LECTURERS (alphabetic order)

Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Milano-Bicocca (ITALY), Fellow at The University of Tokyo, RCAST - Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (JAPAN). Director of the Complex Systems & Artificial Intelligence Studies and Research Center, and of the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication. Director of the Milano-Bicocca Cini Node "Artificial Intelligence & Intelligent Systems”. JSPS (Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellow at The University of Tokyo. Research Activity: Artificial Intelligence (Knowledge Representation, Engineering and Management); Complex Discrete Dynamical Systems (Cellular Automata, Multi-agent Systems). From 2004 she focused her activity in the field of crowds and pedestrians modeling and simulation to support crowd management in public spaces. She was/is Principal Investigator of several research and application national and international projects.  From 2009 she extended her research in the field of mobility in an Ageing Society. She co-chairs the Working Group “Ageing Society” of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. Her most recent research interest regards Affective Collective Intelligence.   

Federico Bergenti is associate professor of computer science at the Department of Mathematical, Physical and Computer Sciences of the University of Parma. He has been working since the early 2000s on various aspects of artificial intelligence, mostly related to agents and multi-agent systems. His research covered foundational questions and applicative problems ranging from theoretical studies on the emergent phenomena of collective intelligence to applied research efforts in international projects funded by the European Commission under competitive grants. He funded the AI Lab of the University of Parma in 2015 to host projects and initiatives on artificial intelligence themes related to agents, multi-agent systems, collective intelligence and machine reasoning. His current research includes the proposal of languages for agent-oriented programming to better support agent-oriented software engineering as a viable means to synergistically combine artificial intelligence and software engineering. 

Daniela Briola obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Genoa, Italy, in 2009, and is currently assistant professor at the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy. Her research interests include multiagent systems (MAS) in large, including in particular knowledge management, software engineering of MASs, and more recently integration of human realistic pedestrian and prossemic behaviours into MASs, simulating them into Virtual Reality scenarios. She is regularly involved in the program committees of AAMAS and many international conferences in her areas of interest, lead Special issues in the areas of MAS and Software Engineering, and currently co-chairs the XRIA@ECAI and EMAS@AAMAS workshops.

Pierangela Bruno is a Computer Scientist. She got a master’s degree within a Dual Degree Program: Computer Science (University of Calabria, Italy, 2017) and Software Engineering (University of Applied Science of Upper Austria, Austria, 2017), and received her PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Calabria (2021). She held a post-doc position at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (University of Calabria, Italy, 2021). Currently, she serves as non-tenured Assistant Professor (RtdA) in the same Department. Her main research interests involve Deep Learning-based approaches for the analysis of biomedical images with the aim of providing an automated assessment of pathological conditions, detecting, and segmenting specific elements of medical interest.

Andrea Cossu is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science department of the University of Pisa. His research revolves around continual / lifelong learning with deep neural models. Andrea is one of the maintainers of Avalanche, a Python library for continual learning.  Andrea is a member of the Pervasive AI Lab (University of Pisa and CNR) and of the Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning group (University of Pisa). He is also a member of ContinualAI, a non-profit research organization on continual learning, where he served as Board Member and Treasurer from 2022 to 2024.  Andrea received his Ph.D. in Data Science from Scuola Normale Superiore and his Master's Degree in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence Curriculum) from University of Pisa.  He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Pisa. He was also visiting researcher at KU Leuven (Belgium) and research intern at Google Brain (California).

Danilo Croce is a Tenure track Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Faculty of Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. in Informatics Engineering from the same university. His expertise spans both theoretical and applied Machine Learning. He primarily delves into Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and Data Mining domains. His particular interest lies in innovative Kernels within Support Vectors, Deep Neural Machines, Transformer-based Neural Architectures, and Large Language Models. His focus centers on advanced syntactic and semantic processing within the realms of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. Throughout his academic career, he has actively participated in various roles across numerous national and European projects. He has authored over 150 publications in international journals, conference proceedings, and workshops (H-index: 24), with 10 of these being recognized as “Best Paper” and more than 15 top ranks in national and international benchmarking champaigns. Danilo has been a member of the Program Committee for more than 25 International Conferences and Workshops. He is also a regular reviewer for esteemed International Conferences including ACL, EMNLP, COLING, IJCAI and AAAI. https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=dXewdYAAAAAJ&hl=it

