The City of The Hague, will be kicking off our first Focal Point Café on Thursday the 27th of February!

The overarching theme for the very first Focal Point Café 2020 will be Collaborative Innovation. We will be joined by The Hague Tech Alliance and the Asser Institute, who will be sharing their innovation stories. This will be followed up by an energetic and interactive session on collaborative learning facilitated by Butterfly works.

Speakers:

The Hague Tech Alliance: Paul Verhagen

Personal Background:

Paul is a Data Scientist at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) which is a member of the The Hague Tech Alliance. At HCSS, Paul focuses primarily on translating data analysis into concrete recommendations for clients. Paul has extensive expertise in quantitative research methods such as text mining, social network analysis and geo-political risk models. Prior to joining HCSS, Paul interned at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he worked on global cyber capacity.

Project Summary:

The Agrifood Dashboard measures Dutch interests in agri-food through trade, development aid, and infrastructure. The project Paul will present offers a one-stop-shop for all information available on agrifood and allows policymakers to quickly and thoroughly ask concrete and specific questions based on data driven insights.

Asser Institute: Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi

Personal Background:

Rebecca is a researcher in International Law and Counter-terrorism at the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague in the 'Human Dignity and Human Security in International and European Law' strand. Her work reflects on counterterrorism and, more precisely, on our evolving legal and policy capacity to deal with security threats, where new forms of non-state transnational risk, counter-risk strategy and technology are in play.

Project Summary:

The digital revolution has led us to build virtual identities. Simultaneously, modern states have acquired unprecedented capacities to collect data about everyone in a timely and almost invisible manner. How can our data be used to counter-terrorism in a legal, democratic and trustworthy way? Citizens are consulted and informed. The project Rebecca will present aims at building a bridge between the state and its citizens in regulating the use of big data in security practices. This bridge will take the form of a mobile App aimed at directly consulting (and informing) citizens of four European countries to start with on the role they would be willing to play in supporting (or not) their government to face current security threats (eg. by sharing their data).