Anton Vedder

Background

About Anton Vedder

Anton Vedder is a Professor Emeritus (emeritus hoogleraar met opdracht) at KU Leuven, Belgium. He is a member of KU Leuven's Ethics Committee on Dual Use, Military Use, and Misuse of Research. He supervises doctoral students, but is not accepting new applicants. Anton’s primary research interests are ethics, regulation, and the impact of innovative technologies on society. He is especially interested in the interplay of technological developments and the conceptualization of basic moral and legal notions. Recent publications include articles and books on innovative technologies, care, enhancement, justice, privacy and profiling, privacy versus public security, ambient technology and autonomy, distribution of responsibilities, quality of information and credibility of experts, legitimacy, trust and technology adoption. Anton was one of the founders and leaders of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme of Law, Science and Technology (EMJD-LaST, a collaborative activity of seven European universities), supported and funded by the European Commission as from 2012. He was also one of the leaders of the LaST-JD Rights in the Internet of Everything project, equally funded by the EC as an ITN Marie Curie project. He led several national and international research projects funded by consortia of public and private parties, NWO (Netherlands) FWO (Flanders, Belgium), and the European Commission, mostly in the domains of legal and ethical issues related to IT or IT based applications in the field of security and the field of health and well-being. Subjects of his teaching included: regulation, ethics, acceptance and legitimacy; health law; privacy and data protection, big data analytics, and technology and anti-terrorism policies. Currently, he supervises ongoing doctoral projects in the stage of finalization. Being an emeritus since October 2023, he does not take on board new PhD candidates. Anton was the programme director of KU Leuven's Brussels based trilingual LLM programme of IP and ICT Law and a board member of the Centre for IT and IP Law.