Marco Almada

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Postdoctoral researcher at University of Luxembourg

Computer simulations of social phenomena are used in academic and non-academic contexts as tools for decision-aiding. By combining social scientific knowledge, computational power, and large data sets, those systems may be involved in decisions that affect people who are not even aware of the existence of a simulation. This paper reviews topics fro...

Concerns about “black box” machine learning algorithms have led many data protection laws and regulations to establish a right to human intervention on decision-making supported by artificial intelligence. Such interventions provide data subjects with means to protect their rights, freedoms, and legitimate interests, either as a bare minimum requir...

Report on access to judicial data in Brazil.

O avanço da IA se reflete cada vez mais no direito, em variadas aplicações e técnicas. Nos últimos dez anos, diferentes projetos de uso de IA se institucionalizaram no sistema de justiça no Brasil. O presente artigo mapeia as implicações dessa transformação para a pesquisa em direito. Argumenta-se que, embora a IA jurídica tenha grande potencial, p...

This paper analyses whether current explainable AI (XAI) techniques can help to address taxpayer concerns about the use of AI in taxation. As tax authorities around the world increase their use of AI-based techniques, taxpayers are increasingly at a loss about whether and how the ensuing decisions follow the procedures required by law and respect t...

Over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have become embedded in various domains of social life, prompting legislative efforts at both national and international levels. In the European Union (EU), this drive for legislation has been reflected in various legal instruments, notably the proposed AI Act, which is expected to...

Sistemas de tomada de decisão automatizada são cada vez mais comuns em diversas aplicações nos setores público e privado. Como muitas das decisões tomadas por estes sistemas dependem de dados pessoais como insumos ou geram dados associáveis a pessoa natural, a Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD) introduz regras específicas voltadas a decisões bas...

Regulation by design is an increasingly common approach in the governance of digital technologies. Under this approach, the developers of digital systems must adopt technical measures that implement the specific requirements mandated by law in their software. Some jurisdictions, notably the European Union (EU), have turned to regulation by design a...

Transparency is widely acknowledged as a core value in the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. However, scholarship on AI technologies and their regulation often casts this need for transparency in terms of requirements for the explanation of algorithmic outputs and/or decisions produced with the involvement of opaque black-box...

Tax administrations globally increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) systems for automation. However, automation has a huge potential impact on the rights of taxpayers subject to algorithmic assessments, which is compounded by the opacity of complex AI systems. This article argues that adequate protection of taxpayers’ rights demands the...

Tax authorities worldwide make extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to automate various aspects of their tasks, such as answering taxpayer questions, assessing fraud risk, risk profiling, and auditing (selecting tax inspections). Since this automation has led to concerns about the impact of non-explainable AI systems on taxpay...

The words “judicial automation” invoke a broad range of images, ranging from time-saving tools to decision-aiding tools or even quixotic ideas of robot judges. As the development of artificial intelligence technologies expands the range of possible automation, it also raises questions about the extent to which automation is admissible in judicial c...

Freie, öffentlichen Meinungsbildung ist das Herzstück der Demokratie. Doch digitale Kommunikation und datengetriebene Kuratierung von Inhalten verändern das der Demokratie eigene Konzept von Öffentlichkeit und erfordern neue gesetzliche Rahmenbedingungen. In diesem Sammelband führen Expert:innen der Rechts- und Politikwissenschaften, der Soziologie...

The European Union (“EU”) Artificial Intelligence Act (the AI Act) is a legal medley. Under the banner of risk-based regulation, the AI Act combines two repertoires of European Union (EU) law, namely product safety and fundamental rights protection. Like a medley, the AI Act attempts to combine the best features of both repertoires. But like a medl...

Stop me if you have heard this one before: the increased social relevance of information and communication technologies (ICT) raises human rights concerns and requires special attention from human rights scholarship and practice. This paper does not intend to mock the growing body of literature that deals with such critical issues; instead, it cont...

