Executive Director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy; Professor of Practice; Tech Policy Lead, UCLA DataX
- B.Sc. (Hons) Australian National University, 2004
- LL.B. (Hons), B.Sc. University of Western Australia, 2006
- B.C.L. University of Oxford, 2009
- Ph.D. University of Cambridge, 2015
- UCLA Faculty Since 2025
Professor Julia Powles is the Executive Director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy at the UCLA School of Law and UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and Tech Policy Lead for the University-wide initiative, UCLA DataX. Professor Powles researches and teaches in the areas of privacy, intellectual property, internet governance, and the law and politics of data, automation, and artificial intelligence.
Prior to joining UCLA, Professor Powles was the founding Director of the UWA Tech & Policy Lab and Associate Professor of Law and Technology at the University of Western Australia. She previously held academic appointments at Cornell Tech, New York University, and the University of Cambridge, and worked at The Guardian, World Intellectual Property Organization, and MinterEllison. She is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the UWA Graduate School of Education and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and Faculty of Law.
Professor Powles earned a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Cambridge and a Bachelor of Civil Law from the University of Oxford. She also holds Bachelor’s degrees in Science and Law, with First Class Honors, from the Australian National University and University of Western Australia. She has received numerous honors and awards, including the Commonwealth Scholarship, Cambridge Australia Poynton Scholarship, Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition Scholarship, John Norman Barker Prize in Law, Yale Poynter Fellowship, WA 40Under40 Business Leaders Award, WYNG-Hatton Trust Fellowship, and two Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Justice Garry Downes AM KC on the Federal Court of Australia and Commonwealth Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Professor Powles leads bold, investigative research programs at the edge of tech development and tech accountability. She has a strong track-record in raising research income, leading research grants, and providing graduate research training. Her work has been published in leading journals including International Data Privacy Law, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Health and Technology, and Fordham Law Review, as well as popular publications such as the New Yorker, Guardian, Financial Times, Medium, Slate, and WIRED, among others. With Professor Frank Pasquale, she is Series Editor of Oxford Technology Law and Policy (Oxford University Press). Professor Powles has served on Federal and State Advisory Committees on Generative AI in Education, AI and Copyright, Privacy and Responsible Information Sharing, Responsible AI, and Robotics.
Professor Powles is committed to providing high-quality graduate research training and supervision, and welcomes approaches from master’s and doctoral candidates in law, engineering, computer science, and social sciences.
Bibliography
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Articles, Chapters & Reports
- AI, Education, and World-Building, in The Oxford Handbook of the Foundations and Regulation of Generative AI (edited by edited by Phillip Hacker, Andreas Engel, Sarah Hammer, and Brent Mittelstadt, Oxford University Press, 2025). Accepted/In Press
- We Need Responsible, Application-Driven AI Research (with Sarah Hartman, Cheng Soon Ong, and Petra Kuhnert), Proc. 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning 267 (2025). Full Text
- Child Sexual Abuse, Technology, and Regulation (with Kate J. Sim), in Oxford Law Pro: Expert Essentials (Oxford University Press, 2025). Full Text
- Resisting Technological Inevitability: Google Wing’s Delivery Drones and the Fight for Our Skies (with Anna Zenz), 382 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 20240107 (2024). Full Text
- The Corporate Culpability of Big Tech, in The Culpable Corporate Mind (edited by edited by Elise Bant, Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2023). Full Text
- (with Jacqueline Alderson), in Best Practice Principles on Athlete-Centric Governance of Technology and Athlete Information (Australian Sports Commission, 2023). Full Text
- Synthesising 2D Video from 3D Motion Data for Machine Learning Applications (with Marion Mundt, Henrike Oberlack, Molly Goldacre, Johannes Funken, Corey Morris, Wolfgang Potthast, and Jacqueline Alderson), 22 Sensors 6522 (2022). Full Text
- (with Jacqueline Alderson, Kathryn Henne, Jason Weber, Lyria Bennett Moses, Rachel Harris, Anthony Elliott, Mike Innes, Matthew Graham, Kate Starre, David Hughes, and Toby Walsh), in Getting Ahead of the Game: Athlete Data in Professional Sport (Australian Academy of Science, 2022). Full Text
- Urbanism Under Google: Lessons from Sidewalk Toronto (with Ellen P. Goodman), 88 Fordham Law Review 457 (2019). Full Text
- Response to DeepMind (with Hal Hodson), Health and Technology (2018). Full Text
- Data Provenance to Audit Compliance with Privacy Policy in the Internet of Things (with Thomas Pasquier, Jatinder Singh, David Eyers, Margo Seltzer, and Jean Bacon), 22 Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 333 (2018). Full Text
- UK Patent Decisions 2017 (with John Liddicoat), 49 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law 318 (2018). Full Text
- Meaningful Information and the Right to Explanation. (with Andrew Selbst) 7 International Data Privacy Law 233; 81 Proc. Machine Learning Research 48 (2017) Full Text
- Google DeepMind and Healthcare in an Age of Algorithms (with Hal Hodson), 7 Health and Technology 351 (2017). Full Text
- Boundaries of Law: Exploring Transparency, Accountability, and Oversight of Government Surveillance Regimes (with Douwe Korff, Ben Wagner, Renata Avila, and Ulf Buermeyer) (Web Foundation, 2017). Full Text
- UK Patent Decisions 2016, 48 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law 179 (2017). Full Text
- Policy-Driven Middleware for a Legally-Compliant Internet of Things (with Thomas Pasquier, Jatinder Singh, Raluca Diaconu, David Eyers, and Jean Bacon), Proc. 17th ACM Middleware 13 (2016). Full Text
- Adblocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race (with Rishab Nithyanand, Sheharbano Khattak, Mobin Javed, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Marjan Falahrastegar, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Hamed Haddadi, and Steven J. Murdoch), Proc. 6th USENIX FOCI (2016). Full Text
- UK Patent Decisions 2015, 47 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law 189 (2016). Abstract
- The Case That Won’t Be Forgotten, 47 Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 583 (2015). Full Text
- Data Flow Management and Compliance in Cloud Computing (with Jatinder Singh, Thomas Pasquier, and Jean Bacon), 2 IEEE Cloud Computing 24 (2015). Full Text
- Expressing and Enforcing Location Requirements in the Cloud Using Information Flow Control (with Thomas Pasquier), Proc. IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering 410 (2015). Full Text
- UK Patent Decisions 2014, 46 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law 221 (2015). Abstract
- Chakrabarty’s Mission to Bug Cancer and Save Patent Law, 9 Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice 342 (2014). Full Text
- UK Patent Decisions 2013, 45 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law 201 (2014). Full Text
- Replacement of Parts and Patent Infringement, 72 Cambridge Law Journal 518 (2013). Full Text
- Industrial Applicability of Bioscience Inventions in the Supreme Court, 71 Cambridge Law Journal 50 (2012). Full Text
- Dynamics of Stomatal Water Relations Following Leaf Excision (with Thomas N. Buckley, Adrienne B. Nicotra, and Graham D. Farquhar), 29 Plant, Cell & Environment 981 (2006). Full Text