The AI Disruption Speaker Series: Katie Atkinson

Katie Atkinson is Professor of Computer Science, Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Sustainability Research at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has been conducting foundational and interdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence for over 20 years, with her key areas of research being in the fields of computational models of argument, AI and Law, and AI for chemistry. Katie has published over two hundred articles in peer-reviewed conference proceedings and journals, and has also applied her work in a variety of industrial projects with large and small law firms. In 2016-2017 Katie served as President of the International Association for AI and Law, since 2020 she has served as a member of the Lawtech UK Panel and in 2024 she was appointed to the Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board for the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice. She also holds the roles of Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal and President of The Foundation for Legal Knowledge-Based Systems (JURIX).

Abstract:
There is a wealth of academic literature on the topic of AI and law, but it is only in recent years that AI has started to be deployed in legal work in practice.  Some legal tasks are well suited to automation through the use of AI tools, whilst other tasks are more challenging for AI, and importantly, legal AI applications need to be demonstrated to be trustworthy, in order to support confident deployment. In this talk, I will showcase work from the field of AI and law directed at supporting several different legal tasks, before focussing specifically on explainable approaches to legal decision-support that involve modelling the arguments featuring in reasoning about legal cases. I will cover examples of the use of AI in real world legal applications and discuss how both the private and public sectors' legal work is being transformed through the capabilities offered by AI and law research and technologies. I will also be highlighting the challenges this transformation poses for governance of the use of AI in legal work and the regulatory responses being developed.

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Speaker Series continues in Fall on the new theme of “The AI Disruption.” Our speakers will discuss how recent advances in AI have reshaped their research — what has been made easier and what has become more difficult — and reflect upon its broader disruptive impact on society.

We meet most Wednesdays, 9am-10am Central time, in Zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend. More information, including upcoming speaker schedule and links to recordings, is available on the series webpage. For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list. Our Fall series is led by Yuanxi Fu and Timothy McPhillips, and supported by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.