Rate My Professor Vili Lehdonvirta

Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Technology Policy at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University. He holds a PhD in Economic Sociology from the University of Turku (2009) and an MSc in Information Networks from the Helsinki University of Technology (2005). He studied law at the National University of Singapore (2023-2024). Previously, Lehdonvirta was Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford (2020-2025), with prior roles as Associate Professor and Research Fellow there. He has held positions at the London School of Economics, University of Tokyo, and Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, and worked as a software developer before academia. He is Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and leads the Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL).

Lehdonvirta's research examines the geopolitics and geoeconomics of digital infrastructures, cloud computing, data centres, AI compute capacity, digital sovereignty, and platform economies. He leads the European Research Council-funded GEOCLOUD project (2025-2029), which maps global cloud computing infrastructure evolution, ownership, societal dependencies, and policy influences. From 2015 to 2021, he directed the iLabour project, developing the Online Labour Index transferred to the International Labour Organization. His books are Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control (MIT Press, 2022; shortlisted for Association of American Publishers’ 2023 PROSE Award) and Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT Press, 2014). Notable publications include Flexibility in the gig economy: managing time on three online piecework platforms (New Technology, Work and Employment, 2018) and The Global Platform Economy: A New Offshoring Institution Enabling Emerging-Economy Microproviders (Journal of Management, 2019). He has secured three European Research Council grants, advised the European Commission, World Bank, and OECD, served on European Commission expert groups on platform economy and digital labour markets (2018-2021), edited Policy & Internet (2013-2018), and sat on editorial boards of Information Society and Socio-Economic Review.