O desenvolvimento de tecnologias de inteligência artificial é relevante para o Direito por duas razões distintas, mas relacionadas. De um lado, a adoção de tecnologias inteligentes em aplicações no setor público e privado, em especial em contextos de tomada de decisão automatizada, atrai demandas regulatórias para o surgimento de um Direito da inte...

Algorithms occupy a central place in the current debates on the ethics of computing. The term “algorithm”, however, is used to refer both to specific socio-technical systems and to the logical abstractions at the heart of these systems, and this ambiguity can mislead analyses of the ethical impact of real-world applications of AI systems. In this p...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies play various roles in modern life. Some applications of these systems, such as the chatbots used for customer support, are directly visible to the public, while other applica-tions, such as fraud detection systems, remain hidden but are part of soci-ety’s technical infrastructure. Given the broad range of p...

Inteligência artificial (IA) é uma tecnologia cada vez mais frequente no campo da saúde. Com os recentes avanços das metodologias e técnicas de extração, armazenamento e processamento de dados, sistemas inteligentes são hoje aplicadas em diversas tarefas, abrangendo desde chatbots capazes de fornecer informações1 a pacientes até sistemas robóticos...

Artificial intelligence techniques have been used to automate various procedures in modern life, ranging from ludic applications to substantial decisions about the lives of individuals and groups. Given the variety of automat-ed decision-making applications and the different forms in which decisions may harm humans, the law has struggled to provide...

• Ongoing research projects, among them the Brazilian SPIRA and SoundCov initiatives, seek to diagnose Covid-19 and severe respiratory insufficiency through the analysis of voice recordings. • The voice recordings may also be used to infer information about various personal traits, including some considered as sensitive by data protection law. •...

Automated decision-making systems are becoming increasingly common in various public and private sector applications. Since many of the decisions made by such systems rely on personal data as input or generate outputs that can be associated to natural persons, the General Data Protection Law (LGPD) introduces specific rules for governing decision-m...

O presente ensaio tem como objeto a Corporação CHOAM, empresa que ocupa papel importante no mundo da franquia de ficção científica Duna. Esta companhia é tida como uma das mais valiosas na ficção, e a descrição oferecida nos livros de sua estrutura e de suas práticas de mercado nos permite traçar paralelos com a organização do direito societário, o...

O presente texto versa sobre o processo de transformação do Direito Internacional Público no período posterior à Segunda Guerra Mundial, marcado por desenvolvimentos geopolíticos como a descolonização e a transnacionalização de grupos econômicos, que tiveram impactos nas instituições e na prática do Direito Internacional. De forma a permitir alguma...

Resumo Trabalho submetido como parte da avaliação da disciplina Lógica I (FLF0258), ministrada pelo prof. Edelcio Gonçalves de Souza no primeiro semestre de 2020. Este breve ensaio tem por objeto a relação entre dois dos princípios associados à lógica clássica: o princípio da contradição (ou não-contradição) e o princípio do terceiro excluído. A pr...

Many scientific domains use computer simulations as investigative tools (Winsberg 2010). This use presupposes that analysing the results of a simulation can directly or indirectly tell us something about the system represented by that simulation. But what, if anything, validates the inferences drawn from computer simulations? This question can be a...

This paper was originally thought as a brief chapter for a book in Portuguese, meant to introduce a generalist audience to ethical issues in data processing. It briefly mentions the relationship between ethics and data protection law, the issue of how to perceive the ethical ramifications of software processing, and some techniques for incorporatin...

This paper, currently available only in Portuguese, analyses the models of neurons used as building blocks within artificial neural networks. This draft provides a preliminary look into how artificial neurons can be understood as representational models of their biological inspiration, with the goals of providing support for a future reconstruction...

A Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais (LGPD) estabelece no caput do artigo 20 que o titular de dados tem direito a solicitar revisão de decisões automatizadas que afetem seus interesses. Na redação original da lei, havia a previsão expressa de que esta revisão deveria ser efetuada por pessoa natural, mas tal exigência foi posteriormente elimina...

