Tjerk Timan 

Principal Consultant

Offices: Belgium - Policy consulting

Email: tjerk.timan@technopolis-group.com

Tjerk Timan (MA, PhD) is a Principal Consultant at the Technopolis Group in Brussels. Here he
works on questions of societal- and organisational embedding of ICT innovations such as AI, SSI
or data spaces and on assessing the impact of new digital technologies in public-and private
sectors. He has worked projects related to digital identity, big data value, privacy-by-design in
the age of (big) data, and fairness and transparency in AI. He has set up and led a portfolio
on Trustworthy AI at TNO, and he has been involved in the formation of AI oversight on a
national policy-and regulatory level. He also publishes and presents on AI ethics and AI
regulation regularly (f.i. for the JRC, STOA and UNESCO. Common questions in his work evolve
around societal and organisational embedding of novel ICTs and the potential impact of new
digital technologies on different actors.
He brings both academic-and professional experience to the field, having worked as a
Postdoc researcher on the project ‘Privacyspaces – redefining privacy for the 21st century’ at
the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT); on ICT and user studies at the
university of Twente at the Science, Technology Policy (STePS) department; teaching big data
and visualization methods at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam and for NGOs and the wider
public; and he has been developing and testing software and online environments for several
commercial parties (f.i. at Philips Eindhoven and as a freelancer for several SME clients). He was
one of the first to research the impact of body-worn cameras in the Netherlands and he has
worked several project and topics worked in the field of law enforcement technologies in
relation to societal and organisational impacts.
Tjerk holds an MA degree of the University of Amsterdam and a PhD of Twente University. He
was a visiting scholar at the Management school of St. Andrews University, Scotland. He has
published about data, devices, ethics, regulation, policy and values-by-design in f.i. Philosophy
of Technology, Engineering Ethics, OUP, Environment and Planning A, Surveillance & Society
and he has published books on Privacy in Public Spaces. He is currently investigating the
relation between data, AI and the way in which data-driven developments impact daily
(data) practices.