The University of Luxembourg places high importance on overcoming boundaries between disciplines and sectors, an aim that the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) explores every day within its work. As of 2023, this interdisciplinarity became a formal bond between SnT and the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance (FDEF) through its National Centre of Excellence in Research in Financial Technologies (NCER-FinTech). Awarded by the FNR, the initiative seeks to bring together the disciplines of law and finance, working on projects that are relevant for our national landscape.
But, navigating discussions across varying disciplines can be challenging to say the least. For researchers, terms and rules within their discipline can be vastly different in another. “If we take the example of data protection, software developers have one mindset – but lawyers see it differently. As do data analysts,” explains Dr Claudia Negri Ribalta, a post-doctoral researcher within the Sociotechnical Cybersecurity (IRiSC) research group at SnT. Recently, she became one of the youngest beneficiaries of a grant from the university as part of its Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) programme, for a project that has also been awarded support from the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme. The project kicked off in July, aiming to create models that will help to discuss technical requirements for topics that may have different mental models.
“When I was working on my PhD in a private company, I regularly spoke with a cryptographer on the topic of privacy and we couldn’t agree on anything,” she explains. “For four months, we had different opinions, until I asked the lead cryptographer what privacy meant to him. He saw privacy through the lens of CIA principles – confidentiality, integrity and availability. But to me, privacy is much more than this – it’s a pillar of democracy, and must account for personal data as well as a company’s business processes and policies,” she continued.
Upon joining SnT in September last year, she began working with Prof. Gabriele Lenzini, an associate professor and head of the IRiSC group at SnT, and Prof. Silvia Allegrezza, an associate professor in criminal law, on a project that studies AI and the effects of AI on regulation in areas such as data protection and money laundering. Having initially studied political science before completing a Master’s in computer science and a PhD in requirements engineering , Dr. Negri Ribalta is no stranger to working across disciplines, and her commitment to exploring these intersections is central to her research.
Running for the next three years, the project is being supported by her supervisors, Prof. Silvia Allegrezza and Prof. Gabriele Lenzini, as part of ongoing collaborations between both groups. Additionally, they have enlisted support from two professors outside Luxembourg who are helping to build the conceptual modelling and ontology that Dr. Claudia Negri Ribalta is developing. Having explored this topic preliminarily in her PhD. with successful results, she hopes to narrow the scope and chip away at a resolution to this long-standing issue – with the Luxembourg ecosystem being the right playground to explore such a project.
About the IRiSC research group
The Interdisciplinary Research in Sociotechnical Cybersecurity (IRiSC) group conducts research at the intersection of computer science, social sciences, and legal compliance. Their focus is on developing secure, reliable, and user-friendly systems that are compliant with regulations. The group brings together experts from multiple disciplines to address cybersecurity as a sociotechnical challenge.