Artificial Intelligence-based systems capable of making decisions, with or without human involvement, are an ever more common element on the lives of people, many times without their knowledge. To allow the people affected by automated decision-making to contest those decisions that affect their rights and legitimate interests, regulatory proposals...

Artificial Intelligence-based systems capable of making decisions, with or without human involvement, are an ever more common element on the lives of people, many times without their knowledge. To allow the people affected by automated decision-making to contest those decisions that affect their rights and legitimate interests, regulatory proposals...

Systems based on artificial intelligence techniques are more and more important for the modern information society. Uses of artificial intelligence may violate rights of their users or of third parties, but the application of civil liability rules is complicated by the complexity of the relevant technical objects. Based on an analysis of the proces...

Concerns about "black box" machine learning algorithms have influenced why modern data protection laws and regulations on their establishment of a right to human intervention on decision-making supported by artificial intelligence. Such interventions provide data subjects with means to protect their rights, freedoms, and legitimate interests, eithe...

An English translation of the second chapter of my Master's thesis about the simulation of social phenomena. In this chapter, I argue that simulations are better understood as a sort of opaque thought experiment that can run on scales that are larger than the ones usually available to human cognition, and that simulation can be useful as a source o...

A brief presentation, in Portuguese, about the current state of AI technology and its implications for legal practice and the social relations regulated by law.

Computer simulations are used inside and outside of academia for modeling social phenomena. Still, there is a lack of specific discussion on the theoretical underpinnings of applying simulation to domains such as law, sociology, or management, as the academic literature on social simulation focuses on methodological questions, opening space to the...

Technologies based in machine learning and artificial technology play a growing role in modern societies, altering existing social dynamics or even introducing new modes of interpersonal interaction. Those changes become relevant for legal philosophy as they transform social relations that are regulated by law or the ways in which legal systems fun...

Slides for the conference paper "Ethical design of social simulations", also available on this profile.

Computer simulations of social phenomena are used in academic and non-academic contexts as tools for decision-aiding. By combining social scientific knowledge, computational power, and large data sets, those systems may be involved in decisions that affect people who are not even aware of the existence of a simulation. This poster presents a checkl...

This presentation, made for graduate students in Electrical Engineering, presents an overview of the current literature on the nature and epistemic status of computer simulations, and anticipates some of the arguments that I develop on my M. Sc. thesis.

Esboço sobre a questão da cientificidade do direito, discutida a partir da tópica de Theodor Viehweg e das modernas concepções de ciência.

Armed conflicts between nation-states are an important topic in International Relations, with deep political, economical and social impacts. This work attempts to predict the result of armed conflicts by using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) on a data set about militarized interstate disputes, using information about the conflict itself but not abou...

This paper presents a short introduction of the uses of agent-based modelling on the study of problems in social science. As an example of the applications of evolutionary computing to such an endeavor, the paper analyzes the results obtained from the implementation of a variant of Epstein and Axtell's Sugarscape, discussing the changes that result...

Códigos de Autenticação de Mensagem (MACs) são utilizados para ga-rantir a integridade de mensagens enviadas em um canal inseguro. Uma construção bem difundida de MACs é a HMAC, que utiliza funções de re-sumo para a geração de códigos de autenticação. Como o HMAC envolve o uso de uma chave compartilhada apenas entre as partes da comunicação como pa...

This essay approaches the relationship between the Armed Forces and the environment, taking into account both the environmental impact of military operations and the environmentally-motivated changes in strategic calculi. Some environmental and occupational hazards of military activities are presented, followed by an analysis of some environmental...

O projeto explorou desdobramentos recentes na Teoria de Fluxos Inteiros: o artigo de Fan e Zhou fornece uma caracterização para a existência de 3-fluxos em grafos simples em função da soma de graus de vértices adjacentes. Já a demonstração de D.H. Younger e R. B. Richter para o Teorema de Grötzsch demonstra um caso particular da Conjectura dos 3-Fl...