Allegra De Filippo (webpage: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/allegra.defilippo/en) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna (2020). Her research focuses on decision support systems, stochastic optimization, and methods for integrated offline/online optimization under uncertainty in complex systems. Her doctoral thesis was identified as being of exceptional quality during the evaluation process of the EurAI 2021 PhD Thesis Award. Allegra has deepened her knowledge of the aspects of artificial intelligence and sustainability through various academic and professional experiences, presenting her research results in international events such as the Business Forum AI Italia Canada with a panel on the current state of AI and its impact on the circular economy and sustainability goals. She organized several workshops ad events related to Artificial Intelligence and Sustainability at national and international level. She has published papers in international conferences and journals in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and she collaborated with research groups and universities. She is an editorial board member of the journal ACM Computing Survey and has served in organizational roles for several events.

Elena received her MSc in Biomedical Engineering in 2002, PhD in Bioengineering in 2006, and she is currently Associate Professor in the Electronic Information and Bioengineering Department (DEIB) of Politecnico di Milano. She is co-founder of the Neuroengineering and Medical Robotics Laboratory, in 2008, being responsible of the Medical Robotics section. IEEE Senior Member, she is currently Senior Editor of the Int. Journal of Robotics Research, Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine and Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Robotics and Robotics and Automation Letters. She has been Publication Chair and Co-Chair for IEEE ICRA 2019, 2023 and 2024 and is Program Chair of IROS 2025. She is responsible for the lab course in Medical Robotics, of the courses on Clinical Technology Assessment and Smart Hospital of the MSc degree in Biomedical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and she serves in the board committee of the PhD course in Bioengineering and of the National PhD in Robotics and Intelligent Machines.

Francesca Fracasso has been a research scientist at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISTC) since 2016. With a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, her research focuses on integrating psychological insights into the design and development of social and assistive technologies, such as robots and intelligent systems. Her expertise lies in applying various methodologies within a User-Centered Design framework throughout the entire process of creating innovative technologies across different domains. This includes utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as psycho-physiological indicators, to evaluate user interactions in both short- and long-term assessments. Her goal is to combine multiple investigative approaches to enhance the synergistic interaction between humans and technology. Additionally, she pays particular attention in the contribution to optimizing the agent’s behavior by continuously adapting it based on real-time user feedback and individual profiles. Francesca is also an active participant in numerous national and international research projects and contributes to the scientific community by organizing workshops at national and international conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Social Robotics.

Francesca Gasparini is an associate professor at the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She took her Ph.D in Science and Technology in Nuclear Power Plants at the Polytechnic of Milan, and her master degree in Nuclear Engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan. She is the scientific coordinator of the Multimedia Signal Processing Laboratory.  She is a scientific board member of NeuroMi Milan Center for Neuroscience and scientific coordinator of the research area of Computational and Systems Neuroscience. Her research activity is focused on multimedia signal processing, analysis and understanding. From 2017 she enriched her research activity including affective computing, and brain computer interface, opening new fields of investigation in the Artificial Intelligence domain, extending her research activity on the field of the Ageing Society. She is currently coordinating several research activities in the area of electroencephalogram data processing and classification, BCI, and physiological data analysis.

Massimiliano Giacomin received the M. Sc. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Padova in 1998, and the PhD degree in Information Engineering from the University of Brescia in 2002. Since 2002 he is with the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Brescia, where he serves as a full professor since 2019. His research interests are in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, including knowledge representation and automated reasoning (in particular, argumentation theory, fuzzy constraints, temporal reasoning), multi-agent systems, and knowledge-based systems. He is author of more than 130 scientific papers in international journals, conferences and workshops. In 2006 he won the “Marco Somalvico” prize sponsored by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence for significant results obtained by an Italian young researcher. He was keynote speaker at PRIMA 2017 and invited speaker at various international workshops. He is author and co-author of tutorials for various conferences, summer schools and workshops and invited lecturer for several PhD courses in Computer Science. He is an editorial board member of “Argument & Computation” journal and co-edited 5 special issues of international journals. He is co-editor of the Proceedings of COMMA 2010 and of two volumes of the Handbook of Formal Argumentation (HOFA). He co-organized international workshops and conferences and he was Program co-chair of the 4th Summer School on Argumentation (SSA 2020). He regularly serves as a reviewer for scientific journals and as PC member for international conferences.

