Staff profile

Ahmet Alper is a PhD candidate at Durham University Law School and a qualified lawyer in Turkey registered with the Istanbul Bar Association. He began his doctoral studies in October 2024, focusing on the regulation of artificial intelligence on online shopping platforms.

Before joining Durham, Ahmet Alper completed an LLM in Information Technology and Intellectual Property Law at the University of Sussex with his dissertation tittled "AI Generated-Art and Copyright Infringements: An Analysis of Open Source Artificial Intelligence Software". Prior to this, he also obtained an LLM degree in Public Law from Galatasaray University where he wrote his dissertation about "The Crime of Unauthorised Access to Computer System in Turkish Criminal Law". He holds an LLB from Ankara University Faculty of Law. Professionally, Ahmet served as a lawyer at the Ministry of Treasury and Finance of the Republic of Türkiye for four years, where he was responsible for managing litigation and enforcement processes and official correspondence.

Current Research

His current research, supervised by Dr Zhiyu Li and Dr Can Eken, focuses on the regulation of decision-making algorithms on online shopping platforms within the framework of European Union law. The research analyses the impact of profiling, recommendation, listing and pricing algorithms on consumers and investigates how existing legislation could be improved to prevent algorithmic manipulation and discrimination and to empower consumer autonomy and privacy.