I have been selected as one of the inaugural Salzburg Global Seminar-Korea Foundation Fellows for the 2021-2022 academic year (May 2021-May 2022). I will work closely with Dr. Charles Ehrlich of Salzburg Global Seminar and will conduct a capstone project, ‘Post-Pandemic Conflicts in Data Governance and Technology: The Varieties of Data Protection Regulations in the EU, South Korea, the U.S. and China’. I will engage with the Finance and Governance Program of the Salzburg Global Seminar, notably the Finance Forum and Law and Technology Forum.

I plan on investigating the institutional variance amongst the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), the varied privacy laws in the U.S. by states, and China’s early draft of its Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL). Empirically, the goal is to look into a) potential data governance regulations in future trade agreements (i.e., data transfers), b) South Korea’s digitalized efforts in the pandemic and post-pandemic era, and comparisons with other democracies of Europe and the U.S., as well as China, and c) moves toward AI deployment in various sectors of the economy, i.e., South Korea’s national pilot project for big data analysis of rare diseases. In anticipation of the future conflicts that may arise from the different approaches on data taken by jurisdictions over the next decades, my aim is to first grasp the key differences amongst the data governance systems among them and to unearth where exactly the future conflicts lie to predict them, and what their impacts would be in the broader realm of technology.