Rita is an international expert in technology and intellectual property law, with a recent focus on legal regulation and governance of Artificial Intelligence technologies. She acquired her PhD degree from Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg/Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law (Germany, suma cum lauda) in 2010. Since then she researched and lectured in universities in Japan, Germany, Lithuania, and Australia. To date, she published over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, as well as a monograph on Applicable Law to Copyright Infringement: A Comparison of ALI and CLIP Principles. Rita is regularly invited to present in conferences in Europe, South and North America, and Asia, and has prepared reports for the European Commission, European Patent Office, and the governments of Australia, South Korea and Lithuania.  

Rita has led projects on 'Government Use of Face Recognition Technologies: Legal Challenges and Solutions' (Lithuanian Research Council grant) and 'Towards Explainable AI in Healthare' (Macquarie University Research Acceleration Scheme), and was an investigator at the NSW Ombudsman project 'Mapping Automated Decision Making Tools in Administrative Decision Making in NSW' (led by Prof Kimberlee Weatherall). Previously she was a recipient of a research grant by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science for her project on 'The Law Applicable to Copyright'.

She is a Lead of the Emerging Technologies Workstream at the Australian Society for Computers and Law (AUSCL), a member of Australia Standards, Committee IT-043, a Lead of the Explainable AI research stream at the Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence at Macquarie University, an affiliate of ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making, a member of Macquarie University Agency and Ethics Research Centre and the Intellectual Property Association of Australia and New Zealand (IPSANZ). 

Rita is willing to supervise student projects in the areas of technology and intellectual property law, especially in the area of AI and law.