dhr. G. (Giovanni) Sileno PhD

For the past eight years Giovanni Sileno has been working in various fields related to AI and Computer Science research, as AI & Law, Data Science and Cognitive Science. He has a particular interest in contributing to the development of theories, methods and applications reducing the gap between computational and human knowledge.

Currently post-doc researcher at the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, he is working on the conception of a computer-aided policy-making environment exploiting models of intentional agents, to be applied on several applicative domains (digital marketplace, healthcare, organizational information systems).

Before returning at UvA, he has been post-doc researcher at Télécom ParisTech and Paris Dauphine University (France), investigating the problems of automated interpretation, and studying problems at the interface between symbolic and numeric methods.  His most recent publications are about:

• the computation of contrast on conceptual spaces,
• the distinction of perceptual with conceptual similarity,
• the identification of relevant causes in a given story, and
• the quantification of notions related to the attribution of moral/legal responsibility (e.g. negligence, foreseeability, risk).

He took his PhD at UvA, with the thesis Aligning Law and Action, discussing computational methods supporting a partial re-alignment of representations of norms with representations of behaviour (operationally or intentionally characterized). The purpose of this research was to improve the reactivity and adaptability of administrative organizations to normative and social changes.

Before starting his doctorate, he worked as Business Analyst for McKinsey & Co., as a freelance software developer, and as a musician for a few years, after graduating in Electronic Engineering with a double degree at the Politecnico di Torino and at the ENSIMAG (Grenoble, France), with a thesis on design, modeling and simulation of embedded devices.