The Steering Committee

Dr Cristina Blasi Casagran is Coordinator of ITFLOWS and leader of WP1 (Management). She graduated in Law at the UAB (2007) and holds a PhD in Law by the European University Institute (2015). She started working at the UAB in 2015 as postdoctoral researcher and since 2020 she is Assistant Professor Serra Húnter at the Public Law department of the UAB. Her research interests are focused on privacy, data protection and migration law. She has conducted extensive research in the field of privacy and data protection law, including the participation in the EU project SURVEILLE – Surveillance: Ethical Issues, Legal Limitations, and Efficiency (FP7-SEC-2011-1). She defended her Ph.D on Global Data Protection Standards in the Field of Law Enforcement in June 2015 at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). The piece was published one year later as a monograph under the Routledge Editorial (UK). She has also been involved in many projects through her position as researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and she is currently coordinating the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Module EUCONAS.

Dr. Emma Teodoro is leader of WP2 (Ethics). She obtained her doctorate in Political Science and Public Law from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She was a member of the UAB Sociolegal Studies Group for 11 years (1994-2004) and has participated in a number of research projects on law and technology, judicial systems, legal professions, documentary editions for education and research, self-regulation through codes of best professional practices within the audiovisual sector, and ICT society ethical aspects. Her research areas cover legal organizations, judicial systems, ethnography of legal institutions and legal organizations, audiovisual and media policies, law and image, and data protection. She is currently a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Law and Technology. She has become a lead expert on the field of ethical and legal implications in the development of security technologies. As such, she served as expert of the Ethical Advisory Board in several European projects: SEKT (Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies, 6th FP Society Technologies); CAPER (Collaborative Information Acquisition Processing Exploitation and Reporting for the prevention of organized crime); SAVASA-Standard based approach to video archive, search and analysis (285621-FP7-SEC-2011-1); PReact-Petty Criminality diminution through search and analysis in multi- source video capturing and archiving platform (607881-FP7-SEC-2013.7.2-1); TAKEDOWN – Understand the Dimensions of Organised Crime and Terrorist Networks for Developing Effective and Efficient Security Solutions for First-line-practitioners and Professionals (700688-H2020-FCT- 2015) and currently at LYNX (780602-H2020-ICT-14-2016-2017); SPIRIT (686993-SEC-12-FCT-2016-2017) and ITFLOWS  (882986-H2020-SU-BES 01-2018-2019-2020).

Dr Asli Selin Okyay is leader of WP3 (Drivers of migration in countries of origin/transit).. Dr. Okyay is a Senior Fellow at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). Before joining IAI in 2017, she was a post-doctoral Research Associate at the ERC-funded “Borderlands” project, hosted by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence. She obtained her PhD (2015) in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute, and her M.Phil in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford (2009). Her area of expertise is migration governance in the broader Euro-Mediterranean context, and her research focuses on EU migration policies towards third countries in the Southern Mediterranean. Within the H2020 project MEDRESET, she conducted research on civil society stakeholders’ perspectives on Euro-Mediterranean migration  governance,  in  the  context  of  Turkey. Within the H2020 project EUIDEA, she is investigating EU external migration cooperation from a differentiated integration perspective.

Dr Tobias Heidland is leader of WP4 (Drivers of integration in the EU). He holds economics degrees from the University of Mannheim and Nottingham (2009/2010) and a Ph.D. in Quantitative Economics from Christian-Albrechts-University zu Kiel (2015). He is a Senior Researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and and Head of Research Center “International Development/Internationale Entwicklung”. He specialises in the economics of migration, and is experienced in quantitative research and data generation, both in the field (household surveys, experiments) and based on digital sources (“big data”). In his work, he combines these with traditional data such as administrative datasets. Tobias has been active in several research and policy projects and has contributed to several policy-related expert reports for Federal Ministries in Germany, among them one on migration forecasting to Germany, which he currently coordinates. His research has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Health Economics, and American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.

Dr Lenka Drazanova is leader of WP5 (Public attitudes towards migration). She is a Research Associate at the Migration Policy Centre at the EUI. Before joining EUI, Lenka was a post-doctoral researcher at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (position awarded under the German Excellence Initiative). Lenka received her PhD (Summa Cum Laude) in political science from the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2016. She holds additional degrees in political science from Central European University in Hungary (with merit) and Charles University in Czech Republic (summa cum laude). Her research interests are at the intersection of comparative politics, political behaviour and political psychology. Specifically, she analyses public opinion and individual attitudes with quantitative methods.

Georgios Stavropoulos is the leader of WP6 (Infrastructure – Models and EUMigraTool). He received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2006. He is a research associate with the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) as well as the Chief Technology Officer of Parhelia Analytics Ltd. His main research interests include signal processing, biometrics, computer vision, machine learning, visual analytics, big data processing, text mining and more. Since 2006, he has been involved numerous European and National projects, both in coordination & scientific management but also in R&D activities. He is an expert developer, with a lot of experience in C++, C# and Python programming languages, as well as various libraries, SDKs and API’s, and has developed numerous applications and algorithms for information collection and visualization, biometric recognition, text mining, text sentiment estimation, machine learning, big data, IoT and more. He is a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece. His involvement with these research areas has led to the authoring and co-authoring of more than 30 articles in refereed journals and international conferences.

Dr Haithem Afli is leader of WP7 (Validation of the EUMigraTool). He is lecturer at Cork Institute of Technology and one of the Funded Investigators in the SFI funded ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology.  His research interests are primarily in the areas of Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

He joined CIT in 2018 from Dublin City University (DCU) where he was a member of the ADAPT Machine Translation (MT) team. There he was responsible for managing the ADAPT Social Media and User-Generated Content research group. He worked on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects from MT and Sentiment Analysis to Multimodal and Multilingual document alignment.

After completing his undergraduate degree in Computer Science, he obtained an MSc in Computational Linguistics from Grenoble University in 2010 and a PhD in Computer Science from Le Mans University in 2014.

He is currently supervising five PhD students and two postdoctoral researchers all working in the ML and NLP applications area. Besides ITFLOWS, he is currently involved in other two H2020 projects, STop Obesity Platform and SliceNet focused respectively on the application of ML and NLP in Digital Health, and 5G technology.

Dr Gergana Tzvetkova is leader of WP8 (Policy recommendations). She is a research fellow at the Sociological Program of the Center for the Study of Democracy. Her areas of interest include human rights, foreign policy, radicalisation and counter-terrorism, transitional justice and democratisation. Dr  Tzvetkova has published a number of papers on these topics and has presented her work at several international conferences. Previously, Gergana worked in the NGO sector as an Associate Manager of the World Stroke Organization (Switzerland) and as a Program Coordinator at the Free and Democratic Bulgaria Foundation (Bulgaria). She was a Senior Editor of Politikon, the journal of the International Association for Political Science Students (IAPSS) and for two years chaired the Research Committee on International Relations Theory at IAPSS. She received her PhD in Politics, Human Rights and Sustainability from Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.

Dr Sergio Carrera is leader of WP9 (Dissemination and communication). He is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Justice and Home Affairs Programme at CEPS. He is also Professor at the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) in the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (Italy). Sergio is Visiting Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) at Sciences Po (France), Associate Professor/Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law in Maastricht University (The Netherlands), and Honorary Industry Professor at the School of Law in Queen Mary University of London (UK). His main research interests are on EU justice and home affairs (JHA) law and Area of Freedom, Security and Justice policy, with particular focus on migration, asylum, citizenship and Schengen policies. His areas of expertise also cover EU criminal justice law and police cooperation, and their impact on data protection/privacy and the rights of the defence.