Visiting Fellows

Title: LegalTech for Cybersecurity

Lead Proposer: Dr Livio Robaldo (Senior Lecturer in Computational Law, Swansea University)

This project will fund a visiting fellowship for Dr. Rafael Diaz, a research associate professor at Old Dominion University (ODU), Norfolk, VA, US. The project is collocated within an ongoing research collaboration between ODU and Swansea University (SU). The project aims at developing an interdisciplinary grant proposal to the bilateral EPSRC-NSF call1 that the two funding agencies have made at disposal after signing an international agreement.

Cybersecurity risk management is a socio-economic-technical problem
Our aims is to create expertise in collecting, storing, and analyzing knowledge on cyber risk management through the synergy of SU, specifically its School of Law (SOL) and its Department of Computer Science (DCS), and ODU, specifically its College of Business and Engineering (CBE) and its Virginia Modeling, Analysis & Simulation Center (VMASC). We will bring together a three-fold interdisciplinary research agenda in LegalTech, Cyber risk Economics, and Cyber insurance, towards the development of a grant proposal to the aforementioned bilateral EPSRC-NSF call.
To prepare the grant proposal, the project partners need to exchange know-how as well as conduct some preliminary joint research. The requested visiting fellowship will allow dr Diaz to spend approximately one month at SU to interact with key researchers of SOL and DCS.
Specifically, we will investigate to what extent LegalTech technologies (e.g., computational ontologies, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, etc.) can be applied to available data about cyber-attacks, coming from different heterogeneous sources, fit to identify similarities and shared concepts and, eventually, a common classification system on which defining metrics and criteria for cost-benefit analyses in cyber risk management as well as of optimal regulatory models for the growing cyber insurance market.
We envision our long-term journey, of which the present fellowship only represents the first step, to eventually culminate in the creation of a Web portal, co-maintained by the two universities, where data about cyber-attacks are incrementally collected and classified. The portal will also implement the aforementioned cost-benefit metrics and criteria in terms of algorithms that run simulations and generate predictive reports out of the collected data. These reports will include estimates of the costs as well as links to the original data sources, which the users will be able to consult. The portal will thus represent a precious reference resource for insurance companies and beyond. Should we succeed in our research plan, we will investigate commercial initiatives of our results, to be negotiated between the technology transfer offices of the two universities.