research

Overview

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing in Dublin City University. My research interests include application of semantics towards solving real-world challenges associated with privacy, data protection, legal and regulatory compliance, and consent. My PhD (Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin) explored the application of linked data and semantic web technologies towards GDPR compliance, with a particular focus on consent and provenance. I chair the W3C Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group (DPVCG) – which develops interoperable vocabularies for privacy and data protection activities based on legal and practical requirements. I am a member of National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI) and work on standardisation for CEN/CENELEC (EU) and ISO.

You can see more information about my:

Research Interests

  • EU's Data & AI Regulations
    My research interest revolves around quantification of the requirements and concepts of laws such as GDPR, Data Governance Act (DGA), Data Act, AI Act, and many others - so that these laws can be better interpreted and applied, and their compliance requirements can be expressed and evaluated using automation in technologies.
  • Privacy
    I'm interested in the exploration of issues regarding privacy, especially those related to use of technology and data protection. My primary motivation in this area is to facilitate discovery and consolidation of existing work in identification and mitigation of risks, and applying existing knowledge to future technologies and innovations.
  • Consent
    Consent is a broad mechanism for agreement in the society, and is also an essential aspect of freedom based on choice. My primary interest regarding consent relates to its connection with privacy and data protection issues, where it is used as the legal justification for collecting and using personal data. My research revolves around quantification and representation of information regarding consent towards identifying and mitigating issues regarding transparency, accountability, and comprehension.
  • Semantic Web and Data Modeling
    The Semantic Web standards, particularly RDF, provide a way for modeling and querying information based on the web infrastructure, permits creation of schemas and ontologies to represent concepts and relationships. My interest lies in using these for the representation, documentation, and modeling of information from other research interests.

Employment

2022-ongoing: I currently am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University, and part of the ADAPT Research Centre.

2020-2022: I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, and part of the ADAPT Research Centre where I primarily worked on exploring privacy risks of technologies using knowledge graphs through the RISKY project.

2020-2020: I was a Research Assistant in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, and part of the ADAPT Research Centre where I primarily worked on the PROTECT ITN project.

Projects (13)

Ongoing Projects (8)

  1. (HARNESS) Harnessing AI and Data-Intensive Technologies
    The objective of HARNESS is to train a multidisciplinary cohort of 13 PhD students in an international Doctoral Network, specialising in ethics, law, and technology.
    ( - ) Principal Investigator
    funded by: HORIZON-MSCA-2023-DN-01-01 under Grant#N/A
  2. (RECITALS) An open-source platform for Resilient Secure Digital identities
    RECITALS aims to build an open-source platform that integrates into a common framework a wide variety of techniques and services for privacy-preserving data sharing and identity management.
    ( - ) Principal Investigator
    funded by: HORIZON-CL3-2023-CS-01-02 under Grant#N/A
  3. (Edu4Standards) Education for Standardisation in the EU
    The EU-funded Edu4Standards.EU project emerges, aiming to specify required standardisation skills, analyse educational gaps and develop an innovative teaching concept on standardisation. Specifically, it aims to produce 5 000 experts annually by 2027. Outputs include teaching modules, academic standardisation days and an EU roadmap for standardisation on education.
    ( - ) Principal Investigator
    funded by: HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01 under Grant#101135705
  4. (HSE-DPIA) DPIA, Data Sharing Agreement and Data Policies for HSE Incident Management
    The project seeks to establish and develop a DPIA and Data Sharing Agreement in a very complex governance arrangement for the HSE with the State Claims Agency.
    ( - ) Project Lead
    funded by: Industry under Grant#N/A
  5. (Fidelity-DataGov) Data Governance and the ethical use of data sharing
    The key research question being explored is how to actively manage data governance requirements at source to facilitate a more effective way to share data across functions with regard to the ethical use of data and enable more consumer insights to be generated.
    ( - ) Project Lead
    funded by: SFI EMPOWER Industry Co-Fund under Grant#N/A
  6. (StandICT'26) ICT Standardisation Observatory and Support Facility in Europe
    The EU-funded StandICT.eu 2026 project aims to enhance the European ICT standardisation ecosystem through development of a fellowship programme, monitor ICT standards, and increase the influence of expert work.
    ( - ) Principal Investigator
    funded by: HORIZON-CL4-2022-RESILIENCE-01 under Grant#101091933
  7. (ADRA-E) AI, Data and Robotics ecosystem
    The EU-funded Adra-e project will work to boost Europe’s excellent research centres, innovative start-ups, a world-leading position in robotics and competitive manufacturing and services sectors. With a consortium composed of leading industry and research organisations in all three domains, the project will create the conditions for an inclusive, sustainable, effective, multilayered and coherent European ADR ecosystem.
    ( - ) Principal Investigator
    funded by: HORIZON-CL4-2021-HUMAN-01 under Grant#101070336
  8. (HSBooster.eu) Standardisation Booster for H2020 & HE research results
    The EU funded HSbooster.eu project will enhance the standardisation impact of projects funded by H2020 and Horizon Europe by designing and implementing a booster initiative to offer automated, proactive and premium services that enhance standardisation results from European-led initiatives. Over a 24-month period, the HSbooster.eu project will provide services to cover more than 1 000 R&I projects and provide a training academy to nurture the next generation of standardisation experts.
    ( - ) Principal Investigator
    funded by: HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01 under Grant#101058391

