Team
Marianna Bolognesi is the principal investigator of ABSTRACTION. Born in the USA and raised mainly in Italy, she is now associate professor of Linguistics at the University of Bologna, Italy. Previously, she worked as a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Amsterdam (NL) and as a research associate at the University of Oxford (UK). Her research focuses on the interplay between language and thought and on how words mean. She published several academic articles and books and participated in conferences and events around Europe. She loves to travel with her husband and their two bilingual children.
Francesca Genovese was born in Bologna. She worked as research fellow for the ABSTRACTION project from the kickoff (1 June 2022), for one year. She studied Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledges, at the University of Bologna. She collaborated on several projects and start-ups, in which she has developed and deepened her skills in the field of user experience, interaction design and web development. She likes to discover and learning about recent technologies. She is passionate about sports, especially tennis and surfing, and she loves to travel.
Caterina Villani was born in Salerno. She currently works as Post-doc for the ABSTRACTION project. She received her PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Bologna, Italy. Her research focuses on the relationship between language, sensory and bodily experiences, which she addressed using behavioral and linguistic methods. She is interested in how abstract and concrete concepts are represented and used across different individuals and cultures. She has also worked as a research fellow at Frei Universität Berlin (DE) on projects investigating prosody and pragmatic processes. She collaborated with national (ALMAIDEA) and international (RECOGNISE) projects on the role of expertise in shaping legal and institutional concepts. In her free time, she loves to dance, read all sorts of books, and look after her cats and plants.
Andrea Amelio Ravelli is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the ABSTRACTION project. Born in the Lucanian Apennines, he got his degree in Modern Philology from the University of Florence, where he also completed his PhD with a project that combined linguistics and computer science, focusing on the annotation of semantic action concepts in computer vision datasets. His research interests center on the representation of meaning and multimodality, as well as corpus linguistics and machine learning. When he's not lost in scripts, debugging, and datasets, he enjoys exploring flavours, scents, and sounds.
Giulia Rambelli is from Viareggio and currently works as Post-doc for the ABSTRACTION project. She obtained a joint PhD degree in Linguistics from the University of Pisa (Italy) and Aix-Marseille University (France). Her research is at the intersection between theoretical linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning. She investigates the meaning aspects of language, interested in the underlying mechanisms in sentence interpretation and productivity. Her papers have won international awards, including the Baidu AACL-IJCNLP Best Paper Award 2020 and the Best Paper Award at *SEM 2021. Starting this year, she is also one of the organizers of the yearly workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics. She loves street photography and her cats and has a boundless passion for freediving, which has taught her how to overcome her limitations physically and mentally.
Claudia Collacciani is currently pursuing her PhD in the framework of the ABSTRACTION project. She was born in Abruzzo and currently lives in Bologna, where she obtained her Bachelor's degree in Classics and her Master's degree in Linguistics. She works in particular on cognitive linguistics and computational linguistics, areas in which she carried out her master's thesis work. She is also interested in the intersection between the two, namely in the comparison between the representation of language emerging from the human mind and that emerging from artificial intelligence systems. She loves reading, hiking and discovering new places.
Tommaso Lamarra was born in Rome, where he graduated with honors in Philosophy of language and linguistic theories at University of Rome "La Sapienza". Currently, as the winner of the PhD position pertaining to the project ABSTRACTION, he is a PhD student of the LILEC department at University of Bologna. He spent a visiting period of research at University of Oregon. He has conducted research activity at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (CNR) in Rome, participating in the activities of Prof. Anna Borghi's Lab (BalLab). His research activity concerns the relation between language, categorization and sensorimotor experience. He is interested to the relation between abstract concepts, concrete concepts, and specificity. His main objective of research is to define how linguistic system enhances conceptualization in the process of abstraction. He has a multidisciplinary approach. He likes walking and swimming. He loves reading books, traveling and taste local products. He has a passion for acting.
Maria Grazia Attianese is the project manager of ABSTRACTION. After graduating in Philosophy at University of Bologna, she attended in Rome a high-level course on European Public Relations and started working in Milan in the publishing and communication sectors. Always proudly to bee an European citizen, she had the opportunity to closely follow the impact of Europe in her territory and eventually to join the European Programmes and Projects Unit of UNIBO Research Services Division. She soon learned at work an essential lesson: great results only come where there is a strong team.
Andrea Ferrari was born in Bologna. He currently works as an IT full stack developer for the Abstraction project; analysis, design, and development of all the services necessary for the project. He started programming when he was 12 and he graduated with a master's degree in computer engineering at the University of Bologna. He is a freelancer which has collaborated with many innovative startups and which still remains linked to the field of research.
He likes to create things hardware or software, made of wood or electronic circuits, but his first passion is JDM(Japanese Domestic Market) cars.
Pinelopi Troullinou is a Senior Research Analyst at Trilateral Research and serves as the external Ethics Advisor of ABSTRACTION. She works on the intersection of science, technology, and society exploring how technology influences society and vice versa. She has an extensive experience in digital ethics and literacy on digital media. Her work results in innovative methodologies in training involved stakeholders on the responsible development, ethical assessment, conscious use, and effective regulation of digital technologies. Her current focus is on the inclusion of children and children’s rights in the development and regulation of innovation. Pinelopi has disseminated her work in journal articles, book chapters, and international conferences. She has an interdisciplinary academic background holding a BA in Philosophy and Social Studies, an MA in Bioethics from the University of Crete (GR), and a second MA in Communications Studies from the University of Leeds (UK). She obtained her PhD in Surveillance Studies from the Business School of The Open University (UK). Born and raised in Greece, and having lived and worked in the UK for over a decade, she moved to Italy to raise her daughter by the sea.