Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Technology Policy at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland, and Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. He has been awarded three European Research Council grants for studies on the political economy of digital technologies. His books Cloud Empires: How digital platforms are overtaking the state and how we can regain control and Virtual Economies: Design and analysis are published by MIT Press and translated to Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. He is a frequent keynote speaker and has advised the European Commission, the World Bank, and other public, private, and third-sector organizations on digital policy and governance.
Lehdonvirta’s latest book Cloud Empires was shortlisted for the Association of American Publishers’ 2023 PROSE Award. “It is a highly accessible and refreshingly original book, and a must-read for anyone interested in our digital past, present, or future” (Regulation & Governance). Cloud Empires has been adopted as a textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses in economic sociology, organization studies, and political theory. From 2018 to 2021 Lehdonvirta served on the European Commission’s Expert Group on the Online Platform Economy, advising policy makers on platform regulation and governance.
From 2015 to 2021 Lehdonvirta led the iLabour research project, a major investigation on the implications of digital platforms to labour markets, global development, and collective action. One of the project’s outputs was the Online Labour Index, an automated statistics production system adopted by researchers, journalists, and international organizations. At the project’s conclusion the system was transferred to the International Labour Organization to be maintained as a public research resource. According to a 2021 bibliometric analysis, Lehdonvirta co-authored the top two most cited studies in gig economy research. From 2018 to 2019 Lehdonvirta served on the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Digital Transformation and EU Labour Markets, advising policy makers on issues such as access to platform data.
Lehdonvirta’s current research focuses on the international political economy and geopolitics of digital infrastructures. His Political Geography of AI Infrastructure research project seeks to map the world’s GPU compute, one of the key bottlenecks in AI system development and operation. Lehdonvirta’s group uses both conventional social science research methods as well as novel data science approaches to map infrastructures and model policy impacts.
Lehdonvirta is a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, an associate member of the Department of Sociology, Oxford, and a former Turing Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, London. He co-organizes the Digital Economy Network of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and sits on the editorial boards of the journals Information Society and Journal of International Business Policy. From 2013 to 2018 he was editor of the journal Policy & Internet. In 2022-2023 he served on the European Research Council’s Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Grants panel.
Lehdonvirta holds a PhD in Economic Sociology from the University of Turku (2009) and a MSc in Information Networks from the Helsinki University of Technology (2005). He has previously worked at the London School of Economics, the University of Tokyo, and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. In 2020 he was a visiting professor at the Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University. Before his academic career Lehdonvirta worked as a software developer.