Dr Vimal Kumar Dwivedi

Overview

Associate Director of the Centre for Legal Technologies at Ulster University.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), Estonia, awarded in 2022. His doctoral research developed a formal specification and verification language for smart contracts in legally binding decentralised autonomous organisations, allowing contractual obligations to be expressed precisely enough to be checked mechanically. That work on verifiable autonomous agreements leads directly into his current research on assurance for agentic AI systems. He completed his MTech at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi, in 2015, and his BTech at Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow, in 2012.

His research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, distributed systems and governance. He works on multi-agent and agentic AI — how autonomous systems coordinate, and how they can be made accountable when given real decision-making authority — alongside applied cryptography, blockchain and decentralised architectures, natural language processing and digital twins. A recurring theme across his work is trust: how data integrity, transparency and ethical assurance can be built into systems rather than added afterwards.

He is Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on projects funded by EPSRC, the Department for the Economy and NIAS, including work on the use of agentic AI in judicial decision-making, privacy-preserving governance for decentralised agentic AI, and trustworthy AI for clinical workflows in low- and middle-income countries.
Dr Dwivedi teaches COM737 Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing at master’s level and supervises postgraduate and undergraduate projects across AI, NLP and distributed systems.

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and received Ulster University’s Teaching Excellence Recognition in 2026. He chaired the University’s Workshop on Responsible AI and its Digital Discovery Day, and welcomes enquiries from prospective research students working in these areas.

Research Opportunities