Dr. Ralf-Martin Soe won the research fellowship at Stanford University

Published on 08.12.2022

Within the framework of cooperation between Tallinn University of Technology, Stanford University and Vabamu, Estonian researchers affiliated with Tallinn University of Technology had the opportunity to apply for a 2- to 6-month research mission to Stanford University.

The Global Digital Governance Fellowship at Stanford University offers the opportunity to make use of Stanford’s academic knowledge, networks, and collections related to the study of information and communications technology (ICT), digital society and economy, cyber security, and smart governance, also to enhance Estonian scholars’ ability to share their knowledge of and experience in issues related to cyber security, e-governance, and trust and technology with the global research community at Stanford University.

Dr. Ralf-Martin Soe, Founding Director of the FinEst Centre, is one out of two selected researchers from TalTech visiting Stanford as the Global Digital Governance Fellow 2023, jointly with Ingrid Pappel.

Ralf-Martin plans to visit Stanford first half of 2023 with a goal to collaborate with smart city and cyber policy related researchers in the interest of newly funded FinEst Centre for Smart Cities and its Research and Innovation Agenda. More specifically, Ralf’s research project looks into how to achieve digital single market in the urban context, focusing on the technological, cyber, legal and policy aspects. By fact, most digital services are local and by large, most of them are developed in isolation from the neighbouring local governments, either national or international. If we zoom into the regional level (city + city), we often see that each city tends to tailor its own electronic services. In this light, urban digital services tend to be developed in isolation with small or little attempts to co-design the services jointly with neighbouring municipalities in order to offer the cross-border services area for the commuting citizens; and to contribute to better market uptake when solutions are interoperable. Furthermore, smart city services are mainly developed and analysed from the “closed-borders” perspective, disregarding the fact that, at least technologically, services could be easily scaled over the city borders. This brings us to the main research question for this research visit: how those services could be scaled also from the legal, cyber and policy perspectives?