Board

Part-time professor at Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna and at the EUI. Appointed in 2006, contract renewed until 2024. 

Giovanni Sartor is currently Principal Investigator for the ERC (Europen Research Council) Advanced project COMPULAW, started on 1 November 2019, to be completed on 31 October 2024. He is part-time professor in legal informatics at the University of Bologna and part-time professor in Legal informatics and Legal Theory at the European University Institute. He obtained a Ph.D. at the EUI,  researcher at the Italian National Council of Research (ITTIG, Florence), chair in Jurisprudence at Queen’s University of Belfast, and was Marie-Curie professor at the EUI. He has been President of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law. He has published widely on artificial intelligence and law, computational logic, legal theory/philosophy, and computer law.

Henry Prakken is a senior lecturer in the Intelligent Systems Group of the computer science department at Utrecht University, and professor in Legal Informatics and Legal Argumentation at the Law Faculty of the University of Groningen. I have master degrees in law (1985) and philosophy (1988) from the University of Groningen. Since May 2021 I also have a temporary appointment as a part-time professor at the European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

In 1993 he obtained his PhD degree (cum laude) at the Free University Amsterdam with a thesis titled Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument. His main research interests concern artificial intelligence & law and computational models of argumentation. He is a past president of the International Association for AI & Law (IAAIL), of the JURIX Foundation for Legal Knowledge-Based Systems and of the steering committee of the COMMA conferences on Computational Models of Argument. He is on the editorial board of several journals, including Artificial Intelligence (since 2017 as an associate editor).

Andrea Omicini is Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI) of the Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna, Italy.
His research interests encompass distributed systems, agents, intelligent systems, software engineering, multi-paradigm languages, agreement technologies, and pervasive systems. On those topics he has written more than 300 papers, published in international journals, books, conferences, and workshops. His courses currently cover distributed systems, intelligent systems engineering, multi-agent systems, fundamentals of Internet of Things.

Agata Ciabattoni is Full Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of the Vienna University of Technology. In 2011 she has been awarded a START prize, the highest Austrian award for early career researchers, for her project Non classical proofs: Theory, Applications and Tools.

Agata Ciabattoni holds a Master in Computer Science from the University of Bologna (Italy) and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Milan (Italy). Prior to her current position, she had a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Commission and an Habilitation Scholarship (Elise Richter Programme for senior post-docs) from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). From 2006-2010 she was working as Independent Principal Investigator in her research projects: Fuzzy Logic: from Mathematics to Medical Applications, funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), 2008-2012, and A (Semantic) Characterization of Cut-Elimination, funded by FWF, 2006-2009. From 2010 to 2012 she was first a research assistant, and afterwards an associate professor at TU Vienna.

Fosca Giannotti is a director of research of computer science at the Information Science and Technology Institute “A. Faedo” of the National Research Council, Pisa, Italy. Fosca Giannotti is a pioneering scientist in mobility data mining, social network analysis and privacy-preserving data mining. Fosca leads the Pisa KDD Lab - Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory, a joint research initiative of the University of Pisa and ISTI-CNR, founded in 1994 as one of the earliest research lab on data mining. Fosca's research focus is on social mining from big data: smart cities, human dynamics, social and economic networks, ethics and trust, diffusion of innovations. She is author of more than 300 papers. She has coordinated tens of European projects and industrial collaborations. Fosca is currently the coordinator of SoBigData(link is external), the European research infrastructure on Big Data Analytics and Social Mining, an ecosystem of ten cutting edge European research centres providing an open platform for interdisciplinary data science and data-driven innovation. Recently she became the recipient of a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant entitled XAI – Science and technology for the explanation of AI decision making.

Kevin D. Ashley is an expert on computer modeling of legal reasoning and cyberspace legal issues. He has reported his research in conference proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Law, and the Cognitive Science Society. He has also published in journals such as IEEE Expert, International Journal of Man/Machine Studies, and Journal of Artificial Intelligence and the Law, of which he is a member of the editorial board. Professor Ashley is a Principal Investigator of a number of National Science Foundation grants to study reasoning with cases in law and professional ethics. Professor Ashley is also author of Modeling Legal Argument: Reasoning with Cases and Hypotheticals (MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1990).

A former National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, Professor Ashley was also a visiting scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and a recipient of an IBM Graduate Research Fellowship. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and Vice President of the International Association of Artificial Intelligence and Law.

In addition to his appointment at the School of Law, Professor Ashley is a research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, an adjunct associate professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a faculty member of its Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems.

Marco Lippi is Assistant Professor with a Tenure Track (Ricercatore Tempo Determinato, tipologia B) at Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell'Ingegneria (DISMI), Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, working in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Currently, the main focus of his research is on argumentation mining and legal informatics (see his Research page), but he's also interested in bioinformatics, computer vision, time-series forecasting and heuristic search. In January 2015 and March 2018 he obtained the National Scientific Qualification (Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale) as Associate Professor in Information Engineering (09/H1) and Computer Science (01/B1), respectively.

Emiliano Lorini is a Senior researcher (“directeur de recherche”) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), co-head of the LILaC team (Logic, interaction, language and computation) at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT).

The general aim of his research is to develop formal models of interaction between cognitive agents. Emiliano has mainly worked in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) with strong interaction with other disciplines such as economics, philosophy and cognitive sciences.

Formal methods have been widely used in AI for modeling intelligent systems as well as different aspects of social interaction between artificial and/or human agents (e.g., a team of robots or a virtual agent or a social robot interacting with a human). In his work he uses logic and game theory as formal tools for building models of interaction between cognitive agents.

He is interested in both the expressivity aspect and the computational aspect of formal models of interaction. 

Paolo Torroni is Associate professor at the University of Bologna since 2015. He is interested in artificial intelligence, in particular in natural language processing, multi-agent systems and computational logic. He has collaborated in numerous national and international research projects, with positions of responsibility, publishing more than 150 scientific articles. He directs the language technologies lab and coordinates the international master's degree program in artificial intelligence. Since 2018 he has been authorized to carry out the functions of the 1st level professor. He is visiting fellow at the European University Institute