Erasmo Purificato

European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency, Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Ispra, Italy
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Based in Ispra

I am a Scientific Project Officer at the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC).

I work at the intersection between scientific research and policy-making, with a specific focus on Human Behaviour and Machine Intelligence (HUMAINT). On the research side, I carry out studies in the area of trustworthy algorithmic systems, e.g. defining methodologies for ensuring fairness, transparency, human oversight and social well-being and analysing their impact on fundamental rights, the related societal risks and potential mitigation measures. On the policy side, I support the enforcement of the AI Act and the Digital Services Acts, collaborating with policy units, high-level experts and academic institutions.

I am also a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (OVGU), working with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ernesto W. De Luca in the Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence research group. Starting from the analysis of the fairness capabilities of state-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks for behavioural user modeling, my doctoral research focuses on proposing innovative approaches for bias detection and mitigation in multiclass and multigroup scenarios, by also providing ways for monitoring the results via novel explainable user interfaces.

Before joining ECAT and JRC, I was employed for four and a half years as a Research and Teaching Assistant at the OVGU, and a Research Fellow in the Human-Centred Technologies for Educational Media department of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI), where I co-coordinated the development of the institute’s Usability Lab and was involved in the establishment of a systematic user monitoring process for the digital infrastructures and services. Previously, I worked for three years as an IT Consultant at Blue Reply with project management and AI systems development roles.

I received my Bachelor and Master degree in Computer Engineering at University of Naples and a 2nd level Master degree in Artificial Intelligence at University of Turin.

I’m a technology enthusiast and a great football passionate.
My life is marked by Muhammad Ali’s quote “Impossible is nothing”.