Prof. Bernarczyk in the international team of the JuDDGES project

Dr hab. Bernarczyk, a Professor of the University of Wrocław, from the Department of Constitutional Law of the Faculty of Law, Administration and Economics of the University of Wrocław will be conducting research as a co-investigator as a representative of jurisprudence in the international research team of the JuDDGES (Judicial Decision Data Gathering, Encoding and Sharing) project. Michał Bernarczyk is a constitutionalist and an expert on the right to information and open data. The project is financed by the consortium CHIST-ERA European Coordinated Research on Long-term Challenges in Information and Communication Sciences & Technologies (https://www.chistera.eu/mission). The National Science Centre is the Polish institution coordinating projects financed by CHIST-ERA.

The winning international team is consisted also of remarkable experts in data science (dr hab. Tomasz Kajdanowisz, Professor of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology; prof. David Windridge from the Middlesex University London), psychology (prof. Mandeep K. Dhami, Middlesex University London), and information and communication (prof. Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Université Lyon I).

It was announced on 17 July 2023 by the secretary’s office of Chist ERA that the JuDDGES project, submitted for the Open & Re-usable Research Data & Software (ORD) competition from 2022, had been qualified for funding (https://www.chistera.eu/call-ord-announcement).

The task of the researchers will be to use artificial intelligence for indexing, comparing, searching for vector representation of language of judicial sentences, and creating searches of semantic similarity. It will allow researchers, students, and legal interns to automatically gain greatly detailed information about application of the law on the basis of hundreds of court sentences (for example, extraction of similarities and differences in actual situations assigned to a specific provision, creation of “question-answer” models, determining stability or discrepancies in the interpretation of a given provision, and many more).

34 applications were submitted to the competition. Of these applications, 19 exceeded the required quality threshold, while only 8 proposals were selected by the Steering Committee for funding within the available budgets. A list of chosen projects will be published soon on the CHIST-ERA website (www.chistera.eu). Within the Polish part of the project, the employment of two PhD students and one researcher (post-doc) is expected, so we recommend following announcements connected with the JuDDGES project to law and artificial intelligence enthusiasts.