CHILDIGITCHILDIGIT – Children in a Digital World: Bridging Technical and Legal Perspectives on Security, Safety and Participation

Sara Tibidò is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in “Cybersecurity” at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro” and IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy. She holds a double Master’s Degree in Human Rights and International Relations from both the University of Padova (Italy) and the University of Wrocław (Poland). She has been a tutor of the “Children’s Rights” course, held within the Master’s Degree in “Human Rights and Multilevel Governance” (University of Padova). Her research focuses on trustworthy AI, child-centered AI, and regulatory compliance of AI systems for children. She has been attending various international conferences in the areas of child-centered design and digital technologies for social good, such as the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC) and the ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT).

Nadia Spatari is a PhD candidate in Cybersecurity at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. Her doctoral research focuses on AI Regulatory Sandboxes, with particular attention to safeguarding AI-based systems and software used by minors, and to governance frameworks supporting the implementation of the EU AI Act, at the intersection of cybersecurity, AI governance, and children’s digital rights. She has authored and co-authored several scientific contributions in these areas.

Azzurra Ragone is an Associate Professor in Secure Software Engineering at the Computer Science Department at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy. Her research focuses on responsible and trustworthy AI engineering, including practitioners’ needs, human and children’s rights in AI systems, and rights-based frameworks and metrics. She also works on LLM-based software engineering, from automated test generation to requirements specification. She has published more than 100 papers at international venues and journals. She supervises Ph.D. students of the national Ph.D. in Cybersecurity coordinated by IMT Lucca.

Angelo Furfaro is Associate Professor of Computer Engineering (INF-05/A) at DIMES, University of Calabria, Italy, and Scientific Director of the university’s CyberSecurity Laboratory. With over 20 years of research experience and more than 130 international publications, his current work focuses on agentic architectures and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applied to cybersecurity. He has contributed to the design of multi-agent systems for the real-time classification, explanation, and reporting of cyberattacks, achieving high accuracy in detecting common web application threats, as well as agentic frameworks that combine large language models with automated validation tools to generate and verify security compliance rules for IT infrastructures. His research also extends to the automated design of cyber training environments from natural-language specifications, and to the study of large language model agents both as emerging attack vectors and as tools for strengthening system-level security.

He is Editor-in-Chief of Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory (Elsevier) and currently leads national doctoral research projects on agentic RAG technologies for infrastructure security and on privacy-preserving network defense in the post-quantum era, funded by Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency. He is a Senior Member of ACM and IEEE. He supervises PhD students in Cybersecurity at the University of Calabria and IMT Lucca, and serves on program committees for major international security and AI conferences.