Gianluigi Greco is full professor of Computer Science at the University of Calabria, where he has held the position of Director of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science since 2018. His research interests range in various fields of Artificial Intelligence, from the study of methods and techniques for representation and automatic reasoning on knowledge bases, to the definition of coordination and collaboration mechanisms in multi-agent systems, to the development of algorithms. responding to principles of fairness in the context of AI systems for decision-making. His research activities have received numerous awards in leading international conferences and journals in the sector, including the IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award in 2018 and the IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Award in 2008. He is EurAI Fellow, the most prestigious award conferred by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI); he also received a Kurt Goedel Research Prize Fellowship from the Kurt Goedel Society, and was awarded the AIxIA Marco Somalvico Award in 2009. He is a member of the editorial board of numerous computer journals and, in particular, he is Associate Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal. Since January 2022, he has been President of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AixIA).

Jomi F. Hübner is an Associate Professor at Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). He received his PhD degree from University of São Paulo in 2003. His research interests include multi-agent programming and tools to develop such systems. He is regularly involved in the program committees of AAMAS and many international conferences in his areas of interest. The main project he is co-developing is JaCaMo: a multidimensional programming platform for multiagent systems.

Dr Sae Kondo holds a doctorate in urban engineering from the University of Tokyo and is a PhD (engineering) and first-class architect. She has worked as a first-class architect in an architectural design company and was in charge of the design of housing complexes, train stations and the JR Central Linear Pavilion at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan. After working as a specially-appointed assistant professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Urban Sustainability and Regeneration Studies and at the University of Tokyo's Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology, she has been an associate professor at Mie University's Graduate School of Engineering, Department of Architecture since 2020. Her main research themes are local city revitalisation, the nature of civic centres for collaboration and exchange, the collaborative base nature of city halls, childcare facilities and towns, and the Living Lab's co-creation scheme. Among these, the thesis on citizen collaboration and relationship building for forming citizen collaboration bases using city halls as a stage was awarded the Paper Encouragement Award by the City Planning Institute of Japan. She was also selected as a 2019 official speaker at SXSW, one of the world's largest tech trade fairs and conferences in Texas, USA, for her unique perspective on organising regional development in Japan by utilising the region's DNA. She is currently implementing a research project in collaboration with local authorities such as Iwaki City in Fukushima Prefecture and Shimoda City in Shizuoka Prefecture. Her most significant research interest in analysing the relationship between 'living labs' and the uplift of organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB).

Carlo Lallo is a Junior Researcher in Demography at the University of Molise (Italy). His research focuses both on economic demography and on survival and health inequalities. He obtained the European Master in Demography at EDSD (European Doctoral School of Demography) - UAB (Autonomous University of Barcelona) in 2012 and the Ph.D. in Demography at University of Rome La Sapienza in 2014. He has been P.I. of two research projects and team member of several research projects focusing on socio-economic determinants of health and survival and their impact on pension systems, health systems and the labour market. In recent years, he has focused on the challenges that Italian society will face as the ageing process reaches its mature equilibrium in the coming decades, from a multidisciplinary perspective. In particular, he has focused on the challenges that ageing will pose for the planning of public services, the sustainability of care and the labour market. He is part of the research team of the "Age-It, ageing well in an aging society" project, funded by the EU Next Generation programme, which aims to achieve a quantum leap in making Italy the leading scientific centre for ageing research and a state-of-the-art "empirical laboratory" on the ageing process, in order to build an inclusive society for all ages.

