Karen Yeung is Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow at Birmingham Law School and School of Computer Science, previously a Professor of Law at King’s College London and Tutorial Fellow in Law at St Anne’s College, Oxford University.  As a leading scholar in the governance of AI, her work highlights how AI systems can undermine the socio-technical conditions necessary for democracy, human rights and the rule of law.  Her research has been at the forefront of understanding the challenges associated with the regulation and governance of emerging technologies, with several on-going projects which investigate 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.

Karen Yeung has extensive policy experience, including membership of the EU’s High Level Expert Group on AI (2018-2020) and the Council of Europe’s MSI-AUTi (2018-2020).  Through her 'AI Equality by Design, Deliberation and Oversight' project, Karen is currently supporting Equinet's work to ensure the protection of the right to freedom from unfair discrimination in the use of AI systems (https://www.rai.ac.uk/impact-accelerator)

She assists organisations that promote human rights and democracy in a digital age, serving in advisory roles for the UN’s Global Judicial Integrity Network, the OSCE Office for Democratization and Human Rights (ODIHR), Equinet, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Digital Regulators Cooperation Forum (DRCF) and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) having  previously served on working groups for the Royal Society and British Academyiv and the NHS. 

Her recent co-edited books include Algorithmic Regulation (2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation and Technology (2017) and the 2nd edition of her book An Introduction to Law and Regulation (with Sofia Ranchordas) will be published in 2024.  She serves on the editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals, including Big Data & Society, Data & Policy, Public Law, Technology & Regulation and the Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law.