tEAM

Monica Palmirani

Monica Palmirani is a Full Professor of Legal Informatics and IT Law at Bologna University, School of Law in Italy. With a Ph.D. in Legal Informatics and IT Law, she has been teaching several courses since 2001 on Legal Informatics, eGovernment, Legal drafting techniques, and Legal XML. She is a member of CIRSFID-AlmaAI, one of the main centers of excellence in Italy for computer science and law. She has coordinated over ten European projects and is the Director of the Ph.D. International Program "Law, Science and Technology" Erasmus Mundus. Her research focuses on Legislative and Legal Informatics, with expertise in XML techniques for modeling legal documents and legal knowledge aspects, including normative rules. She is also involved in eGovernment research fields related to AI, Big Data, Open Government Data, Smart Contract, DTL, and is the scientific coordinator of the Legal Blockchain Lab. She has been a visiting professor at Stanford University and received the "OASIS distinguished contributor" award for exceptional contributions to Legal Standardization models.

Fabio Tamburini

Fabio Tamburini obtained a degree in Computer Science with distinction applying neural networks to pattern recognition problems. He started his activity working at the Interfaculty Centre for Applied and Theoretical Linguistics - University of Bologna. In 2004 he received a PhD in Electronics and Computer Science Engineering from the University of Bologna, defending a thesis on the Automatic detection of prosodic prominence in continuous speech.

He is now full professor in the same university, where, during the past decades, he has been teaching various Computational Linguistics and Applied Linguistics courses both at undergraduate and master level. His main scientific interests span through Natural Language and Speech Processing, AI & Machine Learning and Corpus Linguistics.

Corrado Roversi

Corrado Roversi is associate professor at the University of Bologna, where he teaches Philosophy of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in analytic philosophy and the general theory of law (awarded by the Università Statale in Milan). He is assistant editor of Ratio Juris: An International Journal of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.) and has worked on the project A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence (Berlin, Springer), of which he has edited the second tome of the last volume (along with Enrico Pattaro), titled Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Civil Law World (2016). He is also among the editors of the collection Law as an Artifact (Oxford University Press, 2018). His research is focused on legal ontology and the phenomenology and cognitive sciences of institutional concepts. Among his publications are: Conceptualizing Institutions (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2014); How Social Institutions Can Imitate Nature (Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy, 2015); On the Artifactual – and Natural – Character of Legal Institutions (in Law as an Artefact. Ed. L. Burazin, C. Roversi, and K. E. Himma. Oxford University Press, 2018); Cognitive Science and the Nature of Law (in Law and Mind. Ed. B. Brożek, J. Hage, N. Vincent. Cambridge University Press, 2021); In Defence of Constitutive Rules (Synthese, 2021).

Silvia Bagni

Silvia Bagni is currently Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy. She earned a PhD in Constitutional Law from the same University in 2005 and completed a 2 year post-doc in Bioethics, from UPRA (Università Pontifica Regina Apostolorum,Rome) in 2013.

Her research interests include constitutional justice, Latin American constitutionalism, interculturalism, and ecological law. She has been visiting professor or invited speaker at Universities in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. She is professor of the PhD Programme in Constitutional and International Law at the Universidad San Carlos in Guatemala and in the PhD Programme in Law oat the University of Cádiz in Spain.

Silvia is member of the editorial board of Diritto pubblico comparato ed europeo (il Mulino, Bologna) and of the open access Comparative Law Journal DPCE Online. She is also member of the scientific committee of Revista General de Derecho público comparado (Iustel, Spain) and of many other Latin American Law Reviews.

In 2013, Silvia was co-founder of the Centro studi sull’America Latina, in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. In 2018, she was nominated as an expert for the United Nations Harmony with Nature Programme, and in 2019 she was invited to be speaker at the UN Dialogue on Harmony with Nature in New York. In 2020, she co-authored a study commissioned by the European Economic and Social Committee, Towards an EU Charter of the Fundamental Rights of Nature (https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/our-work/publications-other-work/studies ISBN 978-92-830-4971-5).

Fabio Vitali

Fabio Vitali is Full Professor in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI) of the University of Bologna. He holds a PhD in Computer and Law from the University of Bologna and has been working for a long time on digital document formats, hypertext systems, web technologies and usability and user experience design. 

He has been part of the W3C Working Group on XML Schema and is currently co-chair of the OASIS TC on LegalDocML. He is the main author of Italian and international standards on legislative XML such as NormeInRete, CEN Metalex and Akoma Ntoso, which became an OASIS standard in 2018. 

He teaches Web Technologies as well as Usability and User Experience Design at the Computer Science School and at the graduate course on Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge of the University of Bologna.

Salvatore Sapienza

Fixed-term assistant professor at the Department of Legal Sciences, University of Bologna. He also holds an affiliation with ALMA-AI (Alma Mater Research Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence). He is the author of several publications in the field of legal informatics, data governance, data ownership, data and AI ethics. His current research interests also include the development and the use of Artificial Intelligence tools for legal data analysis. He teaches modules in the courses "Legal Informatics" (Ravenna Campus) and "Data Science for Lawyers" (Bologna Campus) at the University of Bologna. He holds a PhD in Law, Science & Technology (LAST-JD) from CIRSFID - ALMA AI in co-tutelle with the University of Luxembourg. Since September 2022, he is a visiting researcher at Centre for IT & IP Law at KU Leuven - CITIP, Belgium. He also holds a Master of Laws (LL.M) in Intellectual Property and Information Law from King's College London.

Silvia Brambilla

Silvia Brambilla studied Linguistics at the University of Bologna and graduated with a dissertation in Computational Linguistics. From 2018 to 2022 she did a PhD at FICLIT (UNIBO). The main topic of her research was the development of a lexical-semantic database for the Italian language based on Fillmore’s semantic frames and the study of the Fear-frames in Berkeley’s FrameNet. In 2023 she joined the HyperModeLex team to work on NLP methods for legal documents, with a particular focus on their semantic representation.

Pier Francesco Bresciani

Research Fellow in Constitutional Law, he holds a PhD in Legal Studies and MD in Law from the University of Bologna and a PgDip in Humanities and Social Sciences from the Collegio Superiore of the University of Bologna. Since 2019, he has been a Teaching Assistant in Constitutional, Parliamentary, and Administrative Law. He has also been a visiting PhD researcher at the Max Planck Institute in both Heidelberg and Freiburg and clerked as a trainee at the Italian Constitutional Court. His research interests include constitutional theory and practice of punishment, security, right to self-determination, and AI in public decision-making.

Michele Corazza

After his master degree in Computer Science he joined the WIMMICS team in Inria Sophia Antipolis as a research engineer to work on the CREEP project, focused on the detection and prevention of cyberbullying instances on social media. During this period (2018-2019), he developed machine learning models to detect hate speech and cyberbullying in a multilingual setting. In 2019 he started a PhD in the University of Bologna, joining the INSCRIBE ERC project, which investigates the origin of writing. During the PhD, their work involved on computational methods for writing systems from the bronze age in Cyprus and the Aegean. Finally, in 2023, he joined the HyperModeLex team to work on NLP methods for legal documents.

Giovanni Sartor