The Research Centre on Information, Law and Society (CRIDS) at the University of Namur brings together more than forty senior and junior researchers to address questions relating to information systems and technological choices that match the ethical requirements of a human life. This includes are large scope of issues, from the protection of digital consumers or patients to the privacy protection, from new modes of governance to the production of common cultural goods, from electronic communication law to identity's issues raised systems of profiling and personalization. The mission statement of CRIDS is to lead applied and fundamental researches with a critical regard and a permanent care for the democratic and human values. CRIDS is and has been involved in several FP6, FP7 and H2020 projects. It is in charge of many national and regional R&D project and has been awarded by the Belgian Science Policy Office for the quality of its research.
The two research units involved in the project are the Units "liberties and information society" (LIS) and "Technology and Society" (UTS).
The LIS studies how fundamental rights and liberties can be protected in the ever changing Information Society.
The main research topics in link with this project are:
-Data protection;
-E-health including products services and devices;
-Video surveillance including, e.g., steady camera, ptz camera in both open and private spaces and drone;
-Radio-frequency identification (RFID);
-Reuse of data including open data.
Of course, these topics are tackled separately or together as, sometimes, there are deeply connected. The research unit conducts both fundamental and applied research and aims to be in phase with the field thanks to its junior and senior researchers as well of its academic members.
The UTS is composed of sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians dealing with the roles, the uses and the social impacts of ICT. These researchers all share the same vision of the technique and its relationship to nature and society: technology is never neutral, in the sense that only the societal effects would be likely to evaluation and questioning. Dealing with this assumption, the UTS carries – among others – sociological assessment such as social acceptability analysis; ethical analysis and assessment, always completed with a enlarged and encompassed vision of the contexts of the technological artefacts; and 'usages studies' of recent technologies by specific actors.