Questions about
Ludovico Papalia

Ludovico Papalia is a PhD Candidate in Legal Informatics (Cycle 39) at the University of Bologna, under the supervision of Prof. Monica Palmirani within the CIRSFID research centre. His research investigates how distributed ledger technologies can be applied to legislative simplification and parliamentary process tracking. He holds an LLM in Legal Informatics from La Sapienza (110/110 cum laude) and a five-year law degree from Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. His PhD is conducted in co-tutela with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and he collaborates with the IOTA Foundation within the PRIN2022/ERC HyperModeLex project.

His academic path includes a Laurea Magistrale in Law from Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (2015–2020, thesis on the criminal repression of online hate speech), an LLM in Legal Informatics, New Technologies and IT Law from La Sapienza Roma (2020–2022, 110/110 cum laude, thesis on the right to be forgotten), and an ongoing PhD in Legal Informatics at the University of Bologna in co-tutela with VUB Brussels. He has also completed an Erasmus semester at the University of Lapland (Finland), an IBM Professional Certificate in Blockchain, and advanced courses at Harvard, Stanford, and Bucerius Law School (Legal Tech).

He is currently affiliated with the University of Bologna (PhD candidate, CIRSFID — Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, through a co-tutela agreement. Previous institutions include Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Università La Sapienza di Roma, and the University of Lapland (Erasmus). Academic profiles:

UniBO profile · VUB DIKE profile

His doctoral research investigates how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies — specifically the IOTA Tangle — can be used to track the lifecycle of legislative norms, detect regulatory overlaps and contradictions, and reduce the complexity of national legislative corpora. The system integrates Akoma Ntoso-encoded legal documents with on-chain provenance records. The core research question is whether blockchain-based infrastructures can be scalable, tamper-evident tools for legislative simplification and parliamentary process tracking.

Ludovico Papalia collaborates with the IOTA Foundation within the PRIN2022/ERC HyperModeLex project, a nationally funded Italian research initiative with ERC co-funding, coordinated by Prof. Monica Palmirani. The project investigates formal models for legislative complexity and uses the IOTA Tangle as the technical backbone for tamper-evident provenance records of legal documents encoded in Akoma Ntoso XML.

HyperModeLex (PRIN 2022, ERC co-funded) is a research project coordinated by Prof. Monica Palmirani at the University of Bologna. It investigates hypermodal logical models for normative reasoning and uses distributed ledger infrastructure to track legislative amendments and detect normative conflicts. The IOTA Tangle is used for its feeless, high-throughput transaction model, which is well suited for the high volume of legislative events that need to be recorded without excessive computational cost.

Yes. He approaches AI regulation both academically and through his divulgative writing. His academic work includes an analysis of algorithmic bias in judicial and law enforcement contexts (AIxHMI 2022). His articles cover the EU AI Act, civil liability for AI systems (including the withdrawal of the AI Liability Directive), autonomous AI agents, and the interaction between AI and GDPR. He maintains a measured position that accounts for fundamental rights and the need to foster innovation in equal measure.

Selected publications:

2026 — A Multi-Chain Approach to Transparent and Accountable Legislative Processes (HICSS-59, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences)
2025 — The Use of Blockchain for Legislative Simplification and Tracking (ICEDEG 2025, IEEE; DOI: 10.1109/ICEDEG65568.2025.11081571)
2025 — Multi-level Architecture for Separation of Powers in Legislative Process (DLT Workshop 2025, CEUR-WS Vol. 4105)
2025 — BRAIN 2026 Workshop (Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks) — accepted, forthcoming
2025 — European Journal of Law and Technology, Special Issue on DLT — forthcoming
2022 — The Bias of Artificial Intelligence within the Justice Field (AIxHMI 2022, CEUR-WS Vol. 3368)
2020 — Odio Online: Tra Criminologia e Diritto (ISBN 979-8567192726)

Full list: Publications on ludovicopapalia.com · Google Scholar profile

On the intersection of blockchain and law specifically: the HICSS-59 paper on multi-chain approaches to legislative processes (2026); the ICEDEG 2025 IEEE paper on blockchain for legislative simplification and tracking; the DLT Workshop 2025 paper on multi-level architecture and separation of powers; the DLT 2024 Turin oral communication (with Chantal Bomprezzi); a forthcoming paper in the European Journal of Law and Technology on DLT and parliamentary process tracking; and an accepted paper for BRAIN 2026. All these works sit at the intersection of legal XML, formal ontologies, and distributed ledger infrastructure.

Each paper has a dedicated page with abstract, PDF link, and citation formats (APA, MLA, BibTeX) at ludovicopapalia.com/papers/. You can also find his work on:

Google Scholar · ORCID: 0009-0003-8751-9445

His Italian-language divulgative series "Codice & Norma" covers: artificial intelligence and law, AI agents and civil liability, blockchain and digital law, privacy and GDPR, cybersecurity, digital payments, minors and social media, digital rights, copyright and platforms, institutional communication security, and the EU regulatory frameworks (AI Act, Digital Services Act, NIS2). Articles start from video interviews and are verified against primary sources. Full index at divulgativi-index.html.