Past Projects (5)

see complete list of projects
  • (COST-DKG-STSM) COST Distributed Knowledge Graphs - Exchange Visit
    The primary goal of this STSM is to explore the requirements and limitations of a "machine-readable privacy policy" for use within Distributed Knowledge Graphs (DKG) as a decentralised model of data governance with Prof. Dr. Ruben Verborgh at IMEC in Gent University
    ( - ) Principal Investigator
  • (RISKY) Exploring Privacy Risks of Technologies using Knowledge Graphs
    The RISKY project aims to enable exploration of privacy risks and its mitigations by storing information within a knowledge graph. This information consists of direct and indirect relationships between concepts associated with technologies, privacy risks, and their mitigations.
    ( - ) Principal Investigator (PI)
  • (PaE:CG) Privacy-as-Expected: Consent Gateway
    An end-to-end solution for managing consent online
    ( - ) Project Lead
  • (PROTECT) Protecting Personal Data Amidst Big Data Innovation
    The EU-funded PROTECT project will develop new ways of empowering users of digital services to understand the risks they take when they go online and to offer new ways to enable companies to incorporate data protection into digital services. The project will grow a new generation of 14 early stage researchers who will integrate and apply arguments, analyses and tools from across the fields of law, ethics and knowledge engineering.
    ( - ) Research Assistant (RA)
  • (PhD) Representing Activities associated with Processing of Personal Data and Consent using Semantic Web for GDPR Compliance
    My PhD research which produced: GDPRtEXT - a linked data representation of the text of GDPR and a glossary of concepts relevant for its compliance, GDPRov - an OWL2 ontology based on PROV-O for modelling activities associated with personal data and consent in ex-ante (planning) and ex-post (execution) phases, and GConsent - an OWL2 ontology for representing information regarding consent, along with minor contributions describing application of semantic web technologies in the form of querying and validation of information using the SPARQL and SHACL standards.
    ( - ) researcher

Funding History

Project Type Start/End Total Budget My Award Funding Credit
HARNESS EU Horizon, MSCA Doctoral Network, Consortium 2025-2027 3,464,611 572,976 ✓
RECITALS EU Horizon, IA, Consortium 2025-2027 3,935,331 357,125 ✓
Edu4Standards EU Horizon, CSA, Consortium 2024-2026 2,994,601 135,621 ✗
HSE-DPIA Industry 2024-2025 100,000 100,000 ✓
Fidelity-DataGov Industry Co-Fund 2024-2026 460,000 260,000 ✓
StandICT'26 EU Horizon, CSA, Consortium 2023-2025 4,500,000 371,156 ✗
COST-DKG-STSM Research Visit 2022-2022 2,200 2,200 ✓
ADRA-E EU Horizon, CSA, Consortium 2022-2025 3,998,708 237,250 ✗
HSBooster.eu EU Horizon, CSA, Consortium 2022-2025 2,000,000 303,640 ✗
RISKY Postdoctoral Fellowship 2020-2022 91,910 91,910 ✓
PaE:CG EU Horizon, Cascading NGI, Consortium 2020-2021 224,069 49,939 ✓
PhD PhD Fellowship 2016-2020 115,000 74,000 ✗
Total 21,886,430 2,555,817 7

Publications

See full list of publications with links to copies and resources here. Lists also available at Google Scholar and dblp.

Selected publications

  1. To Be High-Risk, or Not To Be—Semantic Specifications and Implications of the AI Act’s High-Risk AI Applications and Harmonised Standards
    Conference formal publication
    Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
    Delaram Golpayegani* , Harshvardhan J. Pandit , Dave Lewis
  2. Making Sense of Solid for Data Governance and GDPR
    Journal formal publication
    MDPI Information
    Harshvardhan J. Pandit*
  3. Creating A Vocabulary for Data Privacy
    Conference formal publication
    International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics
    Harshvardhan J. Pandit* , Axel Polleres* , Bert Bos , Rob Brennan , Bud Bruegger , Fajar Ekaputra , Javier Fernandez , Ramisa Hamed , Elmar Kiesling , Mark Lizar , Eva Schlehahn , Simon Steyskal , Rigo Wenning

