My work focuses on measuring and understanding complex phenomena in systems that entangle human behaviors and digital platforms. I am interested in Computational Social Science, Data Science, Infectious Disease Dynamics and Digital Epidemiology.
I currently lead the Data Science Laboratory of the ISI Foundation, where I also serve as Scientific Director. I am a founder and a principal investigator of the SocioPatterns collaboration.
News
- I will be co-chairing a new research track at WWW2017 focusing on Computational Health
- new paper in BMC Infectious Diseases: Contact diaries versus wearable proximity sensors in measuring contact patterns at a conference: method comparison and participants’ attitudes
- new interactive data visualization: 4 million traffic tickets in Torino
- new paper in EPJ Data Science: Quantifying social contacts in a household setting of rural Kenya using wearable proximity sensors
- ZikaTracking: an interactive global map of tweets mentioning the Zika virus
- Flickr cities: a data visualization project to explore the urban geography revealed by millions of digital photos
- new paper in Nature Communications: Compensating for Population Sampling in Simulations of Epidemic Spread on Temporal Contact Networks
- new manuscript: Predicting human mobility through the assimilation of social media traces into mobility models
- new manuscript: Revealing latent factors of temporal networks for mesoscale intervention in epidemic spread
- new paper in BMC Infectious Diseases: Mitigation of infectious disease at school: targeted class closure vs school closure (arXiv)
Bio
I received a PhD in theoretical Physics from the University of Perugia (Italy). After a few experiences in the software industry I worked at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and then moved to the Frontier Research System of the RIKEN Institute (Japan) as a post-doctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. After three years in Tokyo, I was awarded a grant at the "Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi" and I moved to Roma, where I was affiliated to the Physics Department of the Sapienza University of Roma. In 2008 I joined the ISI Foundation, where I currently lead the Data Science Laboratory. From 2010 to 2014 I was Deputy Scientific Director of the ISI Foundation, and since 2014 I serve as the Scientific Director of the Institute.