As AI systems become increasingly integrated into our lives, emerging concepts such as trustworthy, responsible, and beneficial AI converge around a central objective: developing AI in ways that align with societal values, ethical principles, and legal obligations. Requirements Engineering (RE) plays a critical—yet often overlooked—role in bridging the gap between technical solutions and the broader socio-technical landscape. A key contribution of RE is its ability to surface, clarify, and formalize the legal and regulatory expectations that govern AI-enabled systems. As global regulatory frameworks rapidly evolve to keep pace with AI advancements, the ability to accurately interpret and operationalize legal requirements becomes essential. This talk explores how RE practices can be leveraged to enhance the understanding of legal requirements, thereby supporting regulatory compliance and enabling the development of AI systems we can trust. Understanding legal requirements is not just a compliance exercise—it is a foundational step toward building responsible and lawful AI.

Dr. Sallam Abualhaija is a research scientist at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg. She received her PhD in Computer Science (2016) at Hamburg University of Technology (Germany). Her main research interests apply AI technologies such as the recent generative large language models and other natural language processing techniques to software engineering challenges, in particular requirements engineering problems. She is specifically interested in legal compliance towards building trustworthy and responsible AI-enabled systems. Abualhaija believes in fostering stronger ties between academia and industry and has conducted the majority of her research in close collaboration with industry partners in the past years.