Recent Publications

  1. How to Manage My Data? With Machine--Interpretable GDPR Rights!
    Conference in-press
    International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems
    Beatriz Esteves* , Harshvardhan J. Pandit , Georg Philip Krog , Paul Ryan
  2. Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) — Version 2.0
    Conference in-press
    International Semantic Web Conference
    Harshvardhan J. Pandit* , Beatriz Esteves , Georg Philip Krog , Paul Ryan , Delaram Golpayegani , Julian Flake
  3. Comprehensive Review and Future Research Directions on ICT Standardisation
    Journal formal publication
    MDPI Information
    Mohammed Mahdi* , Ray Walsh , Sharon Farrell , Harshvardhan J. Pandit
  4. AIUP: an ODRL Profile for Expressing AI Use Policies to Support the EU AI Act
    Short Paper formal publication
    International Conference on Semantic Systems
    Delaram Golpayegani* , Beatriz Esteves , Harshvardhan J. Pandit , Dave Lewis
  5. Examining the Integrity of Apple's Privacy Labels: GDPR Compliance and Unnecessary Data Collection in iOS Apps
    Journal formal publication
    MDPI Information
    Zaid Ahmad Surma* , Saiesha Gowdar* , Harshvardhan J. Pandit

Groups and Memberships

Ongoing

Past

Organisation

  • COnSeNT (Workshop on Consent Management in Online Services, Networks and Things) 2022 2021
  • NXDG (Workshop on Next Generation Data Governance) 2024
  • SEMANTiCS (International Conference on Semantic Systems) 2021 2020

Peer-Review

Reviewer for Journals

Reviewer for Conferences/Workshop

  • AICS (Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science) 2022 2018
  • APF (Annual Privacy Forum) 2024
  • CIKM (29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management) 2020
  • CKG (Workshop on Contextualized Knowledge Graphs) 2019
  • DataValue (Workshop on Governing Value: The Practice of Exploiting Data Value) 2019 2018
  • ESWC (Extended Semantic Web Conference) 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018
  • FAccT (Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency) 2023
  • ISWC (International Semantic Web Conference) 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018
  • IWPE (International Workshop on Privacy Engineering) 2022
  • JURIX (International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems) 2024 2023 2021 2020
  • KGSWC (Iberoamerican Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web Conference) 2021 2020
  • LASCAR (Workshop on Large Scale RDF Analytics) 2020
  • MEPDaW (Managing the Evolution and Preservation of the Data Web) 2022 2021 2020 2018
  • ODBASE (International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics) 2019
  • RELATED (International Workshop on Relations in the Legal Domain) 2021
  • SEMANTiCS (International Conference on Semantic Systems) 2022 2019
  • TERECOM (Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance) 2018

Competitions

Supervision / Mentoring

I maintain a blog post for project ideas relevant to my research interests, updated annually.

Current/Ongoing

PhD Supervision (1)

Past

PhD Supervision (2)

MSc Supervision (10)

Undergraduate Supervision (13)

Internship Supervision (9)

Teaching, Knowledge Dissemination

Teaching

  • CA691 Data Governance: (2024) - Masters: MA in Data Protection and Privacy (MDPP), EM in Law, Data & Artificial Intelligence (EMILDAI). Dublin City University
  • CA292 Project Management: (2023) - Undergraduate: Computing for Business Year 2. Dublin City University
  • CA269 Programming 3: Object-Oriented Programming: (2023, 2024) - Undergraduate: Computer Science (CASE) Year 2, Data Science (DS) Year 2. Dublin City University
  • CS3014 Concurrent System I: (2018) - Undergraduate:: Integrated Computer Science (ICS) Year 3. Trinity College Dublin

Recent Talks, Seminars, Lectures

See full list of presentations with links to slides and resources here.

Teaching Assistant

  • CS7CS2 Research and Innovation Methods - 2018 Term I, MSc Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin

Demonstrator / Lab Assistant

  • CS1010 Introduction to Programming I/II - 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 Term I/II, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS1013 Programming Project I - 2017 Term II, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS1021 Introduction to Computing I/II - 2016, 2017, 2018 Term I/II, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS1E03 Computer Engineering I - 2019, Term II, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS2010 Algorithms and Data Structures - 2017, 2018 Term II, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS2014 Systems Programming I - 2016 Term I, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS3012 Software Engineering - 2016 Term I, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS3021 Computer Architecture II - 2016, 2018 Term I, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS7IS1 Knowledge and Data Engineering - 2018 Term I, MSc Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
  • CS1061 C Programming - 2014 Term I, University College Cork
  • CS5008, CS6509, CS1069 Internet Computing - HiDip ACT, MSc and PGDip DSA, BSc Math Sci 2014 Term II, University College Cork
  • CS5015, CS6120 Object-Oriented Software Development - 2014 Term II, University College Cork