Haiko van der Voort is Associate Professor Organization & Governance. His main research topic is the the governance of enforcement in the digital age. New use of digital technology – such as machine learning, Artificial Intelligence and data science – will both facilitate and threaten the inspector’s job. It will certainly change enforcement as we know it, including the organization of inspections (on a micro-level), public and private regulatory arrangements (on a meso-level) and the way norms develop in the first place (on a macro-level). Haiko is also Director of the Msc Engineering and Policy Analysis.

He recently published about the organizational politics of algorithms, risk governance and co-regulation.

Law enforcement agencies are expected to defend public values (e.g. public health, sustainability, safety) by detecting law violations and preventing them to have too much impact on society. This requires adequate tooling for risk assessments, including innovative features such as AI and machine learning. It also requires critical alignments within and between the agencies. What is public value? How to define risk? And how to handle innovative, however erratic, features? Challenges on this matter are semantic, cognitive and political. Haiko’s research interests are about the organization of law enforcement in the digital age.

Haiko is a Public Administration scholar in an engineering environment. He unites knowledge on theories on public organization with the ‘can-do mentality’ of modelers and designers.