Luc Rocher

Dr. Luc Rocher is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford. They are also affiliated with Kellogg College and Imperial College London’s Data Science Institute. Their work focuses on algorithmic accountability, privacy-enhancing technologies, and the societal impacts of AI. Rocher leads the Synthetic Society Lab, investigating how to make technology accountable to the public, and the Observatory of Anonymity, an international tool assessing re-identification risks. Their research bridges technical and social science approaches, including statistical modeling, adversarial machine learning, and interactive tools.

Education: PhD from Université catholique de Louvain (2019), prior roles at Imperial College London, ENS de Lyon, and MIT Media Lab. Awards include the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and recognition from institutions like the European Commission and OECD. Rocher has published in top journals/conferences (Nature Communications, Usenix Security, WWW) and contributed to policy discussions on AI regulation.

Advising: Current students include Andrew Bean (DPhil), Lujain Ibrahim (DPhil), Juliette Zaccour (DPhil), and others. Grants funded by UKRI, EPSRC, and the John Fell Fund. Research emphasizes privacy risks in digital data, pricing algorithms, and public sector AI systems.

Labs/Teams: Synthetic Society Lab (public interest AI), Observatory of Anonymity (global re-identification risks). Recent work includes demonstrating flaws in traditional anonymization methods and advocating for privacy-preserving frameworks.