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HUMAINT team

Our approach is interdisciplinary. Our team includes a core team at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Seville, Spain and an group of researchers from different institutions.

JRC Core Research Team

Emilia Gómez (lead scientist) holds BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and a PhD degree in Computer Science. She is a principal investigator on Human and Machine Intelligence (HUMAINT) at the Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission. She is also a guest professor at the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Her research is grounded in the Music Information Retrieval field, where she has developed data-driven technologies to support music listening experiences. Starting from music, she studies the impact of algorithmic systems on human decision making, cognitive and socio-emotional development. Her research interests include fairness and transparency in AI, the impact of AI on jobs, and how it affects children development. She is currently a member of the OECD One AI expert group, the Spanish National Council for AI, and part of the research team at the JRC providing evidence-based scientific support to AI EU policy initiatives, notably the AI Act and the Digital Services Act.

Guillaume Chaslot (scientific officer).

Cristian Consonni (scientific officer) has a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2019 from the University of Trento on the topic of “The Dao of Wikipedia - Extracting Knowledge from the Structure of Wikilinks”. His research encompasses the field of computational social science, data mining, and knowledge extraction, with a particular focus on graphs. He is as well interested in graph algorithms, machine learning, and time-evolving graphs. He is an advocate for free software and open knowledge.

Maria Eriksson (scientific officer) is a researcher focusing on the history and politics of digital technologies. Her work is located at the intersection of media studies, social anthropology, and science and technology studies and explores how culture shapes technology and technology shapes culture. She received her Ph.D. in media and communication studies from Umea University in Sweden in 2019 after studying social anthropology at BA and MA’s level at Stockholm University. Prior to joining the JRC in October 2024, she was teaching and conducting research at the Seminar for the History and Theory of Media at Basel University in Switzerland. She has been involved in various research projects exploring the role of algorithms and machine learning models within the cultural industries and cultural heritage sector and her work has been featured in magazines and news outlets such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, Financial Times, Les Jours, and Rolling Stone.

David Fernández (scientific officer) received the Ph.D degree in telecommunication engineering from the University of Alcalá (UAH) in 2008. He was Full Professor with UAH and Head of the Intelligent Vehicles and Traffic Technologies (INVETT) research group until November 2020 when he joined the HUMAINT project at the JRC. He has coauthored more than 130 publications in international journals and conferences, and 12 patents. He received the IEEE ITS Society Young Researcher Award 2018. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the IET Intelligent Transport Systems. His current research interest are focused on trustworthy automated road transportation, automated road transportation, predictive perception for autonomous vehicles, human-vehicle interaction, end-user oriented automated driving, and assistive ITS.

Sandy Manolios (scientific officer) has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from TUDelft and a Master's degree in Cognitive Science and Human-Machine Interaction.

Arman Noroozian (scientific officer).

Erasmo Purificato (scientific officer) is a Scientific Project Officer at the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT) of the European  Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), focusing on trustworthy algorithmic systems and algorithmic fairness within the HUMAINT team. Before joining ECAT and JRC in September 2024, he worked as a Research Assistant at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media in Germany. Previously, he spent three years as an ML Engineer at Blue Reply in Turin. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, researching "Fairness Analysis of Graph Neural Networks for Behavioral User Modeling." He holds Bachelor's and Master’s degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II (2014, 2017) and a 2nd level Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Turin (2019).

Arianna Sala (scientific officer) has a BSc and a PhD in Psychology (from the University of Florence and the University of Seville) and has been a postdoctoral researcher in Social Anthropology (Federal University of Santa Catarina, BR). She has been in charge of qualitative research projects in the field of education, gender studies and policy evaluation for over twelve years and has been a researcher in several universities, public institutions, International Organizations (such as UN Women and the OEI), and private companies, in Spain and Brazil. At the JRC, she has been the first author of “LifeComp, the European Framework for the Personal, Social and Learning to learn Key Competence” and “LifeComp into Action: teaching Life skills in the classroom and beyond” focusing on the promotion of Socio-Emotional Competences through formal and non-formal education. Her current research interest lies in the impact of social media and online platforms’ use on adolescents’ well-being and mental health.

João Vinagre (scientific officer) focuses his research on recommender systems, in particular algorithms that learn online from continuous flows of data. He is currently interested in long-term user modelling, online monitoring and decentralised algorithms. More generally, he is curious about intelligent systems and their societal effects. He received his PhD in 2016 from the University of Porto. Before joining the JRC, in late 2022, he was a researcher at INESC TEC, one of the largest portuguese research institutes in the fields of computer science, systems engineering and energy, where he participated in more than 15 national and international research projects. He has also worked for 10 years as a software developer and project manager in the industry. Between 2018 and 2023, he was an invited professor at the University of Porto, where he taught courses related to programming and artificial intelligence. Since 2023, he teaches a course on recommender systems at Porto Business School.

Gerrit Bostelmann (IT Support) holds a BSc and an MSc in Bioinformatics, which he obtained at Freie Universität Berlin and University of Potsdam, respectively. Throughout his studies he worked as data analyst for the data and business intelligence teams at a large e-commerce retailer and as research assistant at the Bioinformatics group of the University of Potsdam, where he analyzed gene expression data. He wrote his Master’s thesis on gene expression profiles at the EMBL-EBI in Cambridge, UK. He has managed laboratory data as LIMS administrator at the Berlin Institute of Health and Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin and has held a data scientist role at a biotech startup in Seville. During the five years prior to joining HUMAINT at the JRC Gerrit developed variant calling pipelines for Next Generation Sequencing data and researched MHC binding predictions of viral peptides as scientific developer and bioinformatician at the Andalusian Platform for Computational Medicine of the Fundación Pública Andaluza Progreso y Salud. At HUMAINT he supports the AI Lab and helps develop software for internal services.

Pedro Frau (IT support) is an Audiovisual System Engineer with a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence. He has been working in several fields related to computer science mainly in processes automation, aerial robotics and social robotics. He has had the opportunity to work with research groups at the university level namely SPECS group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and CVAR group at the Technical University of Madrid where he could make contributions with a conference paper and a journal paper in the field of aerial robotics. In the corporate level, he has worked in tech consultancy companies (Everis, NTTDisruption, AKKA technologies) and in defence (Airbus Defense and Space). Currently Pedro is a freelance consultant working for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Seville developing tools to be used on Artificial Intelligence related studies.

Collaborators

Relevant past and current collaborators.

Former members