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
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 preprints:
Beyond demographics: How search engine data can enhance the understanding of determinants of suicide in India and inform prevention, accepted, to appear in Journal of Medical Internet Research
Wearable proximity sensors for monitoring a mass casualty incident exercise: a feasibility study
Predicting Demographics, Moral Foundations, and Human Values from Digital Behaviors, accepted, to appear in Computers in Human Behavior
5th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2018)
special issue of Applied Network Science on Machine Learning with Graphs
NetSci 2018 satellite workshop on Machine Learning in Network Science
session on Data Science at the Service of Philanthropy at the European Foundation Centre 2018 conference in Warsaw
ISI Foundation is a partner of a winning proposal of the Data2X challenge on "Big Data for Gender"
new paper in Phys. Rev. E: Estimating the outcome of spreading processes on networks with incomplete information: A dimensionality reduction approach
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.