Professor Karen Yeung

Karen Yeung joined Birmingham Law School and the University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science as Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow in Law, Ethics and Informatics in January 2018. Her research has been at the forefront of understanding the challenges associated with the regulation and governance of emerging technologies.  Over the course of more than 25 years, she has developed unique expertise in the regulation and governance of, and through, new and emerging technologies.  Her on-going work focusing on the legal, ethical, social and democratic implications of a suite of technologies associated with automation and the ‘computational turn’, including big data analytics, artificial intelligence (including various forms of machine learning), distributed ledger technologies (including blockchain) and robotics. 

She has been actively involved in several technology policy and related initiatives at the national, European and international levels.  These have included membership of the EU High Level Expert Group on AI, the Council of Europe’s Expert Committee on human rights dimensions of automated data processing and different forms of artificial intelligence (MSI-AUT), the UN’s Global Judicial Integrity Network and as a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of UKRI’s Trustworthy Autonomous Systems programme.  Her former policy roles include Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Party on Genome Editing and Human Reproduction (2016-2018) which lead to the publication of the Nuffield Council of Bioethics report, Genome Editing and Human Reproduction, and during that time she was also a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Biotechnology. She also acted as ethics advisor and member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Digital Medicine for the Topol Independent Technology Review for the NHS between 2018 and 2019, which produced the Topol Review, ‘Preparing the Healthcare Workforce to Deliver the Digital Future’ (February 2019).

Professor Yeung occupies a number of strategic and advisory roles for various non-profit organisations including, and major research projects concerned with responsible governance of technology.  Recent books include Algorithmic Regulation (co-edited with Martin Lodge) Oxford University Press (2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation and Technology (co-edited with Roger Brownsword and Eloise Scotford) in 2017.  As rapporteur for the Council of Europe’s MSI-AUT expert committee, she undertook a Study on the Implications of Advanced Digital Technologies (including AI systems) within a Human Rights Framework for the Concept of Responsibility Within a Human Rights Framework (2019) which provides a critical overview of the characteristics of machine learning systems that make them prone to generating unintended adverse impacts to individuals and society, raising important questions concerning responsibility for those impacts. She is currently working on a second edition of An Introduction to Law and Regulation (with Sofia Ranchordas) by Cambridge University Press, which is scheduled for publication in 2023. She also a member of the editorial boards of Big Data & Society, Data & Policy, Public Law , Technology and Regulation and the Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law. 

As an interdisciplinary professor, she is keen to foster collaboration between scholars and students from across a range of disciplines, to and to initiate dialogue between academics and policy-makers across various disciplines concerned with examining the social, legal, democratic and ethical implications of technological development, and in seeking to promote informed, inclusive and human-centred technology policy-making and implementation.    Hence she is particularly excited about the University’s MSc in Responsible Data Science, developed in association with Accenture, which launched in September 2021. The programme is intended to training law graduates in the basics of data science while equipping them with the knowledge and critical capacities needed to ensure the responsible development, deployment and governance of data-driven technologies and is currently supported by a number of scholarships funded by the Office for Students aimed at enhancing diversity and inclusivity in the AI sector. 

She is currently a Principal Investigator on several projects from various funding sources including the FATAL4JUSTICE? project, funded by a 4-year award from VW Stiftung’s project (together with 4 German collaborators from computer science, neuropsychology, law and political science), Partner Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making in Society, funded by the Australian Research Council and Co-Investigator on UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship funded project, Infra-Legalities: Global Security Infrastructures, Artificial Intelligence and International Law (2021 – 2028) led by Associate Professor Gavin Sullivan. Previous awards include a Wellcome Trust funded project seeking to investigate the legal, ethical, technical and governance challenges associated with utilising blockchain in healthcare contexts.  She is admitted to practice as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria (Australia), having completed a brief stint in professional legal practice and an Honorary Professor at Melbourne Law School, having previously served as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow (from 2016-2020).