To delve deeper into the concepts covered in REMIT’s second conference session’s topics, and to offer participants a glimpse of what awaits them (or why you should register if you haven’t already!), we’ll be rolling out a Session Series in the weeks leading up to the event.
Going chronologically in the conference program, next up is our Roundtable!
| April 15, 11:30 – 13:00 | Roundtable: “Europe’s Dilemma in Regulating Digital Technologies: Reconciling Innovation, Geopolitics and Ethical Concerns” Chair: Flavia Lucenti (Luiss Università di Roma) Speakers: Paolo Benanti (Luiss Università di Roma), Anne Haglund-Morrissey (European Commission), Giuseppe Francesco Italiano (Luiss Università di Roma) |
The roundtable is run by our hosts, REMIT partner Luiss Università di Roma in Italy.
The roundtable aims to investigate the ethical issues that may arise when regulating digital technologies in the European context, while also unpacking the challenges to EU core values that abuses or misuses of these technologies may pose. It opens up a discussion about how to implement human-driven regulation without hindering innovation.
Session speakers
Flavia Lucenti is a postdoctoral researcher for the EU Horizon Project REMIT and an adjunct professor at LUISS University, Department of Political Science. Her research interests include IR theory, China, Russia, technology and norms. Previously, she was a research assistant at the University of Oxford and a postdoctoral research fellow and adjunct professor in International Politics at the University of Bologna. Flavia also worked as a researcher for the Research and Analysis Institute of the Italian Ministry of Defence. She holds a PhD in Political Studies and International Relations from the University of Roma Tre. She was a visiting PhD candidate at the Hong Kong University, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the European University Institute. From 2020 to 2023 she was a member of the Early Career Development Group of the European International Studies Association. From 2021 to 2024, Flavia was a deputy editor for the issue Global Policy: Next Generation of the journal Global Policy. Her main publications appear in International Politics, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Geopolitics, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Global Policy and the Italian Political Science Review.
Assoc. Prof. Paolo Benanti is a Third Order Regular Franciscan – TOR – and works on ethics, bioethics and ethics of technologies. In particular, his studies focus on the management of innovation: the Internet and the impact of the Digital Age, biotechnology for human improvement and biosafety, neuroscience and neurotechnology. At the Pontifical Gregorian University he received his licentiate in 2008 and his doctorate in moral theology in 2012.
Father Benanti is an Associate Professor at Luiss Università di Roma. He is also a Vatican Consultant on AI, President of Italian Government Commission on the impact of AI on media and journalism, and a lecturer and author of numerous publications about the ethical impact of AI. He works on neuroethics, ethics of technologies, artificial intelligence and the posthuman. He was part of the Artificial Intelligence Task Force to assist the Agency for Digital Italy. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life with a particular mandate for the world of artificial intelligence. In late 2018, he was selected by the Ministry of Economic Development as a member of the group of thirty experts tasked at the national level with developing the national strategy on artificial intelligence and the national strategy on shared ledger and blockchain-based technologies. In 2023 was selected by General Secretary of United Nation Guterres to be part of the group of 38 expert to develop a proposal for a global governance of the AI.
Dr. Anne Haglund-Morrissey is deputy Head of Unit of ‘Democracy, Equality and Culture’ in the European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG R&I), and is in the lead of R&I actions related to ‘Democracy and Governance’ of Horizon Europe – the EU Framework Programme for R&I. She was previously deputy Head of Unit in the field of international cooperation in R&I, with a particular focus on the association of third countries to Horizon Europe. She has been working in the European Commission since 2008.
Before joining DG R&I, she was working with the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions in DG Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (DG EAC), and prior to that she was Head of Sector in the Youth unit, in DG EAC/EACEA.
In her prior academic career, she was Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Jean Monnet Scholar at the University of Hull (UK). She has been involved in a number of international research networks and has published mainly in the areas of EU foreign policy and international relations
She holds the Swedish scientific title of ‘Docent’ (Linnaeus University, Sweden), a PhD degree in Political Science (University of Hull, UK), a MA in European Political and Administrative Studies (College of Europe, Belgium) and a MA in Political Science (Växjö University, Sweden).
Giuseppe F. Italiano is currently Deputy Rector of Artificial Intelligence, Founding Director of the Research Center “AI4Society” and Professor of Computer Science at Luiss University in Rome, Italy. After a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University, Prof. Italiano was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights (NY, USA). He then went back to Italy as a Full Professor, and has been Visiting Professor in several international universities, including Columbia University (NY, USA), Université Paris-Sud (Francia), Max–Planck–Institut fur Informatik, Saarbrücken (Germania), Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. In 2016 he was nominated Fellow of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. He has been doing research on algorithms, consulting with big international companies and co-founded several tech startups.