Riccardo Vecellio Segate

Dr Riccardo Vecellio Segate is an international legal scholar, technology regulator, and policy advisor specialised in complex law & technology and bioethics policies and transnational IP disputes, with a focus on the EU, the UK, China, India, Japan, and the Gulf region. He is a specialist inter alia in intellectual property rights, public international law, commercial and investment arbitration, and a wide portfolio of law & technology dossiers, and his competence extends to several European, American, MENA, and East Asian jurisdictions.

He is currently working in London as a Research Associate at The Alan Turing Institute (the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence), where he helps validate standards for biometrics applications from an ethical-legal standpoint. Prior to joining The Turing, he has worked at the University of Dundee (School of Science and Engineering) as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on an interdisciplinary portfolio of regulatory deliverables for the largest UKRI/EPSRC grant on smart collaborative robotics, with dozens of academic departments (especially from Warwick, Cranfield, Strathclyde, Loughborough) and industry partners (especially Toyota and Airbus).

Riccardo holds a PhD in International Law (awarded unanimously without corrections) from the University of Macau, where he was granted the highest university-wide doctoral honour within the Talent Program. He also holds inter alia a Master of Laws in Public International Law from Utrecht University, a Postgraduate Diploma in European and Global Governance from the University of Bristol (where he served as the PGT Representative), as well as three Diplomas in European Affairs, Development Cooperation, and Humanitarian Intervention from ISPI Milan. He has held visiting research positions at Tsinghua Law School (2019), the University of Hong Kong’s Law & Technology Centre (2020, deferred), the UC Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (2022), as well as the University of Milan’s Information Society Law Center (2022). While teaching and researching about the law, he is part-time enrolled at the Polytechnic University of Milan as well as at the University of Ferrara as a BSc student in Industrial Production Engineering and Medical Biotechnologies, respectively.

Dr Vecellio Segate has published more than 35 scholarly works for world-leading European and American publishers, including single-authored research articles for SSCI, ESCI, and Scopus-indexed journals. These encompass, for instance, the Columbia Journal of Asian Law, the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, Social Sciences, the UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal, the Chinese Journal of Comparative Law, the International Criminal Law Review, the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, the Nordic Journal of Human Rights, the North Carolina Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Dispute Settlement, the Nordic Journal of Youth Research, the Hastings Environmental Law Journal, Art Antiquity and Law, the Loyola University Chicago Journal of Regulatory Compliance, the Asian Journal of Comparative Law, and The International Journal of Human Rights. His works for these and many other outlets span across dozens of technology-intensive legal and policy fields, and have been widely cited in many languages by institutions (parliaments, tribunals, research centres, embassies, public regulators, etc.) around the world, including by the National Assembly of South Korea, the Hángzhōu Intermediate People’s Court, the US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, and Ukraine’s National Aviation University. Furthermore, Riccardo has drafted extensive commentaries to six of the most controversial cases before Hong Kong SAR’s last-instance court (Court of Final Appeal) for the International Law in Domestic Courts series published by Oxford University Press.

Riccardo is a member of the International Advisory Board of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer), and the former Executive Editor and Secretary of the Utrecht Journal of International and European Law (Ubiquity Press). He has also served as an ad-hoc peer-reviewer for such renowned journals as the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property (Elgar), Crime, Law and Social Change (Springer), the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice (Elsevier), AI & Ethics (Springer), as well as Energy Research and Social Science (Elsevier). In November 2019, he has been awarded the Young Scholar Prize at the “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Algorithms: Regulation, Governance, Markets” Conference, organized by Kyushu University’s Faculty of Law in Fukuoka (Japan). In 2018, together with other three LLM students from Utrecht University, he classified third at the “Telders” International Moot Court Competition held in The Hague, and two years later he served as a memorials judge for the cognate “Jessup” contest.

Dr Vecellio Segate has trained at the European Commission as a “Blue Book” stagiaire at the Directorate-General for Communication Networks, Content, and Technology (DG CNECT), served as a Research Assistant in fintech at Qatar University, and worked as a legal consultant in trade secrets at Rouse & Co. International LLP, a tier-one intellectual-property firm in Shànghǎi. He has also worked for EXPO2015 (Field Force Team) and volunteered for the Italian National Committee for UNESCO in Venice. Further, he entered the start-up business with a Forbes-listed company incubated at SDA Bocconi School of Management – which was also ranked by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture within the 25 best practices in the food&wine sector nationwide, and assigned Confindustria’s SMAU Lamarck Award 2014.

He has taught classes and seminars at undergraduate, master’s, as well as doctoral level on human rights, legal/policy research methods, AI and automation, robotics/cobotics law, neuroscience & law, digital & scientific evidence, data protection, BRICS law, Chinese constitutional law, patent law, trade secrets law, technology regulation, cybersecurity law, quantum computing law, EU external relations law, legitimacy in EU law, primacy in EU law, sources of EU law, and corporate social responsibility, inter alia at the University of Dundee, University of Glasgow, UC Berkeley Law, Wǔhàn University, European Humanities University (Vilnius), the University of Macau, and USPTO training programs for ASEAN diplomats.

Upon invitation by learned societies around the globe (such as the European Society of International Law, the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, the American Society of Comparative Law, the Asian Society of International Law, and the Society of International Economic Law), he has delivered or chaired more than 140 academic talks and lectures at universities, international organisations, and think-tanks in 55+ countries all throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, and (South-)East Asia, including at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and at the universities of Geneva, Renmin (Běijīng), Gottingen, Oxford, Sapienza (Rome), KU Leuven, Peking, NUS (Singapore), Trieste, Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá), Philippines College of Law, York (Toronto), International Islamic University Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), Padova, Universitas Indonesia (Jakarta), Bologna, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Aberdeen, QUB (Belfast). He is keen on commercialising some of his research outputs, and underwent initial training for that purpose at Université Paris Sciences & Lettres thanks to Cambridge University’s Postdoc Academy.

Riccardo is also a professional classical musician, with a Bachelor (first class) and Master’s Degree in Piano Performance from the State Conservatory of Music of Verona. He has further studied music at the University of Leeds, the Mozarteum University Salzburg, the CNRR de Nice, as well as with Professor Aldo Ciccolini in Paris. He was selected as the best young student of his Conservatory (“Terenzio Zardini prize”) in 2012, and won a dozen national and international piano and choir competitions. Moreover, Dr Vecellio Segate has had his poetry collections widely awarded international prizes across Europe, including a special mention at the “Castello di Duino” contest in Trieste. His first poetry book, Teneri e precari, was published in 2012 and presented by Brazilian poetess Márcia Theóphilo at the Biblioteca Civica in Verona. In August 2011 he was unanimously awarded the First Prize at the juniores section of the XXIX “Premio Gambrinus Giuseppe Mazzotti” in Treviso, dedicated to original works on mountaineering, exploration, human geography, and landscape ecology addressed to Italy’s Veneto Region.