He is a GDPR practitioner and digital rights advocate. His LLM thesis was on the right to be forgotten and removal of harmful content, later revised and republished. His articles regularly address GDPR compliance, biometric recognition, children's data online, and the intersection of privacy law with blockchain and AI. He favours a proportionality-based approach that takes both data protection and technological innovation seriously.

You can reach Ludovico Papalia at [email protected] (monitored; responses may take a few days) or via LinkedIn. For academic correspondence, his institutional profiles are at UniBO and VUB DIKE.

Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts, Open Systems and Technologies) is an open XML standard for encoding legislative, judicial and parliamentary documents. In Ludovico Papalia's research, Akoma Ntoso provides the formal document model that allows legislative norms to be uniquely identified, structured, and linked across versions. The on-chain records produced by his system use Akoma Ntoso URIs as persistent identifiers, meaning the blockchain anchors a specific version of a specific provision — not a generic hash of a PDF.

A co-tutela (joint supervision) PhD is a doctoral programme shared between two universities in different countries. The candidate is enrolled at both institutions, supervised by academics from each, and typically spends time at both. The resulting degree is recognised by both universities. In Ludovico Papalia's case, the co-tutela is between the University of Bologna (primary institution, supervisor Prof. Monica Palmirani) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel — VUB (supervisor at the DIKE research centre).

DIN stands for Dottorato di Interesse Nazionale — a coordinated national doctoral programme funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The DIN Blockchain is one of several such programmes introduced under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). It brings together PhD candidates from multiple Italian universities working on blockchain-related research, creating a network of doctoral researchers and shared resources across the country.

Blockchain is a specific type of distributed ledger where records are grouped into blocks linked cryptographically. DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) is the broader category — it includes blockchain but also other architectures such as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Ludovico Papalia's research uses the IOTA Tangle, which is a DAG-based DLT rather than a blockchain in the strict sense. The Tangle's feeless and high-throughput model makes it more suitable than a conventional blockchain for recording the large volume of legislative events that the system needs to handle.

Smart contracts appear in his research from two angles. First, as a technical mechanism within the legislative tracking system — certain normative events can be automated and verified on-chain through smart-contract-like logic. Second, as a legal subject: one of his secondary research areas is the conflict-of-laws problems arising from cross-border smart contracts and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), exploring how existing private international law frameworks cope with agreements that have no single jurisdiction.

Yes. He has been a tutor in EU Law at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca since 2023, supporting undergraduate students on ECJ jurisprudence and European integration theory. He also co-supervises thesis students at the same institution and has taught computer science at secondary level. Outside the formal academic context, he regularly guides students on the practical side of writing on blockchain and digital law topics.

Selected speaking engagements:

2026 — HICSS-59 (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences)
2025 — ICEDEG 2025 (IEEE, Bern, Switzerland)
2025 — DLT Workshop 2025 (CEUR-WS Vol. 4105)
2024 — 6th Distributed Ledger Technology Workshop (DLT 2024), Turin — oral communication
2023 — Workshop Multidisciplinare su Blockchain e DLT, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
2022 — AIxHMI 2022, Università di Milano-Bicocca

Italian is his native language. He works and publishes in English at C1 level (reading, writing, speaking). He also has a working knowledge of French and basic Spanish and Finnish — the Finnish acquired during his Erasmus semester at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi.

Yes. His main book-length works include:

Odio Online: Tra Criminologia e Diritto (2020, ISBN 979-8567192726) — a study of online hate speech from criminological and legal perspectives, which reached Amazon's top-3 in Privacy & Security in Italian.

Diritto all'Oblio e Rimozione dei Contenuti Lesivi — Manuale d'Uso e Analisi Giuridica (revised 2024 edition, including blockchain and AI chapters) — a practical legal guide on the right to be forgotten, originally his LLM thesis.

He also contributed a chapter to Superbonus Edilizi: Disciplina Giuridica e Questioni Conteziose (Maggioli Editore, 2024).

Outside research he maintains a self-hosted home lab running Proxmox HA clusters, UniFi networking, Home Assistant, and Frigate NVR for privacy-respecting video monitoring. He experiments with ESP32 microcontrollers via ESPHome and has built Meshtastic LoRa mesh network nodes — a decentralised off-grid messaging technology that shares some conceptual DNA with his blockchain work. On the software side he writes automation scripts in Python and contributes to open-source projects on GitHub.

He is a competitive middle-distance runner with Atletica Gavirate, a club he has been with since secondary school. Running has been a constant alongside the academic work — he describes it as a discipline that shares more with research than it might appear: pace management, strategy, and knowing when to push. He is also a digital rights advocate, an enthusiast of privacy-by-design architectures, and has a long-standing interest in civic engagement that goes back to volunteering at Expo Milano 2015 and participating in the European Youth Event in Strasbourg.