DRAFT v5.4 · iips.institute · People — card-grid reorganisation. Co-Founding Director Rinaudo (pending). Founding Fellow Manca confirmed. Costantini, Borswick in dialogue.
Founding nucleus · June 2026

People — a nucleus with two co-Directors.

Four concentric layers: a Founding Director and a Co-Founding Director with pari grado institutional standing; Founding Fellows (one confirmed, two in dialogue); Associates; and figures acknowledged In Memoriam. Total active membership will not exceed five to seven people in the first two years.

Directors (2) · Founding Fellows confirmed (1) · in dialogue (2) · Associates (0) · In Memoriam (4)
I.

Directorship.

The Institute is co-directed. The two Directors set the scientific direction jointly, sign off on Institute outputs, and represent the Institute externally. The model reflects the dual centre of gravity of the founding nucleus — Cambridge UK and Brussels BE — and the parallel trajectories of the two founders from the JRC AI Laboratory at Ispra through Computational Nuclear Safeguards and the start-up of the European Medicines Agency.

Founding Director

Flavio Argentesi

Cambridge, UK

Formerly Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Ispra, from 1976. Coordinator of the JRC AI Laboratory at Ispra (1980s). Head of the Computational Nuclear Safeguards Division (early-mid 1990s). Head of the Division that became the start-up of the European Medicines Agency (1995-2003, London). Honorary Fellowship, University of Strathclyde. Author of TRAG, the operational Line A prototype.

Selected foundational publications

IFAC The Hague 1973; Brebbia Southampton 1976; ESARDA Brussels 1979; Parma 1981; Statistica Applicata 1982; Athens 1982-83 (two chapters with Cavalloro); INMM Vail 1982 (Loss-Pattern Identification with LANL); Memorie IIDr 45 (1987); Journal of Limnology (2026, under review).

Co-Founding Director · pending formal acceptance

Franco Rinaudo

Brussels, BE

System engineer at the JRC AI Laboratory in the 1980s, with primary focus on Case-Based Reasoning and several Hypertext projects spanning engineering and pharmaceutical documentary domains. Subsequently moved to the EMEA London start-up, where he served as first system engineer of the Agency. Retired officer of the European Commission.

Operative axis

Documentary architectures and hypertext systems — directly continuous with the Line A programme of LLM-orchestrated RAGs over high-value corpora. Infrastructure architecture and the technical platform that hosts the Institute's online presence. Co-Founding Director status is pending formal co-signature of the Manifest.

II.

Founding Fellows.

Senior independent researchers who share the Institute's scientific outlook and contribute to its programme on a sustained basis. Intended size: three to six members in the first two years. Participation is formalised by personal invitation and reply.

Founding Fellow · confirmed

Marina Manca

Verbania-Pallanza, IT

Formerly CNR-IRSA Verbania. Co-author of Argentesi, de Bernardi, Di Cola & Manca (Memorie IIDr 45, 1987). Scientific lead of CIPAIS long-term zooplankton monitoring of Lake Maggiore, 1981-2023 (43 years).

Operative axis: B·1 (PINN demographic inversion) and A·1 (RAG-LLM population modelling).
Founding Fellow · in dialogue

Livio Costantini

Vienna, AT

JRC AI Laboratory (1980s) on computational linguistics, machine translation, database systems. Subsequently Head of the Documentary Analysis Division at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Operative axis: Line A, NLP on structured documentary corpora.
Founding Fellow · in dialogue

Giulia Borswick

London, UK

Endocrinologist with PhD, clinical researcher on protocols formally analogous to inverse-problem identification in human physiology.

Operative axis: Line B applied to clinical-biological inversion.
III.

Associates & methodological collaborations.

Associates are external researchers in active collaboration with the Institute on specific co-authored outputs. Open slots are available for collaboration on the projects in development. Below: methodological collaboration in scoping with the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires.

Methodological exchange · scope to be defined

Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society

King's College London + Imperial College London

Contact: Oliver Perkins (KCL), author of WHAM! (Wildfire Human Agency Model, Geoscientific Model Development, 2024) and of its coupling with JULES-INFERNO within the UK Earth System Model for CMIP7. INFERNO is the wildfire parameterisation developed at Imperial College under Voulgarakis and Prentice.

Scope

Methodological exchange on simulator + RAG + LLM fusion. IIPS does not pursue the wildfire application domain itself.

Associate · open slots

[ to be confirmed ]

Line A and Line B

Open slots for collaborators with competence in (a) RAG architecture + LLM orchestration applied to inverse-problem informatics, or (b) SciML on age- or stage-structured population models or compartmental kinetics. Operative axis: any of A·1, A·2, B·1, B·2, B·3.

No Associate has yet been formalised.
IV.

In Memoriam.

Figures whose intellectual contribution to the lineage of the Institute is foundational. The category is permanent and honorary; inclusion is decided by the Directors in consultation with active Founding Fellows.

In Memoriam

Giulio Di Cola

University of Parma · IAC Roma

Co-author of the founding papers of Line B (IFAC 1973, Brebbia 1976, Memorie 1987) and of the Athens 1982-83 entomology chapters. Anchor of the JRC-IAC collaboration on compartmental and PDE inverse problems.

In Memoriam

Luciano Guerri

University of Pavia · CNR-IAC Pallanza

Co-author of the 1976 Brebbia Southampton paper on PDE distributed-parameter models with Tikhonov regularisation — the first field-data application of the methodology, on Lobesia botrana.

In Memoriam

Bernard Meltzer

JRC Ispra · Edinburgh · 1916-2008

Founder of the journal Artificial Intelligence (1970); Head of the Edinburgh Department of Artificial Intelligence (1974-1977); full-time Senior Advisor of the JRC AI Laboratory at Ispra. Direct continuity between Edinburgh AI and JRC documentary research.

In Memoriam

Margaret Merlini

CNR-IRSA Verbania

Author of the 1971 paper on Zn-65 compartmental physiology in Lepomis gibbosus — the empirical anchor of Line B·3. Biographical profile in preparation by the Institute archive.

The Institute also records the memory of Pierre Bonnaure, French engineer of grande école formation and senior director of the JRC, whose decision at the end of the 1970s to move significant resources from the declining nuclear programme to the nascent AI Laboratory made the formative phase of the founding nucleus possible. And of R. Cavalloro (1925-1995), convenor of the IOBC/WPRS Working Group Fruit flies of economic importance at JRC.

V.

How participation is conferred.

Membership categories carry no contractual force. They are categories of mutual recognition, conferred by invitation, accepted by reply, and may be revoked or relinquished at any time by either party.

Path

Founding Fellow

Invitation only. Directors send a personalised invitation; the candidate accepts, declines, or requests further discussion. No formal document is signed.

Path

Associate

Invoked upon a concrete collaboration. Both parties agree by email on the specific co-authored output that carries the Institute affiliation.

Path

Restrictive affiliations

Associate category is designed to be compatible with government labs, universities with strict external-affiliation rules, and industry research divisions.