Keynotes
GECON 2024 is honored to have the keynote speakers:
Speaker: Evangelos Pournaras 
Title: Collective privacy recovery: Data-sharing coordination via decentralized
artificial intelligence
Abstract:
Collective privacy loss becomes a colossal problem an emergency for personal freedoms and
democracy. But are we prepared to handle personal data as scarce resource and collectively
share data under the doctrine: as little as possible as much as necessary? In this talk I hypothesize
a significant privacy recovery if a population of individuals, the data collective, coordinates to share
minimum data for running online services with the required quality. I will show how to automate
and scale-up complex collective arrangements for privacy recovery using decentralized artificial
intelligence. For this we compare for the first time attitudinal intrinsic rewarded and coordinated
data sharing in a rigorous living-lab experiment of high realism involving >27,000 real data
disclosures. Using causal inference and cluster analysis we differentiate criteria predicting privacy
and five key data-sharing behaviors. Strikingly data-sharing coordination proves to be a win–win for
all: remarkable privacy recovery for people with evident costs reduction for service providers.
Short Bio:
Dr. Evangelos Pournaras is Professor of Trustworthy Distributed Intelligence in the School of
Computing at University of Leeds. He is also a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow (£1.4M), a
Research Associate at the UCL Center of Blockchain Technologies and has also been an Alan
Turing Fellow. Evangelos has more than 5 years of research experience at ETH Zurich after
having completed his PhD studies at Delft University of Technology. Evangelos has also
been a visiting researcher at EPFL and has industry experience at IBM T.J. Watson Research
Center. Evangelos has won the Augmented Democracy Prize, the 1st prize at ETH Policy
Challenge as well as 5 paper awards and honors including the listing of two of his
project within UNESCO IRCAI Global Top-100 as `outstanding' and `promising'. He has published
more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals and conferences. Evangelos has
extensive leadership experience and raised funding for national and EU projects such as H2OforAll
ASSET and SoBigData.
Speaker: Arianna Martinelli 
Title: Patents and the technological evolution of AI
Abstract:
The transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly unfolding. Because of
market failures in the production of knowledge that underpins technical change, governments
have played an important role in designing appropriate incentives and in supporting R&D
activities in the economy. Grasping how private and public incentives coexist in shaping how
the AI technological trajectory evolves is pivotal to understanding firms’ behaviour and
policy impact. This talk examines some aspects on the innovative process in AI, delving into
the role that government grants and government departments played in the development of
AI. We analyze all AI patents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office and develop
network measures that capture each patentâ’s influence on all possible sequences of follow-
on innovation. By identifying the effect of patents on technological trajectories, we are able
to account for the long-term cumulative impact of new knowledge that is not captured by
standard patent citation measures. We show that patents funded by government grants, but
above all patents filed by federal agencies and state departments, profoundly influenced the
development of AI. These long-term effects were especially significant in early phases, and
weakened over time as private incentives took over.
Short Bio:
Arianna Martinelli is Associate Professor in Applied Economics at the Institute of Economics
of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Social Studies
from Bocconi University in Milan, a Msc in Industry and Innovation Analysis from SPRU
(Science and Technology Policy Research) at Sussex University and a Ph.D. in Economics of
Technical Change from the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research interests include
the use of IPR data patents as an indicator of innovative activities, the interplay between IPR
and technological standardization, the empirical investigation of technological paradigms and
trajectories, the internationalization of innovative activities. She published the outcome of her
research in highly reputed international journals, such as Research Policy, Journal of Economic
Geography, World Development, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, the Journal of
Technology Transfers, and the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.