Keynote (Auditorium): “Transparency as Sovereignty through the DSA, DMA and the AI Act”

Stefano Iacus – Scientific Project Officer, European Commission — Joint Research Centre

Transparency as Sovereignty through the DSA, DMA and the AI Act

Stefano Iacus – Scientific Project Officer, European Commission — Joint Research Centre

Chair: Stefaan Verhulst, TheGovLab, New York University and The Data Tank

Session Description: Transparency is a precondition for sovereignty. The Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the AI Act all regulate algorithmic transparency, through different provisions, different timelines, and different enforcement mechanisms. Some of the DSA’s provisions focus on content moderation decisions (Art. 17), recommender systems (Art. 27), and researcher access to data (Art. 40). The DMA adds obligations on self-preferencing (Art. 6(5)) and interoperability (Art. 6(7)), increasingly applied to AI assistants and gatekeeper platforms. The AI Act’s provisions cover how users interact with AI systems, the labelling and disclosure of AI-generated content, and the use of emotion recognition (Art. 50, recently in force). Enforcement of high-risk systems (Art. 13) and general-purpose AI models (Art. 53) is on the way. With both DSA and AI Act regimes now applying in parallel, overlaps between the two regulations are possible, but it is their synergy that matters most. The talk briefly reviews how enforcement so far is producing tangible results on transparency, and what this means towards sovereignty and a safer digital space.

Stefano Iacus, a statistician, is currently scientific project officer at the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, working on algorithmic transparency. He has been Senior Research Scientist and Director of Data Science and Product Research of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University (2022-2025), where is also managed the development of the Dataverse Project, and contributed to the board of OpenDP project.

In 1999, Iacus started his academic career at the University of Milan (Italy), where he became full professor of statistics in 2015, and also where he founded the Data Science Lab and served as its director. Since 2019, he has also served at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, where he led the team that explores new sources of data and exploits their advantages over traditional official statistical data, to support policymaking during crisis periods and refine preparedness measures. Since 2006, he has had a recurring visiting professor position at the University of Tokyo (Japan).

Iacus’ accomplishments extend beyond academia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he managed a large scale business-to-government project for the European Commission, producing insights for policymaking using data from mobile network operators covering most European Union member states. In 2012, he co-founded a data science firm, Voices from the Blogs, that specialized in social media analysis and big data analytics. In 2017, he co-founded a second startup in the field of quantitative finance. Iacus has published several books, many scientific articles, and a variety of open-source software products in a number of fields including causal inference, sentiment analysis, inference for stochastic processes, computational statistics, and quantitative finance. His work is widely cited across scholarly fields.

Iacus received his bachelor’s degree in statistics, magna cum laude, in 1995 at the Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). He completed his Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Padua (Italy) in 1998, and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1999 at the Le Mans University (France).