Scientific Director: Bernardo Giorgio Mattarella

The project examines administrative reforms through an interdisciplinary approach, involving lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, and economists. It considers these reforms from various perspectives: reform policies, implementation, comparisons and connections with foreign and international experiences, and local government. A research unit will specifically address each of these perspectives. The research units will collaborate closely through frequent meetings and by sharing data and documents. This methodology aims to address common shortcomings in public administration studies, particularly those concerning administrative reforms. These studies are often episodic, monodisciplinary, and theoretical in nature, with an emphasis on legal provisions. They also lack a supranational and comparative perspective, tend to be descriptive rather than proactive, and primarily focus on national administration. The research objectives are primarily scientific, but the research group members aim to contribute to improving reform policies and implementing ongoing reforms.

Scientific Director: Giuseppe Francesco Italiano

Networks are ubiquitous across various domains. In many of today's applications, such as social networks, they are enormous in size, with over billions of nodes/edges. The AHeAD project’s ambitious goal is to create powerful new algorithmic tools for handling large-scale network analysis, providing the scientific foundation and technological advancements needed to process and visualize massive, streaming, and dynamic network data. AHeAD will explore new algorithmic and visualization techniques, applying its new findings primarily to the realm of social networks. Achieving this goal calls for a quantum leap in algorithm design and engineering. The sheer volume of data, coupled with its interconnected and ever-changing nature, presents new algorithmic challenges that cannot be tackled with traditional methods. AHeAD is a project proposed by a highly qualified and integrated consortium of six research units, internationally recognized as leading groups in algorithmic research, with strong research ties and a long history of fruitful collaboration: Padua, Perugia, Pisa, Rome Sapienza, Rome Tor Vergata, and Rome Tre. Their strong scientific standing is evidenced by their publication records and their presence on the editorial boards of prestigious journals and conferences.

Scientific Director: Marco Scarsini

Digital markets are becoming an increasingly important part of the global economy. The internet has fostered the emergence of new markets with previously unseen characteristics—e-commerce, web-based advertising, viral marketing, the sharing economy, and real-time trading—and algorithms play a central role in many decision-making processes within these markets. For example, algorithms conduct electronic auctions, dynamically adjust prices, trade stocks, and collect big data to devise market strategies and offer advice to clients. The project's main goal is to develop new methods and tools in research areas that are crucial for understanding digital markets: algorithmic game theory, market and mechanism design, machine learning, algorithmic data analysis, and optimization in strategic contexts. These methods will be applied to solve fundamental algorithmic problems related to internet advertising, the sharing economy, the design of mechanisms for social good, and game security. While the research focuses on foundational work—with rigorous design and analysis of algorithms, mechanisms, and games—it will also include empirical validation using large-scale datasets from real-world applications.

Scientific lead: Giuseppe Melis 

In line with the H2020 objectives for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth (ICT-13 and 26), this research aims to determine whether and how AI related to algorithmic decisions and data-driven predictions affects key aspects of national legal theory and practice. This research, primarily legal in nature, aims to identify suitable tools for protecting rights and distributing wealth, drawing on the valuable contributions of sociologists, economists, and statisticians. There are three objectives: 1) to examine (A) whether and how the application of AI challenges certain traditional legal categories in civil law (e.g., subjectivity and liability) and (B) its repercussions, particularly on tax, commercial, and labor law; 2) to develop case studies aimed at testing the results of general considerations in two markets that are particularly significant for the application of AI: finance and labor (specifically identified by H2020 as cross-cutting activities for ICT); 3) propose a reference framework to guide both legislators (at the national and supranational levels) in making policy and regulatory decisions regarding the phenomenon, and private operators by providing them with a reference model for regulatory compliance.

Scientific Director: Gianfranco Pellegrino

Concerns about the creation and spread of disinformation and false data are widespread in democratic societies, to the extent that a series of problematic political events and processes are seen as a consequence of citizens' distorted beliefs. From Brexit to the election of Trump in the United States, from the rejection of refugees to vaccine hesitancy across Europe: these are all examples of the impact that distorted information has on citizens' behavior and attitudes. The project aims to provide the first comprehensive typology and philosophical analysis of the many cognitive biases hastily lumped together under the label “fake news,” as well as a normative assessment of the various institutional responses developed to address them. Consequently, this project aims to: 1) critically analyze the cognitive traps that influence democratic life; 2) carefully evaluate the proposed policy responses to the issue, questioning their potential risk of undermining democratic principles and values as much as the cognitive distortions they are intended to remedy; 3) consider cognitive defects and possible remedial cognitive virtues from the perspective of democratic ethics.

