University of Bologna
Monica Palmirani, Full professor of Legal Informatics and IT Law at Bologna University, School of Law, Italy. Graduated in Mathematic, Ph.D. in Legal Informatics and IT Law, teacher of several courses since 2001 on Legal Informatics, eGovernment, Legal drafting techniques, and Legal XML. She is teaching Legal Informatics and IT Law, a module of Data Science for lawyer (2021-2002) at University of Bologna in the Legal Studies programme LLM called Legs, and Open Access and Digital Ethics at Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge Master. In this current semester 2022 she teaches a module of 20 hours of Legal Design in the undergraduate class in Ravenna. She passed for twice the selection of Advanced ERC with a project on the theoretical modelling of Smart Legal Order using AI, Data analytic, Legal Design. She is waiting the result of the interview of ERC committee.
She is member of CIRSFID-AlmaAI, one of the main centers of excellence in Italy and one of the leading centers at the international level for the area of computer science and law. CIRSFID-AlmaAI is part of the larger Alma Mater Research Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence that includes 27 departments, among the others Department of legal studies.
She was project manager and coordinator of more than ten European projects.
She is the Director of Ph.D. International Program “Law, Science and Technology” Erasmus Mundus, now appointed by MSCA-ITN fellowships (https://last-jd-rioe.eu/). She is coordinator of the eGov module in the Master in the Law of New technologies, Director of the Summer School Legislative XML (http://summerschoollex.cirsfid.unibo.it) organized by the University of Bologna, Ravenna, with the goal of disseminating the usage of Legal XML in the public agencies, respecting and guaranteeing the legal principles embedded in the legal document form. She leads the LEXML.it group inside of a European legal XML network, she is co-chair of LegalRuleML and LegalDocML OASIS TCs (2012) for modelling the legal knowledge. She is also part of the group of Legal Design White paper of the Authority of Data Protection of Italy.
The principal field of research is in Legislative and Legal Informatics, in particular she is an expert of XML techniques for modelling legal documents both in structure and legal knowledge aspects, including normative rules. She is also dedicated effort to the Data Science and AI techniques applied in the legal drafting, case-law analysis, legal knowledge modelling. She is a member of the AKOMA NTOSO project managed by the UN/DESA, which aims to promote XML standard for e-Parliament in Africa. She has contributed to the ontological aspects of the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF-core) and to the formal representation of legal norms in LKIF-Rules. She is member of the RuleML Technical Group, and of OASIS, serving in the LegalXML Member Section. Those annotated legal sources are the basis for applying legal analytics and Machine Learning techniques for improving the semantic annotation.
She is involved also in eGovernment research fields related to AI, Big Data and Open Government Data, Smart Contract, DTL especially for improving data protection, licensing and transparency at national and international level, she is also the scientific coordinator of the Legal Blockchain Lab. She is involved in the digital citizenship training in the primary and secondary schools, including courses for teachers, parents, students.
In 2009 she was invited to give a lecture at Stanford University, School of Law, within an initiative promoted by CodeX (Stanford Center for Computers and Law, part of the Stanford Research Program in Law, Science and Technology), in 2009 she was a visiting professor at NICTA – Brisbane, Australia (August 2009) and in 2010 she was visiting professor in Stanford University into the CodeX Center (July-August 2010, July-August 2017) with particular regard to the Legal Design Lab for conducing a research in the field of Legal Design. In 2015 she received the valuable award “OASIS distinguished contributor” for the exceptional contribution in the Legal Standardization models. Since 2016 she is one of the ten Directors of OASIS. She is also member of the IAAIL Executive Committee and Vice-President.
