Yiwei Lu

Postgraduate teaching

Tutor in the postgraduate course:

Electronic Commercial Law 2023

E-Commerce Law 2024

Regulation of autonomous systems: the law of robotics 2024

Participated in marking postgraduate students' dissertations in 2024

Robotics,AI and the Law 2024

E-Commerce Law 2025

Regulation of autonomous systems: the law of robotics 2025

Robotics,AI and the Law 2025

Research summary

As a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Law, Yiwei’s research focuses on the interaction between artificial intelligence, law, and regulation, particularly how legal and regulatory frameworks respond to the deployment of AI systems in high-risk socio-technical contexts. His work examines how AI reshapes decision-making structures, redistributes responsibility across human and technical actors, and challenges existing legal, institutional, and professional forms of accountability.

His research focuses on three main areas:

  1. AI Law, regulation, and accountability in high-risk systems Yiwei studies how AI systems create new regulatory and legal challenges, especially where decision-making is distributed across developers, deployers, users, organisations, and affected individuals. His work addresses responsibility allocation, accountability gaps, trustworthy AI, and the legal governance of AI in domains where safety, public trust, and institutional legitimacy are central concerns.
  2. Translating legal and regulatory requirements into AI system design and governance Yiwei investigates how legal norms, regulatory obligations, and policy expectations can be interpreted, represented, and operationalised in AI development and deployment. This includes research on compliance-by-design, regulatory-by-design approaches, legal decision-support systems, and frameworks that support communication between legal, technical, and organisational actors.
  3. Socio-legal analysis of AI’s impact on expertise, professional judgement, and institutional practice Yiwei’s research examines how AI changes the relationship between law, technology, and professional decision-making. He is particularly interested in how AI affects human expertise, oversight, voice, and responsibility in complex institutional settings, and how legal and governance frameworks can be redesigned to support responsible innovation, public trust, and meaningful accountability.

  1. Yiwei Lu(co-first author of 2 in total), Zhe Yu,Burkhard Schafer, Zhe Lin: Explanation in Legal Contexts: An Integration of Deontic and Non-monotonic Reasoning. In journal of Topoi: an international review of philosiphy (2026) 
  2. Yiwei Lu, Xue Li, Zhe Yu, Yuhui Lin, Burkhard Schafer, Alan Bundy, Andrew Ireland, and Zhe Lin: A Theory Repair Based Traffic Regulations Generalisation for Autonomous Vehicles. In proceedings of 5th International Conference on AI Logic and Applications (AILA 2025)
  3. Yiwei Lu(co-first author of 2 in total), Zhe Yu, Burkhard Schafer, Zhe Lin: Cross-Border Legal Adaptation of Autonomous Vehicle Deign based on Logic and Non-monotonic Reasoning. In proceedings of 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2025) 
  4. Yiwei Lu(co-first author of 2 in total),Zhe Yu, Hao Zhan , Yang Yu * Zongshun Wang: A Quantitative Legal Support System for Transnational Autonomous Vehicle Design. In Journal of  Drones. (2025)
  5. Zhe Yu, Yiwei Lu, Burkhard Schafer: Systematic Reasoning for Formal Argumentation Combined with Deontic Logic. In Journal of Studies in Logic (2024)
  6. Pak Yin Chan, Xue Li, Yiwei Lu, Yuhui Lin, Alan Bundy,  Formalise Regulations for Autonomous Vehicles with Right-Open Temporal Deontic Defeasible Logic.  In proceedings of  AI-2024 Forty-fourth SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI 2024)
  7. Zhe Yu, Yiwei Lu:  Reasoning about legal systems based on formal arguments of deontic logic. In proceedings of 1st China Artificial Intelligence and Logic Conference （2024）
  8. Yiwei Lu, Zhe Yu: Enforce Actions based on Structured Argumentation Theory under Legal Contexts. In proceedings of 4th International Workshop on Logics for New-Generation Artificial Intelligence (LNGAI 2024)
  9. Leon Qiu, Yiwei Lu, Burkhard Schafer: Formalisation Memories: Towards a Pattern Approach to Legal Design. In proceedings of 27th Internationales Rechtsinformatik symposion 2024 (IRIS2024), Journal of Jusletter IT (2024)
  10. Yiwei Lu, Zhe Yu, Yuhui Lin, Burkhard Schafer, Andrew Ireland, Lachlan Urquhar.: A Legal System to Modify Autonomous Vehicle Designs in Transnational Contexts. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2023).
  11. Yiwei Lu, Yuhui Lin, Xue Li, Alan Bundy, Burkhard Schafer, Andrew Ireland:Logic and Theory Repair in Legal Modification. In 3rd International Joint Conference on Learning & Reasoning (IJCLR): CogAI 2023.
  12. Yu, Zhe, and Yiwei Lu. "A Structured Bipolar Argumentation Theory for Providing Explanations in Practical Reasoning." 5th International Conference on Logic and Argumentation. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023.
  13. Yiwei Lu, Zhe Yu, Yuhui Lin, Burkhard Schafer, Andrew Ireland, Lachlan Urquhart：Legitimacy Detection System based on Interpretation Schemes for AI Vehicles Design.  Presented in 17th International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2023)
  14. Yiwei Lu, Zhe Yu, Yuhui Lin, Burkhard Schafer, Andrew Ireland, Lachlan Urquhart: Handling inconsistent and uncertain legal reasoning for AI vehicles design. In Proceedings of Workshop on Methodologies for Translating Legal Norms into Formal Representations (LN2FR 2022)
  15. Yiwei Lu, Zhe Yu, Yuhui Lin, Burkhard Schafer, Andrew Ireland, Lachlan Urquhar.: A legal support system based on legal interpretation schemes for ai vehicle designing. In Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2022). pp.213–218 (2022)
  16. Haixiao Chi, Yiwei Lu, Beishui Liao, Liaosa Xu and Yaqi Liu: An Optimized Quantitative Argumentation Debate Model for Fraud Detection in E-commerce Transactions, In IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 52-63 (2021)
  17. Yiwei Lu, Zhe Yu: Reasoning with Inconsistent Legal Ontologies Based on Argumentation Theory.  Presented in 14th International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2020)
  18. Yiwei Lu, Zhe Yu Argumentation Theory for Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies. In: Borgwardt S, MeyerT, editors. 33rd Description Logic workshop 2020. vol. 2663;DL 2020.

2023-now: As a member of Regulation and Design Lab (RAD Lab) University of Edinburgh.

2021-now: Work with Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS), University of Edinburgh.

2018-2021: As a member of Zhejiang University – University of Luxembourg Joint Lab on Advanced Intelligent Systems and REasoning(ZLAIRE). Zhejiang University.

2019-2020: Participated in research project in cooperation with the Ant Group, which is the network finance affiliate of Alibaba Group. This project aims at building an explainable system to solve e-economy fraud detection problem. 

2018-2019: Participated in research project in cooperation with an Internet company TuiDian. This project aims at building an intelligent database for import and export trade declaration. 

 

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