Jan Smits

Jan Smits is a Full Professor and holds Chair of Law and Technology in the Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences department at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His areas of expertise include telecommunication engineering, interdisciplinary branches of law and political science. During the first fifteen years of his appointment, Jan Smits’ research mainly focused on (mobile) telecommunication and digital TV. In the last decade, his focus has been on privacy protection and information security. He found that non-technical disciplines have a difficult time at a Technical University, because they are not core disciplines for an engineer. However, it is precisely the humanities and social sciences that can provide colour and richness to the engineering programs. Technology and Law touch each other in many places in society: self-driving cars, smartphones, cloud services and medical equipment, for example. But in the area of technical standardization not lawyers, but engineers make 'laws'.