Gianmaria Avellino
Gianmaria is pursuing a joint PhD (cotutelle) between the Center for Critical Computational Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany (Chair for Empirical Computational Ethics), and IMT Atlantique (Department of Data Science), part of the Institut Mines-Télécom, in Brest, France.
His training is originally rooted in philosophy, history and classical studies. He holds a Bachelor's ("Laurea triennale") and a Master's ("Laurea Magistrale") Degree in Philosophy from the University of Naples "Federico II". During those years, he focused particularly on contemporary social ontology, metaphysics, philosophical hermeneutics, and classical phenomenology. He then pursued a more in-depth study of Critical Theory at the University of Milano-Bicocca before moving toward computationally-driven research through a Research Master’s Degree in Media Studies (Cultural Data & AI track), at the University of Amsterdam.
Across these stages, his studies have been constantly de-constructed and re-constructed around the mediation between theoretical speculation and socio-technical reality. Originating in Continental Philosophical Hermeneutics, this interest builds on the notion of translation as a contingent process of "world-making" through which entities are incessantly reassembled into ever-new meanings. In the last years, Gianmaria has progressively broadened this interest to computational models of language and affect. Particularly, he started by focusing on the implicit epistemological conditions through which psychological theories of affect may become templates to be transferred to other disciplines, in part. when translated from Social Psychology to Natural Language Processing. His Research Master’s work developed this orientation through dimensional sentiment analysis, lexical co-occurrence networks, and Actor-Network Theory, investigating how models, datasets, annotation procedures, and theoretical framing all participate in the production of affective knowledge as a "chain" of socio-technical translations.
His PhD project brings these problems into the study of linguistic and cultural biases in multilingual AI-based language models. Starting from established work around the so-called "Language Modelling Bias", the project challenges the assumption, foundational in contemporary language technologies, that meaning is "universal" and can be represented as unconstrained from the historical, contingent features of individual languages and cultures. Being affective meaning the central empirical case, the project focuses on two connected applications: machine translation, asking to what extent sentiment survives translation, and cross-lingual sentiment analysis, examining whether resources or models developed within one linguistic setting remain valid when transferred to another.
Research Master's Degree in Media Studies: Cultural Data & AI (120 ec) 09\2024 -- 07\2026
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Thesis titled "Doing Emotions: Reassembly of a Reddit Corpus for Emotion Recognition Through Dimensional Sentiment Projections and Multi-scale Lexical Networks" (127 pp.).
Grade: 9\10 cum laude.
Postgraduate Programme ("Perfezionamento") in Critical Theory of Society (29 ec) 11\2023 -- 07\2024
University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Thesis titled "I sistemi-mondo e il processo di universalizzazione della forma-merce: percorsi tra Lukàcs e Wallerstein" ["World-systems and the Universalization of Commodity Form: Paths between Lukàcs and Wallerstein"].
Master's Degree ("Laurea Magistrale") in Philosophy (120 ec) 01\2022 -- 02\2024
University of Naples "Federico II", Naples, Italy
Research Thesis in Theoretical Philosophy titled "Lineamenti di una teoresi critica dell'Essere Sociale. L' 'ontologia sociale' di Essere e Tempo e il 'marxismo heideggeriano' del giovane Marcuse" ["Outlines of a Critical Theoresis of Social Being. Being and Time's 'social ontology' and Young Marcuse's 'Heideggerian Marxism' "] (213 pp.).
Grade: summa cum laude.
Bachelor's Degree ("Laurea Triennale") in Philosophy (180 ec) 10\2018 -- 12\2021
University of Naples "Federico II", Naples, Italy
Thesis in Theoretical Philosophy titled " 'Esagera l'oscuro che vedi in me'. Martin Heidegger e le fughe nei Contributi alla filosofia (dall'Evento)" [" 'Overstate the Darkness You See Within Me'. Martin Heidegger and the Fugues in Contributions to Philosophy (from the Event)"], with an Appendix titled "Il canto come esistenza. Addentellato sulla poesia di R. M. Rilke" ["The Song as Existence. A Digression on the Poetry of R. M. Rilke"] (124 pp.).
Grade: summa cum laude.
