Hi, I'm Davide Giacomo Zoppolato

Full-Stack Researcher & Developer passionate about Chinese Law | Geopolitics | Data, Mapping & Code.Hong Yen Chang Center Fellow, Columbia Law School

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2010

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Travel stops

🎤 Conference talks

💼 Job affiliations

🎓 Education

Time spent

Chinese Law & Capitalism

How Chinese law and the Party-state order markets, companies, and capital — state-owned enterprises, securities and cross-border finance, legal transplants, and the encounter between Chinese and Western legal orders.

Global China Geopolitics

China across the Global South — development, infrastructure, security, and the discourses and spatial strategies through which power is built, contested, and lived.

Chinese law

State-owned enterprises

Securities & finance

Capital flows

Legal transplants

WTO

Party-state capitalism

Critical geopolitics

Belt & Road

CPEC

Infrastructure

Security & violence

Development

Global South

Discourse analysis

NLP

GIS & mapping

Mixed methods

Full-stack dev

Education & Experience

Hong Yen Chang Center Fellow · 2026–2028

Research on Chinese law, state capitalism, and the legal architecture of cross-border capital.

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

I code in and use

Python

React

Next.js

PostgreSQL

spaCy / NLP

ArcGIS

MapLibre

Publications

My Work

Education & Experience

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See full academic CV

Teaching

Visualizing Global China

Co-taught · NYU Shanghai (GCHN-SHU 133)

Spring 2026

32 students

Geovisualization to read China's global investments & the Belt and Road

Hands-on with the Mapping Global China database, ArcGIS & QGIS

Maps as arguments — critical cartography over GIS mechanics

Story maps, an evaluation framework, and an original analysis

Global Sustainability

West Virginia University, USA

2023 – 2025

125 students

Global sustainability through a world-regional lens

Environmental, economic, political & human geography

Social-media analysis, presentations & weekly discussions

Critical GIS

Pakistan · 6 partner NGOs

Field course

35 students

Open-source GIS with QGIS

Mapping, power, and colonialism

Participatory methods & fieldwork for spatial data

GIS analysis, open data & a QGIS fieldwork trip

Applied Research

Geospatial Intelligence & Risk Mapping

Advanced spatial analysis for assessing infrastructure vulnerabilities and governance-related risks across time and space.

🛠️ Tech Stack

ArcGIS

PostGIS

Mapbox GL

GeoPandas

Python

📊 Analytical Methods

Collected and geocoded 2,500+ Chinese companies in Pakistan using structured open data sourcesInfrastructure-security co-location pattern analysis using space-time scan statisticsRisk surface modeling with multi-criteria geospatial analysis and temporal change detection

📦 Featured Application

MDB-Watchdog Spatial

LLM-Powered Multilingual Text Mining

Large-scale data collection, processing and analysis across sources times space and languages

🛠️ Tech Stack

Scrapy

PostgreSQL

spaCy

HuggingFace

FastAPI

📊 Analytical Methods

Collected and categorized 4.2M+ entries using NLP and MLMultilingual NER pipeline with full-text search infrastructureLLM-powered thematic clustering and cross-lingual insight extraction using HuggingFace Transformers

📦 Featured Application

CPEC Dataset

Full-Stack Platforms & Dashboards

Development of scalable data platforms and systems with maps, feedback systems, and real-time KPIs and authentication

🛠️ Tech Stack

Next.js

Supabase

MUI

Recharts

ArcGIS Maps SDK

Vercel

📊 Analytical Methods

Built dynamic dashboards with real-time updates powered by geocoded project data, clustering, and filtering by financing source, location, and statusRefactored legacy GIS analysis into maintainable, modular components using ArcGIS Pro SDK

📦 Featured Application

FoodLink MDBs Watchdog

RAG Knowledge Systems

Retrieval-augmented generation for multilateral policy intelligence at scale

🛠️ Tech Stack

FAISS

Gemini API

SQL

Python

📊 Analytical Methods

Built a FAISS-based semantic index with cosine similarity for long-form institutional documentsIntegrated Gemini API to generate answers grounded in top-ranked, metadata-rich chunksDesigned a chunking pipeline preserving document structure across project stagesApplied metadata filters to target phases, document types, and country-level themes

📦 Featured Application

World Bank Documents QA system

Legal-Tech Automation

AI-powered legal analysis and compliance monitoring

🛠️ Tech Stack

LangChain

OpenAI

Neo4j

LlamaIndex

PyPDF

📊 Analytical Methods

Built a custom pipeline to clean, standardize, and segment unstructured documentsLeveraged LLMs to extract structured insights from tender and adjudication documentMapped legal entities and relationships into network graphs

📦 Featured Application

Document Processor PPRA project Pakistan