Katie Szilagyi is a Part-Time Professor & doctoral candidate in Law & Technology at the University of Ottawa. Drawing from her training as both an engineer and a lawyer, she studies the perilous intersection of artificial intelligence, democracy, and the law. Her academic expertise includes intellectual property; property; contracts; and their intersections with emergent technology through regulation, autonomy, and privacy. She has taught first year Contract Law and two upper-year technology law seminars of her own design: Law, Technology, and the Future and Privacy Law.

Katie’s SSHRC-funded doctoral research is focused on potential erosion of the democratic institution of the rule of law due to machine learning algorithms, predictive analytics, and the fact that everyone spends all their time staring at their smartphones. She has published and presented on the transformative impacts of blockchain technology on the legal landscape and on the international humanitarian law implications of autonomous weapons systems on the battlefield. 

Katie holds a BSc in Biosystems Engineering from the University of Manitoba; a JD from the University of Ottawa with joint specializations in International Law and Technology Law; and an LLM in Law and Technology from Tel Aviv University. After completing her JD, she clerked at the Federal Court of Appeal for Justice Marc Nadon and Justice Wyman W. Webb. Thereafter, she spent a couple years working as a commercial litigator at a large Toronto law firm and a couple years traveling the world solo. An avid moot court competitor during her law school career, she now coaches uOttawa moot court students in the Intellectual Property Advocacy programme. She is also a Global Fellow of the Institute of Technology & Society of Rio de Janeiro.

Katie speaks Hungarian, English, French, and smatterings of Spanish and Hebrew. She hopes to train the next generations of both robots and lawyers to be kind, benevolent, and responsible guardians of democracy. She reluctantly—and only occasionally—tweets as @katieszi.