As the emerging technology trend for 2024 and beyond, university stakeholders already started to benefit from Artificial Intelligence (AI) in different tasks such as students and academics in teaching, researchers in projects, and administrators in managerial processes. On the other hand, experts in the World Economic Forum 2024 warned about the need for well-established AI regulations to ensure data security, data privacy, intellectual property rights ownership, and ethical criteria. While Finland and France were the first to introduce their national AI strategy in 2017, since then, the remaining 25 EU countries also published their strategies. Further, as the first multinational regulation, the “EU AI Act” law came into force in February 2024.
No doubt, the risk-based assessment logic in this EU law as well as national regulations have deeply influenced the usage of AI technologies in European universities. Accordingly, this project aims to inquire the limitations of “European AI regulations” in front of employing AI technologies effectively and to explore further development needs in these regulations for the trustworthy usage of AI applications in European universities. For this purpose, the researchers will use a qualitative approach and design the project as phenomenological research. They will triangulate their data adding AI regulatory documents from European countries as well as the EU AI Law, focus groups with students, academics, and administrative staff in universities, and personal interviews with experts having different disciplinary backgrounds (such as computing, cyber security, health sciences, IPR laws, academic integrity, research ethics, higher education policies, educational technology, pedagogical sciences, digital society, etc.) in institutes/centres of AI and ethics from all over the world. The results will provide opportunities to contribute to the discussions on AI technologies in European universities while generating a well-established theoretical structure for future regulations around Europe.
Prof. Barış Uslu
Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University (Turkey) | Higher Education Policy and Management
E-mail: baris.uslu@college-uaruhr.de
Achieving a nationally competitive scholarship, Barış Uslu visited the University of Sydney, Australia, for a year of research during his doctoral training. After this international visit, he received his PhD degree in the field of Educational Administration in 2015. Starting with his PhD research, Barış Uslu mainly studied higher education policy and management. While he was appointed to an assistant professorship in Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey, in 2018 as the Turkish team leader, he also joined an internationally comparative project titled ‘Academic Profession in the Knowledge-Based Society (APIKS)’ in which more than 20 countries participated. He then achieved his nation-wide tenure in Educational Sciences: Higher Education Studies from the Interuniversity Council of Turkey in 2019.
Barış Uslu has published more than 100 articles, chapters and conference papers, and received different international and national project funds and prizes. In addition to his editorial or evaluator roles in various scientific platforms such as Higher Education Quarterly and the European Commission Co-Fund Programme, he continues his research on organisational management in universities, sustainable quality management in higher education, changes in academic profession, teacher education policies, digitalisation in education, and AI integration in higher education institutions.
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© TU Dortmund / Felix Schmale
Prof. Liudvika Leišytė
TU Dortmund University | Higher Education Research
E-mail: liudvika.leisyte@tu-dortmund.de
©
© TU Dortmund / Felix Schmale
Prof. Liudvika Leišytė
TU Dortmund University | Higher Education Research
E-mail: liudvika.leisyte@tu-dortmund.de
Liudvika Leišytė is Professor of Higher Education and Deputy Director at the Center for Higher Education (zhb) at TU Dortmund University. She holds a PhD degree in Public Administration from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. For ten years, she was involved in and managed various research projects at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (University of Twente), where she is still a visiting senior scholar. She was visiting professor at Nagoya University in Japan in 2019 and Sciences Po in France in 2022.
Prof. Leišytė has actively been involved in a number of international and national research projects studying changing university governance, and management, interdisciplinarity, quality assurance and evaluation, and digitalisation in higher education. In 2018 she received the Emerald Literati Award for the Highly Commended paper 2018 in The Learning Organization international journal.
Liudvika Leišytė has published five (co-edited) books on reforms of higher education, governance of higher education and organisational change in universities. Her sixth book, the “Research Handbook on the Transformation of Higher Education”, was published by Edward Elgar in 2023. Her work has appeared in a number of prestigious international peer-reviewed journals, including Higher Education, Science and Public Policy, Studies in Higher Education, Minerva, Public Management, and Public Administration.
Prof. Leišytė is a member of editorial boards of Higher Education Policy, Triple Helix, The Learning Organization, Social Inclusion, and Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung. She is an Advisory Board member of the Lithuanian Higher Education Quality Assurance Agency delegated by the Lithuanian Parliament Education and Science Committee. In 2023 Prof. Leišytė was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe).
Website
https://hdhf.zhb.tu-dortmund.de/en/professorship/team/liudvika-leisyte