Giuseppe Longobardi
Emeritus University of York (UK)
Giuseppe Longobardi has served as a Anniversary Professor at the University of York, where he was the Coordinator of the York International Research Centre for Linguistic History and Diversity in collaboration with the Universities of Campinas and of Pennsylvania.
He was NATO-CNR Visiting Scholar at MIT, Fulbright Fellow at UCLA, Directeur de Recherche Etranger (CNRS, Paris), Visiting Professor at Vienna, University of Southern California, Harvard, and UCLA. He is a staff member of the PhD program in linguistics of Università di Roma-La Sapienza. He was the PI of the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge’ (2012-2018), aiming at the first cross-continental mapping of gene-language correlations.
He has contributed to the study of syntactic long-distance dependencies, reference and the syntax-semantics mapping of proper names, and the format of grammatical diversity (Parametric Minimalism).
He began to develop the PCM in 2001 and then started to apply it to comparison of linguistic and genetic diversity.
Cristina Guardiano
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (IT) – Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia
Cristina Guardiano is full professor of Linguistics at Unimore and at the Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS (Pavia). She is the Principal Investigator of the DHisGram project.
She specialized in classics and linguistics at the Università di Pisa, where she also got her PhD in historical syntax, with a dissertation about the internal structure of the nominal domain in Ancient Greek.
She is active in research about formal and quantitative linguistics, crosslinguistic comparison, language change, phylogenetic reconstruction, gene-language comparison. She is expert in the parametric analysis of nominal phrases, and in the comparative study of diachronic and dialectal syntactic variation, with a special focus on Greek and Romance.
She has been developing the Parametric Comparison Method (PCM) since 2001, with Giuseppe Longobardi.
Paola Crisma
Università degli Studi di Trieste (IT) – Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Emanuela Li Destri
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (IT) – Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia
Emanuela Li Destri is a research fellow at the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia (Italy), where she works on optimizing data collection practices within the PCM. She earned her PhD at the Università di Udine (Italy) with a thesis investigating the grammaticalization of the periphrastic construction “verb of motion + a + infinitive” in Italian. Her MA thesis employed a corpus-based approach to examine the most frequent neostandard features in the writing of university students.
She has training in computational linguistics and contributed to the creation of an ASR model for Zahre Sproche, a low-resource Germanic language spoken in the Italian Alps. She continued her work on minority languages as a member of the RESYNC project, which studied the resilience of morphological and syntactic features in endangered languages. Currently, she is collaborating with the ELITE-AI Erasmus+ project on creating ethical and effective pedagogical practices for integrating AI-powered tools in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) university courses.
Marco Longhin
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (IT) – Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia
Marco Longhin is a research assistant at the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, working on a project aimed at modelling cross-linguistic variation in Differential Object Marking (DOM) through the PCM and at analysing the structure of parametric variation through statistical and computer-aided techniques. Currently, he is in charge of the development of a tool for data collection, storage and sharing for the PCM.
He obtained his Master’s degree in Linguistics from the Università di Padova, with a dissertation focusing on the variation and formalisation of Venetan metaphony.
Gaia Sorge
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (IT) – Dipartimento di Scienze fisiche, informatiche e matematiche
Gaia Sorge is currently enrolled in the PhD Program on Data Science and Social Analytics at Unimore. She is an expert in Semitic languages. She graduated at the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘l’Orientale’, with a dissertation on morphosyntactic agreement in Judeo-Arabic varieties of Libya. She is currently developing her skills in the Parametric Comparison Method, which, in her PhD project, will be applied to Semitic phylogenetics. She has published a paper about ‘Gender and Number Agreement in Libyan Judeo-Arabic’ (Maydan: rivista sui mondi arabi semitici e islamici 3, 2023) and has presented her work at the conference Documenting languages, documenting cultures: migration, minorities, dialects. Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘Federico II’, February 2023 (L’accordo di genere e numero nel giudeo-arabo libico) ad at the giornate di studio di Maydan: riflessioni sui mondi arabi, semitici e islamici, Università degli Studi di Torino, October 2023 (Racing the clock: The (re)documentation of endangered Judeo-Arabic varieties in migratory settings, with E. Balbo). She is a member of the Editorial Board of Maydan: rivista sui mondi arabi semitici e islamici since 2023. In 2024, she joined work on Differential Object Marking in collaboration with Monica Irimia and Cristina Guardiano, presented at CIDSM18.
Andrea Sgarro
Università degli Studi di Trieste (IT) – Department of Mathematics and Geosciences
Andrea Sgarro is Professor in Computer Science at Università di Trieste. His research interests are information theory, cryptography, soft computing, incomplete knowledge management, and computational linguistics.
Alessandro Treves
SISSA Trieste
Alessandro Treves has studied at Liceo Michelangiolo in Florence, briefly at Yale and then physics in Florence, Rome and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he got his PhD with Daniel Amit in 1989 and met theoretical neuroscience. After a postdoc in the neurophysiology lab of Edmund Rolls in Oxford, he has been at SISSA since 1992, with the self-organizing limbo research group. Between 2003-2022 he has been affiliated with the research center of Edvard and May-Britt Moser at NTNU, and from 2024 with that of Hanne and Tor Stensola at UiA.
In 2010 he has convened the first, and so far last, Ararat Memory Meeting in Yerevan, Armenia and in 2011-2013 he has served as Science Advisor to the Italian Embassy in Tel Aviv.
With a long-standing focus on the hippocampus, memory and the self-organization of the mammalian brain, his current interests have expanded to include spontaneous thought and the role of quenched disorder in syntax diversity.
Monica Alexandrina Irimia
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (IT) – Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia
Monica Alexandria Irimia is an Associate Professor at Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia.
Dimitar Kazakov
University of York (UK) – Department of Computer Science
Dr Dimitar Kazakov is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Science at the University of York, and Coordinator of the Departmental Artificial Intelligence group. His research encompasses the development of Machine Learning (ML) and Evolutionary Algorithms and their applications to Computational Linguistics, real-time systems, intelligent agents, function optimisation and financial forecasting (see Research interests mind map). He has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles, supervised 7 and co-supervised another 3 PhD students to completion, and was involved in research projects with a total budget of £665,000. He is currently leading a research team of 2 researchers and 6 PhD students. Dr Kazakov is a former Vice-Chair of the UK Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB).
Stefano Ghinoi
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (IT) – Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia
Stefano Ghinoi is Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Department of Communication and Economics) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Helsinki (Department of Economics and Management). He also worked at the University of Greenwich and the University of Bologna. He holds a PhD in Economic Statistics, and his main research interests focus on innovation and sustainability. He uses social network analysis to investigate intra- and inter-organizational dynamics and how these dynamics are impacted by policy initiatives. His works have been published in highly ranked academic journals such as Research Policy, Regional Studies, Ecological Economics, Small Business Economics, and Social Networks.