Abstract: This talk will explore part of Dr Urquhart’s upcoming book ‘Clever Computing through Accountable Design’ (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and will discuss how he been addressing the problems of realising better cybersecurity in smart homes through research into legal, design and social perspectives. This includes mapping the emerging legal framework such as with the UK Product Security and Telecommunications Act and forthcoming EU Cyber Resilience Act; discussing empirical research conducted with cybersecurity stakeholders in government, industry and academia on the challenges of securing IoT devices; and presenting design interventions, such as the Defending the Dark Artefacts board game and Moral-IT cards.

Bio: Dr Lachlan Urquhart is a Senior Lecturer in Technology Law and Human-Computer Interaction at the Edinburgh Law School. He is Founder and Director of the Regulation and Design (RAD) Lab. He is a Director of both the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance, and Privacy (CRISP) and the Scottish Research Centre for Intellectual Property and Technology Law (SCRIPT). He is part of the management team of the Designing Responsible NLP Centre for Doctoral Training, and the Institute of Design Informatics. 

His monograph, Clever Computing through Accountable Design, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Lachlan has published over 60 papers in leading venues in computing, law, and ethics. He has been an investigator on projects totalling nearly £17m. He is currently Principal Investigator of the £1.2m EPSRC ‘Fixing the Future: Right to Repair and Equal-IoT’ project and is Co-Investigator on the £9.75m Responsible Natural Language Processing AI CDT; the £3.2m EPSRC Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Governance Node, and various projects in the EPSRC Horizon Trusted Data Driven Products hub. He was also investigator on the now completed ESRC Emotional AI in Smart Cities project , EPSRC Defence Against Dark Artefacts and TAS Hub Envisioning Biometric AI Futures project.

His main research interests are in the socio-technical aspects of designing, living with, and regulating emerging information technologies. He has a multidisciplinary background in computer science (PhD) and law (LL.B; LL.M) and has studied at the Universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde, and Nottingham. He is an editor on the Routledge Studies in Surveillance book series.

He is a Visiting Researcher at the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute and member of the international Emotional AI Lab. He has been a visiting scientist at Fraunhofer AICOS, Porto (2021); a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (2020-22), a Research Fellow at the Information Society Law Centre, Universitá degli Studi di Milano (2022-23), and a visiting researcher at Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Tokyo (2014). At Edinburgh, he was the Law School lead for the Centre for Data, Culture, and Society 2019-2023; and is a research associate at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. 

https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/CIDS/Week+5+Protecting+the+State%2C+Protecting+our+Homes%3A+govern...