Prof David Nelken is Professor of Comparative and Transnational Law at King’s College London. He taught previously at Cambridge, Edinburgh and University College, London before moving to Italy in 1989 as Distinguished Professor of Legal Institutions and Social Change at the University of Macerata. From 1995 to 2013 he was Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Cardiff University, and from 2010-2014 Visiting Professor of Criminology at Oxford University.
His widely published research, covering both theoretical enquiry and empirical investigation, lies in the areas of comparative sociology of law, criminology, and legal and social theory. He has received various awards during his academic career including the Law & Society International Scholar Award in 2013. He is a Participating Investigator on the interdisciplinary research project ‘Data Science in Humanitarianism: Confronting Novel Law & Policy Challenges’ funded by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects scheme and a co-investigator for a project on digital discrimination funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council.

Dr James Millington is Senior Lecturer in Geography and Chair of the Geocomputation Research Group in the Department of Geography. His research interests and expertise are in the use of spatial simulation modelling to understand dynamics of coupled human and natural systems. He was co-I on the ESRC/DFID-funded UrbanARK and NERC-funded WhyDAR projects that examined risk and resilience in sub-Saharan Africa, including the use of open-source spatial technologies to explore new ways of mapping and visualizing the challenges faced by vulnerable populations.

Dr Serena Natile is a Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies at Brunel Law School, where she teaches Public Law, International Law, Gender and Human Rights and Research Methods. Prior to joining Brunel University, Serena was a Postdoctoral Researcher at King’s College London (2017-2018) and an Associate Lecturer and Researcher at Kent Law School (2011-2018). Serena’s research interests lie in the areas of law and development, feminist political economy, digital financial inclusion and digital humanitarianism. She is currently completing a monograph based on her PhD research and titled The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls (Routledge, RIPE Series in Global Political Economy, forthcoming 2019), which examines the narratives and institutions of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality by looking at Kenya’s path-breaking mobile money project, M-Pesa. Serena served for three years on the steering committee of the Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality and worked on British Academy and European Research Council-funded research projects. Besides academia, she gained relevant experience in migration, development and humanitarian law working for the Permanent Representation of Italy to the European Union (Migration, Asylum and Borders) and for the United Nations Development Programme in Brussels and collaborating with various human rights organisations in Italy, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Brazil.

Dr Faith Taylor has research interests that intersect the topics of (a) natural disasters, (b) spatial analysis and modelling and (c) the urban Global South. Faith completed her PhD at KCL which developed a spatial-statistical model of landslide impacts to infrastructure. Faith then undertook two post-docs at KCL both looking at risk and resilience in urban Africa. This has involved extensive fieldwork in Kenya, Cape Town, Malawi and the Philippines, and the development of low data cost, free and open source solutions for understanding risk in Africa. Faith is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at KCL and a Lecturer in Geographic Information Science at the University of Portsmouth.

Prof Fleur Johns is Professor and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Law at UNSW Sydney. Fleur studies patterns of governance on the global plane, employing an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the social sciences and humanities. For the past five years, she has focused, in particular, on changing modes of global relation emerging in the context of technological change, especially the politico-legal implications of introducing data science to international humanitarian and development work. In this context, she is leading a 3-year Australian Research Council-funded project entitled ‘Data Science in Humanitarianism: Confronting Novel Law and Policy Challenges’ (with Wayne Wobcke, UNSW Computer Science). Fleur has held visiting appointments in Europe, the UK and Canada and is a graduate of Melbourne University (BA, LLB(Hons)) and Harvard University (LLM, SJD; Menzies Scholar). Before her academic career, Fleur practised as a corporate lawyer in New York, specialising in international project finance.

Dr Co-Pierre Georg is the director of the Digital Financial Innovation Lab at the University of Cape Town. The Lab is a forum for academics, policy makers, and practitioners to discuss the most pressing issues around financial technology in Africa. The University of Cape Town is the leading research university on the continent and the only African university offering a Master’s programme in financial technology. The Lab focuses on developing technical skills in the blockchain space with the goal of developing applications that can benefit those most vulnerable in conflict regions.

Dr Ana Paula Camelo is a researcher at Centre for Law and Innovation–FGV/SP and associated researcher at University of Campinas–Unicamp in Brazil. Her research interests cover energy policy, sociology of risk, governance of emerging technologies and public engagement in sociotechnical controversies in the Global South. Her latest research includes 1) the use of personal data in heath and agriculture sectors and 2) challenges and opportunities regarding artificial intelligence as part of the Research Group in Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion at ITS Rio. She is also part of the Virtual Institute for Responsible Innovation (VIRI) and the Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centres (Network of Centres).

Vitor Henrique Pinto Ido is a researcher at the Development, Innovation and Intellectual Property Programme (DIIP) at the South Centre, Geneva. He is also completing his PhD at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where he is an affiliated researcher to the Law and Poverty Research Group, as well as to the Centre of Education and Innovation, FGV/SP. His research focuses on the intersection between intellectual property rights and development, with a focus on indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge, access to medicines and technology policies in the Global South. Vitor’s research explores the overlap between legal, social and technological discourses, particularly in the fields of technology and innovation.

Idil Kaner is an Undergraduate Research Fellow in Digital Humanitarianism and a final-year Politics, Philosophy and Law student at King’s College London. Her research interests cover the impact of technology on society and the ethics of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Idil was a founding member of KCL Blockchain (2017/18) and is currently undertaking the presidency role at the King’s Information Technology and Intellectual Property Law Society (2018/19).