PhD Student and Supervisors Shortlisted for LexisNexis Best Paper Award
Tue 27 June 2023
A paper written by Ayça Atabey, with supervisors Lachlan Urquhart and Burkhard Schafer, was among ten shortlisted papers for the LexisNexis Best Paper award at the International Legal Informatics IRIS conference in Salzburg this spring. “How do you solve a problem like Alexa” explores the legal and ethical issues posed by music recommender systems that use emotion recognition technology.
Music has been recognised as a source of manipulation used by both the powerful and those who challenge power, ever since Plato proposed outlawing certain harmonies. As music recommender systems increasingly use profiling technology that measure the emotional response of its listeners, new forms of manipulation become possible that could prove to be dangerous. This paper explores the role of data protection law and the new EU AI Act in protecting society from the subliminal manipulation that the convergence of emotion recognition technology and recommender systems pose.