As of April 2025, Catarina Fontes is a Visiting Fellow at the UNU-EGOV.
Catarina Fontes is an experienced academic and researcher in the field of urban studies, ethics in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence –Technical University of Munich, her expertise lies in AI in the public sector, democratic engagement, ethics and sustainability.
Committed to advancing urban development in alignment with local values and societal goals, Catarina has completed a PhD in Urban Studies in 2021 at the Nova University of Lisbon and ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon, framing urban change from an interdisciplinary perspective and combining ethnographic research with spatial and policy analysis.
In recent research projects, she has studied different AI-enabled technologies, their complexities and impacts, namely how potential risks for society can be prevented and mitigated. She conceptualized and contextualized ethical aspects of several emerging technologies, such as remote face recognition in public spaces, emerging mobility modes (autonomous vehicles and urban air mobility), human digital twins and urban digital twins. She led the design and implementation of participatory methods in collaboration with the cities of Dublin and Amsterdam and UN-Habitat. In extension, she explored AI governance at different levels and from different perspectives focusing on stakeholders’ interplay. Her work on AI governance ranges from describing initiatives at the EU level to govern AI, to advancing methods to promote inclusive public engagement in decision-making and proportionality aspects of data collection and surveillance leveraging AI in the public realm.
Catarina has lectured a Master Seminar at the Technical University of Munich and supervised Bachelor and Master theses. Among her academic publications are “AI-powered public surveillance systems: why we (might) need them and how we want them” and “Governing AI during a pandemic crisis: Initiatives at the EU level”, which received particular attention from the scientific community. She is an invited Editorial Board member of the renowned Elsevier Journal “Technology in Society”.
Her visiting appointments include research stays at the Complutense University in Madrid, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and ETH Zürich.