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The Legal Scholar Who Keeps up with the Times

, by Fabio Todesco
Oreste Pollicino tackles the challenges that new technologies throw to Constitutional Law and has been appointed by governments and associations in expert groups that monitor artificial intelligence, the rise of the algorithmic State and disinformation

Artificial intelligence, the development of data collection, data mining, and algorithmic analysis resulting in predictive profiling, or the spread of disinformation via social and electronic media are examples of new technologies raising challenges for Constitutional Law, «as the State formulates its legal response to the new technologies being developed and applied by the market, and as it considers its own use of these technologies», a document by the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL) states.

Oreste Pollicino, Full Professor of Constitutional Law at Bocconi University, is at the forefront of these constitutional challenges as a member of groups that tackle the emerging reality in various ways.

Prof. Pollicino is the only Italian scholar co-cordinator of two Reaserch Groups within the IACL. Both Groups are dealing with the above-mentioned issues, from different angles. The first one, coordinated with Prof. Giovanna De Minico, "Internet and freedoms in the Age of Ordinary Terrorism" will finalize the papers presented in the 2018 IACL World Conference in Seoul in a forthcoming book, to be published by Routledge. The second, the recently established Research Group (coordinated with Prof. Amnon Reichman) on "Algorithmic State, Society and Market – Constitutional Dimensions", aims to promote the debate on the issue and submit the proposal for a workshop on the topic in the next World Congress of Constitutional Law in 2022 in South Africa. The inaugural conference of this group will be in Florence, in May 2019 (click here for the call for papers).

At the end of 2018 Prof. Pollicino was also appointed by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development as a member of the High-Level Expert Group for the Development of a National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence.

The European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of public service media including 117 member organizations reaching an audience of more than 1 billion people worldwide, established a Sounding Board on Disinformation, particularly supportive of policies that would lead online platforms and social networks to deliver remedies and real industry commitments to the spread of disinformation. Prof. Pollicino is part of this Board, that has recently spurred the European Commission to adopt more effective policies.

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