Regulatory Technology (RegTech)

The paradigmatic changes we are witnessing today in how IT is developed and used require new knowledge to understand the broadening range of reciprocal interactions between technology and society. Extant bodies of knowledge on IT design, implementation, and management are rendered obsolete by the advent of intelligent computational systems, novel patterns of human-machine interaction, and ever-increasing interdependencies of technological, human, institutional, and natural factors. RegTech is emerging as a significant umbrella topic for scholarly inquiry into how technologies shape individual lives, businesses, and societies, and how these technologies can be developed and managed to minimize risk and maximize value for users and society at large. 

Our research group tackles the knowledge gap established by paradigmatic changes in how intelligent technologies are developed, implemented, and interact with people. Moving the research lens from traditional “boxes” of discrete technologies to dual-use, general-purpose, autonomous, quasi-human, and meta-human systems exposes knowledge gaps related to establishing appropriate regulatory socio-technical regimes. These regimes must be informed by different technologies, in use or under development, and divergent use contexts, established through what is referred to as trifecta of IT-based regulation: the mutual alignment of IT, its use practices, and rules for technology development and use. The scope of analysis of human-machine interactions must expand to transcend organizational boundaries and include society at large and future generations of users. The very concept of machine must be redefined to accommodate intelligent social robots and systems that can learn and evolve. Effectively, the foundation of a socio-technical regulatory system—the trifecta of rules, practices, and IT—must be reconsidered, as intelligent systems themselves acquire agential properties and develop new interaction rules, properties previously reserved solely for humans. 

Specific research frontiers: 

Control and compliance: investigating venues, tools, and limits for establishing compliance with regulatory norms and standards and controllability of learning, autonomous, and meta-human systems. 

Governance architectures: exploring, identifying, and probing regulatory architectures for specific technology use contexts and scenarios involving diverse technological systems. 

Human-centricity and sustainability: developing and disseminating theoretical and practical knowledge to inform the inclusion of ethics, sustainability principles, and core values in discourses on technology development and use, promoting safe, reliable, and ethical integration of intelligent and autonomous systems into daily life. 

Theory renewal: developing novel socio-technical constructs, vocabularies, and theories to accommodate new contexts and scenarios of technology development, implementation, and use at individual, organizational, industrial, and societal levels.