Graduate Fellow
Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici (IISF), Naples, Italy 03\2024 -- 05\2024
Recipient of two Scholarships, respectively titled "The Spirit of Time: Philosophy and Technology" and "Figurations: Between Words and Images".
Contributions in Books
Avellino, G. (2025). "Il valore dell’educazione e del lavoro nella società dell’immagine" [The Value of
Education and Work in the Society of the Image]. In Sapere di non sapere. Nuove sfide della conoscenza tra
tradizioni e traduzioni. Atti del convegno della Società Filosofica Italiana - 2024, 291-297. Milan: Ledizioni
Avellino, G. (2022). Prassi e rappresentazione. Alcune riflessioni filosofiche su un piano per il fu-
turo della fabbrica di Firenze [Praxis and Representation. Some Philosophical Considerations About
a Plan for the Future of Florence’s Factory]. Read.CsvSalerno Annali Del Volontariato, 5(1), 179–194.
Peer-reviewed Articles
Avellino, G. (2024). L’alienazione artistica come macchina da guerra passando per territorio e ri-
tornello: tra Deleuze, Guattari e Marcuse [Artistic Alienation as War Machine Via Territory and Ri-
tornello: Between Deleuze, Guattari and Marcuse]. Comunicazione Filosofica, 53(2), 101-108.
Avellino, G. (2023b). Lo s-terminato esistere. La co-appartenenza di apollineo e dionisiaco a partire
da una prospettiva infra-heideggeriana [The Un-determined Existence. The Co-belonging of Apollo-
nian and Dionysian from an Intra-heideggerian Perspective]. I Castelli Di Yale Online, 11(2), 132–152.
https://doi.org/10.15160/2282-5460/2858
Avellino, G. (2023a). Conversazione con Giuseppe Cantillo in ricordo di Giuseppe Cacciatore [Con-
versation with Giuseppe Cantillo in Memory of Giuseppe Cacciatore]. Bollettino Della Società Filosofica
Italiana, 239(2), 83–90. https:/doi.org/10.23816/108320
"Reassembling Sentiment: A Critical Genealogy of Dimensional Sentiment Analysis", 22/04/2026: speech given at the Media Studies Research Master's Conference. (Held in English)
Discussant - "Platform Brutality" book launch, 13/11/2025: invited by Dr. G. Lovink (Institute of Network Culture) to discuss topics and themes of his new book at OT301, Amsterdam. Organised by Valiz, Institute of Network Culture and OT301. (Held in English)
"Translating Sentiment: from SentiWordNet 3.0 and Micro-WN-Op to a Multilingual Gold-Standard", 02/05/2025.
Participation as speaker in the Workshop entitled "AI for Linguistic Diversity", jointly organized by University of Amsterdam, University of Trento and IMT Atlantique. (Held in English)
"Philosophy as a 'Critical Theoresis'": a Notion Starting from Plato and Herodotus", 04/08/2024: participation as speaker in the XXV Philosophy World Congress' session on the topic of Hermeneutics at Sapienza University, Rome, Italy. (Held in English)
"The Value of Education and Work in the Society of the Image", 05/04/2024: participation as speaker in the Italian Philosophical Society's national congress' section entitled "Texts, Words and Images: Philosophical Traditions and Translations", at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy. (Held in Italian)
"In the Memory of Giuseppe Cantillo a Year from his Disappearance", 22/03/2024: Participation as speaker on the topic of Southern-Italian philosopher and ethicist Giuseppe Cantillo's work, in the conference entitled "In the Memory of Giuseppe Cantillo a Year from his Disappearance" at the Banner's room of the Municipality of Salerno, Italy. (Held in Italian)
University of Naples "Federico II", 2019 -- 2024
Recipient, throughout my Bachelor's and Master's, of a merit- and income- based scholarship for students who show regularly outstanding performance in their studies, yearly issued by "Adisurc", i.e. the Agency for the Right to Education in the 'Campania' region. For my Bachelor's degree, I also receive an economic prize, issued, when funding is available, by the University of Naples to students who received a scholarship the year before, graduated in time, and with outstanding performances.
Contact
Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S)
Eschersheimer Landstraße 121
60322 Frankfurt am Main
Room 3470
Email: avellino@c3s.uni-frankfurt.de