Luc Rocher

Luc Rocher is an Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. They lead the Synthetic Society Lab, a research group that conducts human-centred computing research to understand how data, digital infrastructure, and algorithms affect society.

They work to make technology and digital power accountable to the public, and guide the development of accountable, sustainable, and safe algorithms that serve the public interest.

Prior to joining Oxford, Luc received a PhD from the Université catholique de Louvain in 2019 and worked as a researcher at the Data Science Institute and Computational Privacy Group of Imperial College London, at the ENS de Lyon, and at the MIT Media Lab. Their work has been published in peer-reviewed conferences such as ACM FAccT and CHI, journals such as Nature Communications and Science Advances, and has been covered by more than 160 newspapers as well as featured in John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, BBC, France TV, and Radio Canada. Their research has been referenced by the European Commission, OECD, World Bank, WEF, FTC, by European data protection authorities, in US legal cases, and led to changes to the UK's Data Protection Bill. Luc was General Chair of Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETS) in 2023 and 2024, and has been Area Chair for the ACM FAccT Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in 2024 and 2025. They sit on a range of programme committees and have reviewed from journals including Nature, Nature Communications, Science Advances, and Big Data & Society.

They lead the Observatory of Anonymity, an interactive website in 89 countries where visitors can find out what makes them more vulnerable to re-identification and where researchers can test the anonymity of their research data.