As part of the regulation of the European digital single market, the EU lawmakers have agreed on a range of legal instruments aiming to foster the development of a European data market and are still discussing on the future ones (AI Act). These legal instruments derive from the European Commission’s Strategy for Data, which comprises a series of resolutions, related communications and declarations outlining principles that pave the way for legislation.

This workshop will aim to give a panorama of the regulations that have been adopted or that are still in the pipeline for implementation in the data market (Digital Services Act (DSA), Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, Data Act (DA), Data Governance Act (DGA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Artificial Intelligence Act). It will also provide keys to understanding the interactions between these different legal instruments, their impact on the landscapes of Data Spaces and Artificial Intelligence, and how they will influence the data economy.

These regulations and their interactions will be introduced and then discussed by legal experts from the Centre for IT & IP Law (CITIP) at KU Leuven, in Belgium in two keynote presentations and a dedicated panel session that will take place in the morning. Professor Dr. Thomas Margoni, with his expertise on the relationship between law and technology, will open the presentations and guide us through the different regulations and their implications.

The panel will be graced, among others, with the presence of experts such as Professor Jan Hajic from Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, Pawel Kamocki, Legal Expert from the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany and also Chair of the CLARIN Legal and Ethical Issues Committee and Professor Anna Rogers, NLP and LM expert from the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

These presentations and discussions will be followed by an overview of technology solutions targeting data protection, such as anonymisation and de-identification, which are applied to different types of data (textual and audio data) and domains. Research and implementations from Dr. Brij Mohan Lal Srivastava, Co-Founder and CEO of Nijta, in Lille, France, Professor Ingo Siegert, from the Institute for IT and Communications at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany as well as Dr. Cyril Grouin, Researcher at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique (LISN) – CNRS in Paris, France will take care of providing us with an overview of their data-protection and user-privacy work.

Then, several practical use cases of technology application to real scenarios will be presented during the workshop too. So far, these will include the following:

• The integration of the MAPA anonymisation toolkit that has been carried out into the European Commission’s eTranslation platform;
• The challenges behind the LM-developing High-Performance Language Technologies (HPLT) project;
• The anonymisation and de-identification work carried out by the German industrial stakeholder Averbis GmbH, who are experts on this type of technology in the healthcare domain, as well as
• The language model (LM) developing company Mistral AI, who will introduce their work and their approach to an open-source GDPR-compliant LM creation.

Finally, the workshop will offer the opportunity to representatives from both industry and the European data spaces to enquire about their concerns in terms of data protection and express their needs. This will be done through a Question & Answering session dedicated to discussing the legal challenges and needs introduced by the language-data stakeholders themselves.

The final session will include a presentation by the European Language Data Space (LDS), which will outline its principles and objectives and then, focus on the help it can offer to the different language-data stakeholders. The LDS endows data sharing through a single platform which is compliant with both EU rules and values and safeguards data sovereignty. It implements secure and trustworthy exchanges and monetisation under data-protection and copyright-compliance supervision.