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Nicoletta Fornara

http://usi.to/dte

Biography

Dr Nicoletta Fornara is Docente-ricercatore (maître d’enseignement et de recherche MER, Lecturer and researcher) at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland. She graduated in Computer Science at the Università degli studi di Milano with full marks cum laude in 1995 and received a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences from Università della Svizzera italiana in 2003 with a thesis on “Interaction and Communication among Autonomous Agents in Multiagent Systems”. In the initial part of her doctoral studies, she was supported by a FP4 EU project at IDISA (Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence). 

Dr. Fornara has participated in and led numerous research projects. From 2018 to 2023, she directed a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and from 2009 to 2013, she directed two others as a co-applicant. She was, from 2011 to 2012 and from 2015 to 2016, principal investigator of two Hasler Foundation projects and from 2013 to 2015, she was principal investigator of a project funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education Research (SERI) under COST Action IS1004 WEBDATANET.

Dr. Fornara was from 2010 to 2012 Substitute Member for representing Switzerland in the Management Committee of the European COST action IC0801 “Agreement Technologies” (2008-2012). Inside this COST Action she did a Short Term Scientific Mission, at Institut d’Investigació en Intelligència artificial (Artificial Intelligence Research Institute IIIA) Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Dr Fornara was from 2011 to 2015 official Member representing Switzerland in the Management Committee of the European COST action WEBDATANET: web-based data-collection - methodological challenges, solutions and implementations.

Since 2021, she has been  Co-Chair of the W3C ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language) Community Group (https://www.w3.org/community/odrl/).

Since 2007, she has been member of the COIN (Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems) Steering Committee. She organized the COIN workshop at the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in 2006 and in 2023 (COIN@AAMAS2006, COINE@AAMAS2023), and at the Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organizations Federated Workshops (COIN@MALLOW2010).

Dr. Fornara is the Scientific Coordinator of the Institute for Communication Technologies, Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). She has been teaching assistant and lecturer of courses at USI, SUPSI, and Politecnico di Milano (Faculty of Computer Engineering).

Dr. Fornara has been in the program committee (PC) of numerous international conferences and workshops in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent systems. She has been in the PC of AAMAS, IJCAI, AAAI, PRIMA, ECAI, and EUMAS. She has authored more than 50 scientific papers published in international peer-reviewed scientific journals, as contributions to peer-reviewed books, and in peer-reviewed conference/workshop proceedings in the research area of Multiagent Systems (a sub-area of Artificial Intelligence), Normative Systems, and Semantic Web Technologies.

Research

Artificial Intelligence, Multiagent Systems, Agent Communication Languages and Interaction Protocols, Artificial Institutions/Organizations for the specification of Open Interaction Systems, Normative Systems, Semantic Web Technologies, Policies for regulating access and use of digital assets.




Competence areas