As the 2020 Network Institute Academy Projects run to an end, the award for the Best 2020 NIAA Project was announced on July 7th at the End of the Year Event. The winner of this year’s award is the project on ‘Appropriate Measures for Security: Investigating Legal and Technical Requirements under the GDPR’ run by the Academy Assistants – Maria Konstantinou (Law) and Tina Marjanov (Computer Science) and their supervisors – Magdalena Jozwiak and Dayana Spagnuelo.

The project aims at clarifying what the appropriate security measures for data processing – the requirement set forth in Art. 32 GDPR – mean in practice. The GDPR compliance is a topical issue, affecting private and public organizations (including universities), as well as many aspects of our daily life (online world, mobile apps). So, it is crucial that there are guidelines on how to avoid GDPR Art. 32 violations, how to comply with its provisions and, ultimately, how to secure the processing of personal data. The project examines the decisions of the EU data protection authorities finding the infringement of Art. 32 GDPR based on the legal and technical ontology elaborated in the outset. During the course of the project, the researchers uploaded the machine-translated decisions to the GDPRhub wiki-page, run by the non-profit NOYB, and annotated them using open access tool Hypothes.is, so that their work is available to everyone interested in further work on this topic.

In September, Tina and Maria will present the poster with their findings at the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) womENcourage 2021 conference in Prague. The theme of the conference is on celebrating bridges built across boundaries of disciplines – and this project is a great example of such ambition.