Scientific Director: Fabiano Schivardi

The development of the “knowledge economy,” broadly defined as a production system where knowledge and information are the key resources for the success of businesses and workers, has sparked growing interest in the mechanisms by which knowledge and information are generated and transmitted within businesses and between businesses and workers, as well as in their economic effects. This growing academic and political debate has sparked new theoretical research and prompted the analysis of new data sources that allow us to track the flow of information between companies and workers. The project examines how the process of generating, transmitting, and disclosing information influences companies’ performance and workers’ careers. An initial series of papers will examine how this process is shaped by the structure of connections between companies, between companies and banks, and between companies and politicians. The second part of the project focuses on workers' careers. It will examine how imperfect information about workers' skills influences talent allocation and, consequently, careers in skill-intensive jobs. Finally, the research will explore how social interactions and the flow of information—both during the “training” period and in the workplace—can shape workers' careers. It will focus specifically on how and to what extent these interactions can help explain the gender pay gap.

Scientific Director: Giovanni Piccirilli

The project develops the perspective of interlegality to address issues arising from the overlap between different legal systems by simultaneously examining the same problems. Theories based on the systemic separation of state law, transnational/international law (e.g., WTO), and regional law (e.g., EU) are proving unsustainable, ill-suited to resolving conflicts, and incapable of providing guidance on practical matters. Given the substantive interconnections between these issues (e.g., security and access to justice, trade and human rights), “interlegality” is the term used to describe both this situation and its explanatory theory. This interdisciplinary research examines its impact in exemplary fields—ranging from security to the environment, food security, immigration, human rights, and trade—through the lenses of constitutional, administrative, and international law. It also draws on the perspectives of decision-making authorities, including national and regional authorities or international courts.

Scientific lead: Cristina Fasone

The project aims to conduct an updated investigation into the constitutional transformations that are taking place in response to the political success of various separatist movements. These changes are occurring in European Union member states that operate based on fundamental principles rooted in a shared liberal tradition, and where decentralization policies—whether through devolution, autonomy, or regionalism—fall under the category of multilevel government. Particular attention will be given to the constitutional doctrines of nationalist or regionalist movements that are at the forefront of demands for various forms of self-determination, often through referendums or consultative democracy. Using a comparative approach, the research will also extend to Eastern Europe, where the pressures of active separatism have tested newly established democracies or are likely to do so in the future. Another area of research will address the striking case of Brexit as the starting point for a “macro-separatism” directed both outward from the country and inward among its constituent parts. The aim is to examine the positions of the many separatist movements and their influence on the orientations of civil society.

Scientific lead: Fausto Gozzi

The main goal of this interdisciplinary project (Mathematics and Economics) is to investigate the causes and consequences of the observed temporal-spatial evolution of economic activities using innovative applied mathematical and economic methods. To achieve this goal, the study will first develop and analyze mathematical models to describe how the most important economic variables (such as labor and capital) evolve over time in different locations, taking into account spatial heterogeneity. The framework will make it possible to circumvent several drawbacks in the literature, typically stemming from the absence of a comprehensive approach to spatial inequalities. The models will primarily involve infinite-dimensional optimal control problems. The theoretical analysis will impact mathematical theory in this field. Secondly, these models will be used to conduct quantitative empirical analyses of how economic activities spread across space, their evolution, and the implications for both inequality and aggregate efficiency. Empirical analysis will help policymakers gain a better understanding of the origins of actual spatial agglomeration and inequality. It will also provide insights to enhance policies aimed at reducing disparities in economic development. The topics addressed in the project are at the forefront of contemporary research. The research clearly demonstrates an interdisciplinary nature, particularly in the interactions between the mathematical and economic approaches to the topics under consideration. The output will consist of scientific publications and software, and planned activities include debates, meetings, workshops, and scientific training for the project's younger participants. This should ensure the project's results are widely disseminated and increase its impact on relevant stakeholders.