Centre for Legal Technology Staff

John Keers

Lecturer in Law

John is a qualified Barrister and accredited Mediator with a strong commitment to innovation in legal practice and judicial systems. Over the past five years, he has led the design and piloting of two Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platforms aimed at improving access to justice in small claims and consumer disputes. In November 2024, he was appointed Director of the newly established Centre for Legal Technology at Ulster University.

John’s research explores the transformative potential of technology in the legal domain, with particular focus on online and digital dispute resolution, the integration of AI in judicial systems, and the ethical adoption of LegalTech.

He currently serves as Principal Investigator on two major projects: a groundbreaking study funded by the UK AI Safety Institute on the responsible use of agentic AI in judicial decision-making — the only legal research project to receive funding in 2024 — and a high-impact collaboration with the Labour Relations Agency and a Northern Ireland legal tech start-up to pilot AI-driven solutions for mass case management.

John’s work is rooted in real-world legal challenges and aims to enhance access to justice, promote transparency, and improve the efficiency of courts and public sector dispute resolution systems.

With over 15 years of teaching experience, John has lectured across a wide range of subjects including International Commercial Law, Commercial ADR, Corporate Law, Equity & Trusts, and Land Law. In 2018, he successfully developed and launched an industry-leading LLM in International Commercial Law and Alternative Dispute Resolution, which is now also delivered at Ulster University’s international partner campus in Qatar.

A passionate advocate for legal system reform through technology, John was appointed by the Office of the Lord Chief Justice in 2021 to the Judicial Steering Group on Digitisation in Northern Ireland. He also serves as External Examiner for the undergraduate law programme at London South Bank University and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Beyond academia, John is Chair of Family Mediation Northern Ireland, a Board Trustee at Relate NI, and was recently appointed to the Shared Island Mediation Project.

Dr Vimal Kumar Dwivedi

Lecturer in Data Analytics

Dr John McCord

Senior Lecturer

John McCord joined the School of Law in 2014 and is a Lecturer in Law and Course Director for the LLM in Clinical Legal Education and Ulster Law Clinic. John holds a 1st Class LLB Hons from Ulster University in 2006 and PhD in Law from Ulster University in 2010. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of family law, children and young people, human rights, property, housing, policing and conflict and contested space related studies.  

John has a sizeable portfolio of esteemed commissioned research projects, peer reviewed journal publications, book chapters and international conference papers in law, socio-legal and property related disciplines. This includes family law proceedings, children’s rights, ethno-religious conflict, urban security, housing markets performance and analysis, property tax, compulsory purchase and energy efficiency. John has been successful in securing a number of EU FP7 and Horizon 2020 research projects concerning urban security, resilience, disaster recovery and critical infrastructure protection; crime & terrorism and community policing. He also reviews papers for a number of international property journals and specialises in providing research and consultancy in property.

Dr Adam Buick

Lecturer in Law

Dr Adam Buick is a Lecturer in Law at Ulster University School of Law.
Adam's research interests centre on the relationship between law and technology, in particular pharmaceutical drugs and information technology. He is the author of Intellectual Property Rights in Pharmaceutical Test Data: Origins, Globalisation and Impact (Springer 2023).

Adam is the Course Director for the Legal Innovation and Technology Law (formerly Corporate Law, Computing and Innovation) LLM/MSc. He teaches on a number of modules associated with the course, including LAW767 Intellectual Property and Data Protection Law and LAW776 Law and Technology.

Adam welcomes applications from prospective PhD students in the fields of intellectual property and/or law and technology.

Adam joined Ulster University School of Law in 2023. He previously worked as a Lecturer in Law at Nottingham Trent University. Adam holds a PhD from the University of Leeds, an LLM from Trinity College Dublin and an LLB from Queen's University Belfast.

Rachel McNally

Academic Excellence Executive Assistant

Dr Bryan Gardiner

Deputy Head of the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems

Dr Bryan Gardiner received a first class honours degree in Electronics and Computer Systems in 2006, and a Ph.D. degree from Ulster University in 2010. Bryan is a Reader in Computer Science and Associate Head of the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems at Ulster. A fellow of the HEA, he is also the Research Lead for the Intelligent Data Analytics team within the Intelligent Systems Research Centre.

His research interests are primarily in Data Analytics, with a keen focus on Computer Vision. His research is currently supported by funding from MRC, HSCNI and Interreg NWE. He has undertaken a number of technology commercialisation and knowledge exchange projects funded via Innovate UK, Invest NI and InterTradeIreland.

Bryan is a member of the IEEE UKRI society, IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), Irish Pattern Recognition & Classification Society (IPRCS), International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), British Machine Vision Association (BMVA), and affiliate member of IEEE Computational Imaging Special Interest Group.

A Guest Editor of MDPI Remote Sensing Journal, he is also a member of a number of Programme Committees, such as: the International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications; the Artificial Intelligence & Cognitive Systems conference; the Irish Machine Vision Image Processing Conference, and has served as a reviewer for several international conferences and journals.

Professor Jun Liu

Professor of Artificial Intelligence

Professor Jun Liu is currently a Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (AIRC) at School of Computing, Ulster University. Before he joined Ulster University, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of Manchester, UK (Feb. 2002 - Dec. 2004), and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK*CEN) (Mar. 2000 -Feb. 2002). He received the BSc. and MSc. degrees in Applied Mathematics, and PhD. degree in Information Engineering from Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China, in 1993, 1996, and 1999, respectively.

He has been working in the field of Artificial Intelligence for many years. His current research is focused on two themes: 1) trust and explainable data-knowledge integrated AI decision model/system with applications in management, engineering, and industry field etc. (e.g., safety and risk analysis; policy decision making; security/disaster management; and heath care and smart home); 2) logic and automated reasoning methods for intelligent systems. In particular: resolution-based automated reasoning methods, algorithm and tools with applications (including software verification and automated theorem proving); lattice-valued logics with focus on handling incomparability, inconsistency and imprecision. He has over 270 publications in these areas.

He has been awarded over £18 Million of research funding from various funding bodies as grant holder and principle co-investigator. He is the current Chair of IEEE CIS Emergent Technologies Technical Committee (ETTC), also the past Chair of IEEE System, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Ireland Chapter (SMC28). He is an IEEE Senior Member including IEEESMC and IEEECI. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Fuzzy Systems, Knowledge-Based Systems, and Human-Centric Computing and Information Sciences, an Area Editor of International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, is also an Editor of Information Fusion Journal, Journal of Universal Computer Science, and International Journal of Knowledge and Systems Science. He serves as chairs or co-chairs and program committees of a number of international conferences and workshops.

He is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Brendan Lenfesty

Research Associate in Al-Assisted Legal Decision Making