Bernardo Magnini is senior researcher at FBK (Trento, Italy), and Director of the FBK International PhD Program. His interests are in the field of Computational Linguistics, particularly lexical semantics and lexical resources, question answering, textual entailment, and conversational agents, areas in which he has published more than 200 scientific papers. He has coordinated international research projects on question answering, ontology population from text, and textual inferences. He has launched EVALITA, the evaluation campaign for both NLP and speech tools for the Italian language, has co-chaired CLIC-it 2014 (the first Italian conference on Computational Linguistics), AI*IA 2018 (the 17th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence), and he has been local organizer of EACL 2006 in Trento and of ACL 2019 in Florence. He has been contract professor at the University of Trento, Bolzano and Pavia, and he is staff member and lecturer at the ICT International Doctoral School of the  University of Trento. He has been member of the Scientific Committee of the Know Center (Graz) and of the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Eurac Research (Bolzano). He currently serves as President of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics and he is General Chair of the 60th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022).

Massimiliano Mancini is an ELLIS member and an Assistant Professor at the University of Trento. He completed his Ph.D. at the Sapienza University of Rome, co-advised by Barbara Caputo and Elisa Ricci. During his Ph.D., he was part of the TeV lab at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, the VANDAL lab at the Italian Institute of Technology, and a visiting student at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. After his Ph.D., he joined the University of Tübingen as a postdoc in the Explainable Machine Learning group led by Zeynep Akata, where he was funded by an Innovation Grant for Science/Life Science of the university. He serves as area chair for major conferences in the field (CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICRA), where he has also been recognized as an outstanding reviewer (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML). He serves as an associate/area editor for CVIU and TMLR and has organized multiple tutorials and workshops on transfer learning, multimodal learning, and efficient foundation models. His research focuses on efficient transfer learning, cross-domain generalization, continual learning, automatic bias identification, and compositional reasoning. 

Katsuhiro Nishinari received his Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering from The University of Tokyo in 1995. He is currently a Professor at the School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, and the Director of the Crowd Management Research Society. He is a member of the Japan Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and was an advisor in Tokyo Olympics 2020. He has published more than 200 research papers in leading international journals and several books on traffic jam and applied mathematics. He has won awards for his work including NISTEP Award 2013 from National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, and the Ig Nobel Prize (2021).

Prof. Dr. Yukio Ohsawa is Professor of Systems Innovation in the School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo. He received BE, ME, and PhD from the School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo (1995). Then worked for the School of Engineering Science at Osaka University (research associate, 1995-1999), Graduate School of Business Sciences in University of Tsukuba (associate professor, 1999-2005), and moved back to The University of Tokyo. He started researches from non-linear optics, and, via Artificial Intelligence, created a new domain chance discovery meaning to discover events of significant impact on decision making, since the year 2000. About chance discovery he gave keynote talks in conferences such as International Symposium on Knowledge and Systems Sciences, Intl Conf. on Rough Sets and Fuzzy Sets, Joint Conf. on Information Sciences,Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, etc. Chance discovery came to be embodied as innovators' marketplace, a methodology for innovation borrowing principles of the dynamics of markets. Then he, when biking from his job in a business school, invented the basic idea of Data Jackets. Since then, he is introducing the method presented in this book to sciences, educations, and businesses. His original concepts and technologies have been published as books and monographs from global publishers such as Springer Verlag, Taylor & Francis, etc. Some books among them are, "Chance Discovery" (2003 Springer, foreword given by Eric von Hippel), "Innovators' Marketplace: Using Games to Activate and Train Innovators" (2012), "Tools for Activating Markets of Data" (2022), and "Living beyond Data" (2022). He is in the editorial boards of several journals. As a previous program chair of the Annual Conference of The Japanese Society on Artificial Intelligence, he came to be the first to change this  conference into an international conference from June 2019. As a member of JSAI (Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, he was awarded the two most prestigious awards service award (2017) and research achievement award (2022). He also served as the program chair of IEEE Big Data Conference in 2022, where he is now organizing a new session Synergizing Mobility Data for Creating and Discovering Valuable Places."

