Massimo Leone is Director of ISR-FBK, the Center for Religious Studies at the “Fondazione Bruno Kessler” in Trento; Full Professor of Philosophy of Communication, Cultural Semiotics, and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences of the University of Turin, Italy; Professor of Semiotics at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Shanghai University, China; Associate Member of Cambridge Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; Adjunct Professor at UCAB University in Caracas, Venezuela; and Adjunct Professor at the Korea University, Seoul, Korea. A member of the Academia Europaea, he has been a visiting professor at several universities across five continents. He is the author of seventeen books, has edited more than seventy collective volumes, and has published over seven hundred articles in semiotics, religious studies, and visual studies. He is the recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant (2018) and an ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2022). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Lexia, the semiotic journal of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Communication at the University of Turin, as well as of Semiotica (De Gruyter). He is also the director of the book series I Saggi di Lexia (Rome: Aracne), Semiotics of Religion (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter), Advances in Face Studies (London and New York: Routledge), and Religion and Technology (Springer).
Steven Umbrello is currently the Managing Director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and a research fellow at the University of Turin. He is also an associate researcher at the Collège des Bernardins, where he works on digital humanism, and was previously a research fellow at the Delft University of Technology. He is the editor of several international academic journals, such as the International Journal of Technoethics, the Journal of Responsible Technology, and the Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He was formerly a Stiftung Südtiroler Sparkasse Global Fellow at Eurac Research, where he worked on the philosophy, religion, and society program, and a researcher at the Bruno Kessler Foundation, where he worked on the ethics of generative AI. He is the author of several books, including Designed for Death: Controlling Killer Robots (Trivent, 2022) and Technology Ethics: Responsible Innovation and Design Strategies (Polity, 2024).