Dr Lachlan D. Urquhart 

I am a Senior Lecturer (~Associate Professor) in Technology Law and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. I am Founder and Director of the Regulation and Design (RAD) Lab. I am a Director of both the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance, and Privacy (CRISP) and the Scottish Research Centre for Intellectual Property and Technology Law (SCRIPT). I am part of the management team of the Designing Responsible NLP Centre for Doctoral Training, and the Institute of Design Informatics.

My monograph, Clever Computing through Accountable Design, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. I have published over 60 papers in leading venues in computing, law, and ethics. I have been an investigator on projects totalling nearly £17m. I am currently Principal Investigator of the £1.2m EPSRC ‘Fixing the Future: Right to Repair and Equal-IoT’ project. I am Co-Investigator on the UKRI £9.75m Responsible NLP AI CDT; the EPSRC £3.2m Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Governance Node, and various projects in the EPSRC Horizon Trusted Data Driven Products hub. I was also investigator on the now completed ESRC Emotional AI in Smart Cities project (£750k), EPSRC Defence Against Dark Artefacts (£1m) and TAS Hub Envisioning Biometric AI Futures project (£40k).

My main research interests are in the socio-technical aspects of designing, living with, and regulating emerging information technologies. I have a multidisciplinary background in computer science (PhD) and law (LL.B; LL.M) and I have studied at the Universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde, and Nottingham. I am an editor on the Routledge Book Series on Surveillance Studies.

I am a Visiting Researcher and Founding Member of the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute and I completed my PhD in the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham. I have been a visiting scientist at Fraunhofer AICOS, Porto (2021); a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (2020-22), a Research Fellow at the Information Society Law Centre, Universitá degli Studi di Milano (2022-23), and a visiting researcher at Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Tokyo (2014). I am member of the international Emotional AI Lab. At Edinburgh, I was the Law School lead for the Centre for Data, Culture, and Society 2019-2023; and I am a research associate at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.