Nicoletta Fornara

I have been a lecturer and researcher (maître d'enseignement et de recherche MER) for digital technologies at the Institute of Digital Technologies for Communication, Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, Università della Svizzera italiana, since 2017. My main research interests include the study of policies and norms for regulating autonomous agents and empowering the sovereignty of individuals by using semantic web technologies. I get my PhD in Communication Sciences from USI with a thesis on Interaction and Communication among Autonomous Agents in Multiagent Systems partially supported by a FP4 EU project at IDISA (Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence) in 2003. I graduated in Computer Science at the Università degli studi di Milano with full marks cum laude in 1995.

I was post-doc, scientific collaborator and lecturer at USI, Lecturer at Politecnico of Milan (2005-2020), and Lecturer at Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana (SUPSI) (2010-2011).  

I am the Scientific Coordinator of the Institute for Communication Technologies, Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). 

I have served in the program committee (PC) of numerous international conferences and workshops in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent systems, e.g. AAMAS, IJCAI, AAAI, PRIMA, ECAI, EUMAS, and JURIX. I 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 Multiagent Systems, and Semantic Web Technologies.

Since 2021, I am Co-Chair of the W3C ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language) Community Group. I coordinate the activities of the group that defines the operational semantics of ODRL.

Fellowships:

2003-2005. Post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation project 200021-100260, “An Open Interaction Framework for Communicative Agents"

2007-2008. Post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Hasler Foundation, project 2204, title: “Artificial institutions: specification of open distributed interaction systems”. 

Feb. 2010. Short Term Scientific Mission, COST Action IC0801 Agreement Technologies at l‘Institut d’Investigació en Intelligència artificial (Artificial Intelligence Research Institute) (IIIA) Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.

2009-2011. Post-doctoral fellowship funded by the State Secretariat for Education and Research SER within the COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research) action number IC0801 “Agreement Technologies”, project C08.0114, title: “Open Interaction Frameworks" in collaboration with HES-SO (University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland).

2011-2012. Funded by the Hasler Foundation, project 11115-KG, title: "Open Interaction Systems: an approach based on Artificial Institutions, Environments, and Institutional Spaces”.

2024-2025. Co-Principal Investigator of the project "Generative AI in education @ USI" funded by USI Internal calls / Projects for Innovation in Teaching. 

2018-2023. Funded by Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Principal Investigator. A Framework for Automatic Monitoring of Norms and Agreements Concerning Digital Assets in the Web of Data. 

Since 2021, I am Co-Chair of the W3C ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language) Community Group. I coordinate the activities of the group that defines the operational semantics of ODRL.

Since 2007, I am member of the COIN (Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems) Steering Committee. I 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).

2015-2016. Funded by Hasler Foundation. Principal Investigator. A System for Automatic Web Data Collection by means of Norms and Semantic Web Technologies.

2013-2015. Funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education Research (SERI) under COST Action IS1004 WEBDATANET. Principal Investigator. Automatic Web data collection from non-reactive sources by means of normative systems and Semantic Web Technologies.

2011-2012. Funded by Hasler Foundation. Principal Investigator. Open Interaction Systems: an approach based on Artificial Institutions, Environments, and Institutional Spaces.

2011-2013. Funded by Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Co-Principal Investigator. Open Interaction Systems: an approach Based on Artificial Institutions and Service Oriented Architecture with an application to electronic market places. 

2009-2011. Funded by Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Co-Principal Investigator. Open Interaction Systems: an approach Based on Artificial Institutions and Reasoning Agents with an application to Collaborative Environments,

2010-2012. Substitute Member representing Switzerland in the Management Committee of the European COST action IC0801 Agreement Technologies (2008-2012). 

2011-2015. Official Member representing Switzerland in the Management Committee of the European COST action WEBDATANET: web-based data-collection - methodological challenges, solutions and implementations.