Francesca Palmiotto Ettorre
Biography
Francesca Palmiotto is a fourth-year researcher at the European University Institute in Florence. Her thesis entitled “Transparent Automated Evidence” is supervised by Prof. Deirdre Curtin. Her work focuses on algorithmic transparency and the rights of the defence in criminal proceedings in Europe. She is a Working Group “The Digital Public Sphere” coordinator and co-founder and editor of the blog DigiCon (The Digital Constitutionalist). Her research interests are related more broadly to Law and Tech, with a specific focus on procedural fairness of automated decisions and evidence. During my visit at LSTS, I will work on the issue of contestability of automated decision-making.
She graduated magna cum laude from the Law Faculty University of Turin in 2017. Her master thesis won the prize “Luigi Tuttolomondo”, an award dedicated to criminal procedural law dissertations. After graduation, she worked as a trainee lawyer in a criminal law firm before moving to Florence for starting the PhD program. She also obtained the LL.M. in Comparative, European and International Laws from the EUI.
Notwithstanding her legal education, her interests and expertise are not confined to law; during the University, she also attended a superior graduate school where she obtained the certificate of attendance in 2018 with a thesis on “Mathematical Models Applied to Electoral Systems”. Moreover, she has basic knowledge of coding. She is currently involved in CLAUDETTE, an interdisciplinary research project hosted at the EUI that aims to develop a machine learning software for consumer and data protection law enforcement. She is also involved in the project “Un-owned Data” at the Robert Schuman Center.