This page provides an overview of vera.ai's Advisory Board members in alphabetic order. The Board members support the vera.ai consortium with their complementary expertise and by providing input based on members' respective track records in data protection, algorithmic governance, technical expertise and platform regulation.
Shirin is an award-winning creative technologist, artist, and researcher based in New York.
Her work explores the societal implications of emerging technology, with a focus on internet platforms and artificial intelligence. She is a media technologist for WITNESS, which helps people use video and technology to defend human rights.
WITNESS’s ‘Prepare, Don’t Panic’ initiative has focused on global, equitable preparation for deepfakes: learn more at wit.to/Synthetic-Media-Deepfakes.
David leads the data science team at Full Fact, a charity of independent fact checkers and campaigners based in the UK.
David has worked in artificial intelligence and natural language processing for over 25 years, moving between academic research, large and small tech companies and the charity sector. Much of his work has focussed on analysing news media across multiple platforms using a variety of AI/NLP tools, including ChatGPT and its relatives.
At Full Fact, David’s main role is to help develop technology to support fact checkers across multiple organisations. This includes developing tools to find claims that are worth checking and finding repeats of claims that have already been checked. These tools save fact checkers time every day and help to disrupt patterns of bad information.
Language engineer, developing Artificial Intelligence technology for the automated processing of user-generated content. He is the CEO of the University of Antwerp spin-off Textgain®, an award-winning company that leverages AI technology for societal good. With a background in linguistics and machine learning, he is continuously exploring how self-learning technology can find meaningful patterns in massive content streams and how these patterns can be transformed into actionable insights.
Kelsey is a media and technology lawyer whose experience in intellectual property, entertainment law, and Internet governance led her to develop a highly regarded specialism in deepfakes and the regulation of social media platforms. As both a practicing lawyer and a researcher, she works with public sector bodies, academics, and corporations on harmful and illegal content, rights to free expression, mis/dis-information, and artificial intelligence, as well as digital content strategies for companies and individuals alike.
She is regularly interviewed by national news media and business publications to provide insight on the legal implications of AI, and often speaks at university and industry events. Notable examples of her work include authoring the comprehensive legal practitioner's guide on deepfakes for LexisNexis, and an in-depth chapter on the implications of synthetic media for the film and television industry for the European Audiovisual Observatory. Her expertise has also seen her appear before the European Parliament's Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) to advise on how best to tackle deepfakes in European policy.
Originally from the United States, Kelsey has dual U.S. and UK citizenship and is particularly interested in the international challenges pertaining to regulating the online ecosystem: she routinely comments on emerging legislation and political trends in the United States (notably California), the United Kingdom, and the European Union. In 2023 Kelsey was named as one of 25 “Rising Stars – Top Female Lawyers in the UK” under the age of 40 by law.com.
Kelsey lives in London with her husband and their young son.
Riccardo is an interdisciplinary physicist who currently leads the CHuB Lab at the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento. This research unit specializes in the data-informed statistical modeling of individual and collective human behavior. His research interests are broad and encompass complexity science and data science, with a particular focus on human mobility, multimodal transportation, decision modeling and online communication.
Riccardo has gained international experience through his affiliations with renowned institutions such as the Institute for Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Mallorca, Spain, the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences in San Martin, Argentina, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Atomic Energy Committee in Saclay, France.
In addition to his research background, Riccardo has made significant contributions to the development of the Covid19 Infodemics Observatory and currently serves as the coordinator of the Horizon Europe AI4TRUST project. This ambitious initiative aims to develop AI-based technologies for trustworthy solutions against disinformation across multiple modes (text, images, audiovisual) and languages to estimate the risk of unreliable information consumption.
Ľuboš Kukliš is an expert on media regulation and Internet governance.
He recently joined the European Commission (DG Connect) as a Digital Services Act Enforcement team member.
From 2006 to 2022, he was the Chief Executive of the Slovak Media Authority. In 2021-2022 he was Chair of the European Platform of Regulatory Authorities (EPRA). In 2018-2019, he was Chair of the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA) and, until the end of 2022, led ERGA's work on disinformation.
Ľuboš cooperates with international organisations on the problems such as the spread of disinformation, the protection of children in the online space, or questions of governance in the digital environment. He frequently speaks at public events and authored several publications on these topics. He is a lawyer by training and holds PhD in Administrative law.