Aleksandre Zardiashvili (Lex Zard) is a researcher, teacher, and Ph.D. Candidate at eLaw, Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden Law School.

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Aleksandre publishes with an alias Lex Zard. Lex is a researcher, teacher, and Ph.D. Candidate at eLaw, Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden Law School. He specializes in the European Union (EU) regulation of digital platform providers, in particular online advertising, as well as legal and ethical frameworks for responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI). His Ph.D. thesis is titled “Power & Dignity: The Ends of Online Behavioral Advertising,” and it addresses the EU framework for online advertising, including the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD), the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR), the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA).

In 2019, Lex was awarded the EURA Young Scholar Prize for his co-authored paper about the centrality of the concept of human dignity for the governance of AI. Lex has attended and presented at various academic conferences. In 2023, he chaired the closing panel of the Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection Conference (CPDP) in Brussels with the title: The End of Online Behavioral Advertising.

Lex coordinates the course Digital Technologies and Power: Atlas of AI, which is part of the minor Responsible Innovation - a collaboration between Leiden University, Delft University of Technology, and Erasmus University. Since 2019, Lex is also actively involved in the Advanced Master’s Program in Law and Digital Technologies. In 2020-2021, he has co-coordinated the program with Francien Dechesne. He is also the coordinator of Practicum in Law and Digital Technologies. Lex gives lectures in various courses at the law faculty, including the course Ethics and Digital Technologies.

As part of his work, Lex has helped coordinate the project SCALES project that was part of the Dutch Research Council’s Program about “Responsible Innovation with Data Analytics” in various domains, such as the healthcare and energy sectors. In parallel, Lex also helped coordinate the project Artificial Intelligence and Ethics at the Dutch Police, which has resulted in the whitepaper, long-term research strategy, and an academic paper.

Lex holds a Master’s degree in law from Leiden Law School, where he completed Advanced Master’s program in Law and Digital Technologies in 2018 (cum laude). Previously, he worked at the National Bank of Georgia in the Anti-money Laundering Supervision Department (2015-2017). Lex received his first degree in law in 2014 from Caucasus University (Tbilisi, Georgia).

Publications