Keynotes
ELISA BONACINI - Università di Bari
Biography: Elisa Bonacini is a digital archaeologist and museologist, currently a researcher in Museology at the University of Bari within the CHANGES project, funded by the PNRR. She holds a PhD in Humanities and Cultural Heritage from the University of Catania and another in Lenguas y Culturas from the University of Cordoba. An expert in digital museums, storytelling, and online cultural participation, she served as the regional coordinator for Sicily of Invasioni Digitali and led the participatory project #iziTRAVELSicilia, recognized by the European Union's Culture Commission. Since 2016, she has collaborated with the Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) at the University of South Florida as a Research Associate and project manager for the digitization of Sicilian heritage. She has been a member of the ICOM Italy Technologies Commission and currently chairs the DiCultHer FARO Sicilia Association. She is also part of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Vie dei Tesori and collaborates with cooperatives engaged in cultural heritage promotion. Author of numerous publications, she has written nine monographs on museology, communication, and digital technologies applied to cultural heritage, including Il museo contemporaneo (2011), I Musei e le forme dello Storytelling digitale (2020, 2022), and Storytelling culturale e piattaforme digitali (2023). Within the CHANGES project, she curated the volume Musei digitali e Generazione Z and contributed to the project Michelangelo antifascista a Bari (1964-1965) with studies and innovative digital tools.
MAREK ŁUKASIK - Pomeranian University in Słupsk (PL)
Biography: Marek Łukasik is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies and the Head of the Pomeranian Centre for Digital Humanities at Pomeranian University in Słupsk. He currently serves as Vice-Rector for Development and Cooperation at the same university. Since 2017, he has held Visiting Professorship in the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin (since 2017). He earned his PhD in applied linguistics from the University of Warsaw in 2010 and received his habilitation degree in linguistics from the same institution in 2019. His current research focuses on the application of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in lexicography, terminology, and specialised translation.
MARIA CECILIA REYES - Universidad del Norte (Colombia)
Biography: Maria Cecilia Reyes is a colombian scholar specialized in cinema, communication, digital humanities and extended reality, currently a full-time professor at the Universidad del Norte. With a joint PhD in Digital Humanities and Communication, focused on interactive and immersive narratives, her work integrates research-creation of narrative immersive and interactive projects. Some of her notable projects include her book Interactive Fiction in Cinematic Virtual Reality: Towards the Immersive Interactive Movie. Former artist/researcher-in-residence at Schloss Solitude Akademie (Germany) in 2021 and at Future Media Theaters (Sweden) in 2022. She worked at the Latinamerican Association for Radio Education (ALER). Postdoctoral researcher at the Educational Technologies Institute of the National Reserach Council of Italy, working on interactive massive online open courses for socio-educative inclusion. Member of the Colombian Film Academy.
MARIO PIREDDU - Università della Tuscia
Biography: Mario Pirreddu is an Associate Professor of Educational Technologies at the University of Tuscia, where he has served as the Rector’s Delegate for Teaching Innovation and University Communication. His research focuses on the relationship between communication and learning processes, schools, and training environments, and he is a member of numerous national and international research groups. He collaborates with the National School of Administration (SNA) on research and training related to innovation in education and AI for Public Administration. As part of the National Digital School Plan, he was responsible for training Digital Animators and School Principals in the Lazio region. He was also a member of the Technical-Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Education for the implementation of the law on Civic Education. Additionally, he collaborates with Rai Cultura and Rai Scuola on topics related to digital education. His publications include Artificial Intelligence and Its Ghosts: Living and Thinking with Generative Networks (Erickson / ail Margine, 2024); Algorithms: The Cultural Software That Governs Our Lives (LSE, 2017); Social Learning: The Communicative Forms of Learning (Guerini, 2014); and History and Pedagogy in the Media (#graffi, 2014, with R. Maragliano).
RACHELE SPRUGNOLI - Università di Parma
Biography: Rachele Sprugnoli is a lecturer at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, where she specializes in Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics. She serves as the publicity co-chair of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC), and her expertise includes natural language processing, corpus annotation, and the evaluation of language technologies. She earned a PhD in Information and Communication Technology from the University of Trento with a dissertation on Event Detection and Classification for the Digital Humanities and graduated with honors in Humanities Informatics from the University of Pisa. She has collaborated with research institutions such as the University of Parma, the University of Pavia, the Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK), and the Center for the Evaluation of Language and Communication Technologies (CELCT). She also conducted a research period at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Among the awards she has received are the PhD scholarship, the Best Paper Award for the paper Towards the Modeling of Polarity in a Latin Knowledge Base, and the Teaching with CLARIN award for her educational materials in the course Natural Language Processing Methods.