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 am the Scientific Director of the ISI Foundation, and a founder and a principal investigator of the SocioPatterns collaboration.
News
Workshop on Data Science for Social Good at The Web Conference 2019 in San Francisco
NetSci 2019 satellite workshop on Machine Learning in Network Science
My ISWC 2008 paper on “Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems“ with Andreas Hotho, Dominik Benz and Gerd Stumme (nominated for Best Paper Award at ISWC 2008) won the 2018 SWSA Ten-Year Award.
new paper in Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR): How Search Engine Data Enhance the Understanding of Determinants of Suicide in India and Inform Prevention: Observational Study
new paper in Computers in Human Behavior: Predicting Demographics, Moral Foundations, and Human Values from Digital Behaviors
new paper in CIKM: Mining (maximal) span-cores from temporal networks
new paper in Phys. Rev. E: Estimating the outcome of spreading processes on networks with incomplete information: A dimensionality reduction approach
new preprints:
Wearable proximity sensors for monitoring a mass casualty incident exercise: a feasibility study, accepted for publication in Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR)
special issue of Applied Network Science on Machine Learning with Graphs
Digital Epidemiology course at the Swiss Epidemiology Winter School
ISI Foundation is a partner of a winning proposal of the Data2X challenge on "Big Data for Gender"
new paper in EPJ Data Science: Shopping Mall Attraction and Social Mixing at a City Scale
new paper in PLoS ONE: Close encounters between infants and household members measured through wearable proximity sensors
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.