance access to and knowledge of international human rights mechanisms. During the first phase of the project, the VHRL team attempted to tackle these questions by organizing seven Friday sessions. For each session, an expert specializing in the field relevant to one of the project modules was invited. After a brief presentation, the experts discussed the implications of their work relating to the project at hand, and provided inputs for the development of the VHRL project.
The Virtual Human Rights Lawyer team was able to hear from the following guest speakers on their experiences:
1. 22 February 2019: Jasmijn de Zeeuw, who spoke about the relevance of the project to Namibia.
2. 1 March 2019: Floris den Hengst - PhD student at the VU’s AI department, and member of the Computational Intelligence Group - on decision trees, how chatbots can be structured, and artificial intelligence terminology.
3. 8 March 2019: Laura van der Lubbe - PhD student in the VU’s Artificial Intelligence department - on serious games, gamification and how these concepts can be used for the Virtual Human Rights Lawyer chatbot and how they can inform user experience.
4. 22 March 2019: Jill Bähring -former PILPG Senior Research Associate and now Privacy Counsel for the Privacy Company - on data protection and privacy, with a focus on the General Data Protection Regulation.
5. 12 April 2019: Lenin Medeiros on making chatbots more empathetic.
6. 26 April 2019: Laura Andeweg - a cyber security consultant at Capgemini - on data protection and privacy with a focus on the GDPR, and Marijn Markus - a senior data scientist - on artificial intelligence.
7. 3 May 2019: Nadine Blignaut van Westrhenen - a researcher in community-based health interventions and education innovation at the VU - on the benefits of the educational model of community service learning in which students work together with the community or society on real time projects through internships.
These sessions allowed PILPG Research Associates, with their background in law and policy, to learn about the different aspects that goes into applying their knowledge to the creation of legal technology. When law interacts with technology, much more than words on a page must be considered . As the VHRL project is in essence an interdisciplinary project, it depends on the input of people from many different backgrounds and disciplines. The input and comments from the guest speakers helped the team gain new perspectives and learn from the speakers projects and experiences.
PILPG-NL extends its gratitude to the speakers for their contributions and continued support.