Leonardo Sanna is a linguist with a PhD in Digital Humanities and Digital Communication. Currently, Leonardo is a post-doctoral researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler within the Intelligent Digital Agents (IDA) research group. Within the IDA group, his research concentrates on integrating Large Language Models into healthcare chatbots. In particular, he focuses on text analytics, employing Retrieval-Augmented generation techniques to enhance chatbots' responses. 

Enrico Scala is a senior researcher at University of Brescia. After completing his PhD degree at the University of Turin, he spent two years at ANU (Canberra) and another two years at FBK (Trento). Then he moved back to academia in Brescia. His research interests are on automated planning and heuristics search, and span over theoretical and practical aspects. He co-authored about 60 papers published in the major AI conferences and journals (IJCAI, ICAPS, AAAI, SOCS, KR, ECAI, AIJ, JAIR), and is maintainer of state of the art engines for automated planning.

Fabio Stella serves as Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication of the University of Milan-Bicocca. His main research interests are related to Probabilistic Graphical Models, Bayesian networks and causal networks, for finance, health and biology. He published more than 100 papers, and served as Program Chair/Reviewer of several international conferences; AISTATS, ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, PGM, NeurIPS, SIGIR, PAKDD, RecSys, SIGIR and UAI. He has been awarded the 10% best reviewers at NeurIPS 2020 and at AISTATS in 2022. He serves the editorial board of IEEE Intelligent Systems. He currently serves as PI for ROSANNA, i.e., a research project funded by the Italian Association on Cancer Research (AIRC). Furthermore, he serves as PI of two research projects funded by private companies on the topic of dynamic treatment of chronic kidney disease and on causal learning from clinical overlapping databases.

Cecilia Tomassini is Full Professor of Demography at the University of Molise. She is member of several national and international research groups on population ageing, especially looking at the role of the family and support network for older people. Her research interests focus on intergenerational transfers, proximity and living arrangements; effects of past demographic events on older individuals’ care; population aging processes and dynamics within the Italian context and in a comparative perspective; grandparents and grandparenting. Cecilia served as expert member of the National Council for Economic and Labour (CNEL), appointed by the President of the Italian Republic, as member of the Scientific Committee of the Research Centre for Inner Areas and Apennines, and as president of the Italian Association for Population Studies. Associate Editor of the Genus journal (Springer). Cecilia is the Scientific Coordinator for the University of Molise of the Extended partenariat on population Ageing, funded by PNRR. 

Giuseppe Vizzari has a Degree in Computer Science, from the University of Milan, and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Milano-Bicocca. He is Associate Professor and member of the Complex Systems and Artificial Intelligence research center at the Department of Computer Science, Systems and Communication (University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy). His research activities mainly concern agent-based models and technologies (with particular focus on agent-based modelling and simulation), knowledge-based systems (case-based reasoning and semantic-web systems), and AI applications to traffic and mobility. He published more than 120 papers on international journals and conferences. He has been a fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), spending a research period at the Research Center on Advanced Science and Technology of The University of Tokyo. He was responsible for the research unit of the University of Milano-Bicocca in the context of the NEANIAS project (Novel EOSC services for Emerging Atmosphere, Underwater and Space Challenges, 2019 - 2021 -INFRAEOSC-2018-2020) and he’s leader of WP4 - Data integration, analysis, security, and delivery of the spoke 8 Mobility-as-a-Service of the National Center for Sustainable Mobility (MOST) funded by the European Union in the context of the NextGenerationEU plan.

I'm Ph.D. candidate at the University of Milano-Bicocca, fully funded by F. Hoffman – La Roche Ltd. My project is about Causal Discovery applied to Healthcare and Medicine, which specific reference to the context of risk assessments of lymph node metastases in Endometrial Cancer patients. In recent times, I also covered different positions, such as adjunct professor for the master course of Causal Networks, research consultant for the Max Planck Institute and training consultant for Fondazione Aldini Valeriani. Additionally, I’m a member of the Italian Association of Artificial Intelligence and serve as a Program Committee member of the Workshop for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.