Joint UCL Engineering and Laws project awarded Research Project Grant by the Leverhulme Trust

UCL is the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Project Grant worth up to £294,694 over 36 months for "Liability for Autonomous Decision Systems". The Co-Investigators of the project are Professor Carsten Gerner-Beuerle (Professor of Commercial Law and Vice-Dean (Research) at UCL Laws) and Professor Miguel Rodrigues (Professor of Information Theory and Processing at UCL Electronic and Electrical Engineering).

The prestigious grant has been awarded by the Leverhulme Trust to investigate when decisions and predictions made by machine learning systems that result in end-user harm give rise to liability. The project will address questions involving law and technology that lie at the heart of the current debate about developing a civil liability regime for artificial intelligence, including when a machine learning system can be qualified as defective in the legal sense, how it can be established whether a prediction that entails end-user harm derives from defective data production, system production, or system operation, and what amounts to negligence in the development and operation of a machine learning system.