At the heart of UWA’s campus, bordered by a traditional Japanese garden, a corridor of plane trees and the sun-flecked sprawl of carpark No 3, a vibrant interdisciplinary research institute has been taking shape.
The Minderoo Tech & Policy Lab at UWA Law School brings together legal and policy researchers with technologists, engineers and scientists. The Lab’s mission, in partnership with sister centres at the University of Cambridge, University of California Los Angeles and New York University, is to tackle lawlessness in the tech ecosystem, empower workers and reimagine technology in the public interest.
The key to unlocking the Lab lies in the combined expertise of its Co-Directors: Associate Professor of Law and Technology Julia Powles and Associate Professor of Biomechanics Jacqueline Alderson.
Associate Professor Powles joined UWA in 2019 after more than a decade in Europe and the United States, most recently at New York University and Cornell Tech, as the Law School’s inaugural Be Inspired appointment. Her expertise is in privacy, intellectual property, internet governance and the law and politics of data, automation and artificial intelligence. After arriving at UWA, she established a Technology and Public Interest Research Group; a move that led professional colleagues in law and science to insist on one essential introduction: to Associate Professor Alderson. From that first conversation, on resisting the overtures of today’s biggest companies and building alternative futures, the Lab has grown.
"We need rules for our technological tools, not rule by our tools."
Associate Professor Julia Powles
For more than two decades, Associate Professor Alderson has been a research leader in one of UWA’s most distinguished research domains – biomechanics – where she drives national and international sport and health-focused research teams in pro-public applications of motion capture, wearable technologies and machine learning. Associate Professor Alderson also established the world’s first and largest sports biomechanics motion capture repository, a coveted resource for tech companies.
Uniting cutting-edge work at the intersection of technology and humanity, with an insistence on effective governance, the Tech & Policy Lab is now a team of 16 and growing rapidly. It comprises research fellows, professional staff, PhD students from the Alderson Biomechanics Group, and new PhD, master's and Juris Doctor researchers in law and political economy.
Since launching in September 2020, the Lab has been prolific across a number of work streams in law, policy and technology. Among these are two flagship projects that interrogate the promises and pitfalls of data and automation through a strikingly original lens: sport.
In partnership with the Australian Academy of Science, the Lab has driven an examination of human monitoring and surveillance across Australia’s major professional sports, from the four football codes to netball, cricket and basketball, which will culminate mid-2021 in a national discussion, Getting Ahead of the Game. The discussion aims to draw attention to the workplace of professional sport, and the urgent need for better governance practices in this data-saturated environment.
The Lab has also secured a historic partnership with the Australian Institute of Sport and affiliated state and territory Institutes, to catapult these quasi-governmental agencies to a world-leading position on the governance of technologies informed by human monitoring.
Spearheading these two projects and related work are Research Fellow Jason Weber, one of Australia’s most experienced high-performance managers, with a 25-year career across international rugby union, soccer and the Australian Football League; Research Fellow Tomas Fitzgerald, who joined UWA from Notre Dame’s School of Law and brings extensive practical experience with governance and regulatory regimes; and Research Fellow Dr Marion Mundt, an award-winning graduate of the German Sport University Cologne who specialises in the application of machine learning to wearable technologies and motion analysis.
The Lab has already made significant contributions to policy debates nationally, identifying the distinct opportunities presented by federal and state privacy reform; cautioning about the immense risks that accompany 'sharing' of government-held citizen information; and offering democratic-led alternatives to unworkable proposals that deputise platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as their own patrollers when it comes to online cyber-abuse.
One of the major early successes of the Lab has been its contribution to national drone policy, where it successfully motivated a wholesale pivot, from the Commonwealth’s initial focus on industry promotion, into a role where the Commonwealth will coordinate national, State and local rules for the protection of amenity, security, safety and privacy.
It is a clear example of the Lab’s ongoing focus: we need rules for our technological tools, not rule by our tools.
Read the full issue of the Winter 2021 edition of Uniview. [PDF 3MB]