Michela Milano appointed Director of the Center for Digital Society at FBK
The appointment came at FBK’s board meeting of October 9, 2024, following the selection process among scientists with solid and recognized scientific reputation and strategic vision, that started in June.
“I am very honored by the appointment,” Michela Milano said, ”and excited to start this new adventure. I have had collaborations with researchers at Fondazione Bruno Kessler for years and I know its value and scientific standing. The Digital Society Center conducts research with important, significant and lasting social impacts. I hope and believe I can contribute to its positioning and growth.”
“Professor Milano,” Fondazione Bruno Kessler President Ferruccio Resta stressed, ”represents a figure of great value, thanks to her solid scientific background and a profile that stands out also for her managerial skills. Her extraordinary ability to integrate interdisciplinary expertise and to build consensus and community, together with her strong ties to the University of Bologna, will strengthen the Foundation’s relationships and open new opportunities for collaboration and research. I am confident that her strategic vision, together with her significant background and the prestigious positions held throughout her professional career, will be instrumental in guiding the Center to new frontiers of development and charting new trajectories for innovation.”
The Center for Digital Society conducts interdisciplinary research on the interaction between digital technologies and society, promoting sustainability, inclusiveness and resilience. It draws on the scientific excellence of about 75 researchers and collaborates with numerous public administrations – on strategic issues such as digitization, environmental sustainability, education – with companies and with the University of Trento through joint laboratories.
Michela Milano ‘s research activity concerns Artificial Intelligence with particular interest in decision support systems in which hybrid methods of reasoning, learning and optimization coexist for the construction of descriptive, predictive and prescriptive models. In this area Michela Milano has achieved international visibility and has collaborations with several research, academic and industrial groups.
Michela Milano is a member of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering and Technology. She was vice president of EurAI (European Association of Artificial Intelligence) and Executive Councilor of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). She is part of the Italian delegation in the Program Committee for Cluster 4 of Horizon Europe of the European Commission. She was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Expert Group appointed by the Government for the definition of a national strategy in 2019 and 2022 and of the working group for the definition of the 2021-2027 National Research Plan. She was a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Constraint Programming and of the Board of Directors of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence AI*IA.
She is Editor in Chief of ACM Computing Surveys, was Area Editor of INFORMS Journal on Computing in the area of Logic, Constraint and Optimization, and was Editor in Chief of the journal Constraints. She has authored more than 180 papers in international journals and conferences.
She has coordinated and participated in numerous Italian and European research projects raising research funds for more than 18 million euros, and is in charge of research collaborations with companies for more than 650,000 euros.
She was awarded the Google Focused Grant Program on Mathematical Optimization and Combinatorial Optimization in Europe in 2012 and the Google Faculty Research Award in 2016 on integration of deep neural networks in combinatorial models.
(v.l.)