invited speakers
Chiara Boldrini
Since 2012, I’m a permanent researcher in the Ubiquitous Internet group of IIT-CNR in Italy. My research interests are opportunistic/DTN networking, smart transportation and urban computing, social network analysis.
I have investigated both the algorithmic aspects of opportunistic networks (contributing the HiBOp and ContentPlace protocols) and their analytical modelling. I have also worked on the modelization of human mobility (you may have heard of the HCMM protocol). Recently, I have spent most of my time studying issues related to smart transportation, with a special focus on car sharing systems. In particular, I have designed optimized supply models for innovative car sharing systems and I have investigated the potential of mining car sharing datasets (hint: lots of very interesting info can be discovered). I am now focusing more on online social network analysis, specifically studying the ego-network structure in Twitter and other online social networks.
Fosca Giannotti
Fosca Giannotti is a director of research of computer science at the Information Science and Technology Institute "A. Faedo" of the National Research Council, Pisa, Italy. Fosca Giannotti is a pioneering scientist in mobility data mining, social network analysis and privacy-preserving data mining. Fosca leads the Pisa KDD Lab - Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory, a joint research initiative of the University of Pisa and ISTI-CNR, founded in 1994 as one of the earliest research lab centered on data mining.
Fosca's research focus is on social mining from big data: smart cities, human dynamics, social and economic networks, ethics and trust, diffusion of innovations. She has coordinated tens of European projects and industrial collaborations. Fosca is now the coordinator of SoBigData, the European research infrastructure on Big Data Analytics and Social Mining, an ecosystem of ten cutting edge European research centres providing an open platform for interdisciplinary data science and data-driven innovation.
Diana Maynard
Diana Maynard is a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has a PhD in Natural Language Processing and mostly spends her time developing tools for text analysis, in particular for social media, as well as teaching and consultancy work. She has over 60 academic publications and lots of experience organising conferences, giving talks and managing projects.
Cristina Ioana Muntean
Cristina Ioana Muntean is a permanent researcher at High Performance Computing lab, at ISTI-CNR. She received her PhD in 2013 from Babes-Bolyai University in Romania. She joined the HPC lab after finishing her dissertation and has worked with the group members on topics related to Information Retrieval. Her main research interests are IR and Machine Learning with applications to web search, news and social media. She is particularly interested in sequential neural models and their application to text summarization and web / news retrieval. Another research interest is trajectories and mobility analysis and applications. She has published papers in top-tier conferences and journals in the field and she has also gained experience in working on European and regional projects.
Alina Sirbu
Alina is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of Pisa, and member of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining laboratory. Her research interests are Complex Systems Modelling, Data Science and Machine Learning, applied to a variety of systems ranging from technical (HPC systems, data centres), social (opinion dynamics, social choice theory, behaviour change) to biological (gene regulatory networks). Her work has appeared in BMC Bioinformatics, PLOS One, Journal of Statistical Physics, Nature Methods, Cluster Computing, Quality and Quantity, Advances in Complex Systems and other international journals and conferences. She was previously Research Assistant at Bologna University, Italy, and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin. In 2014 se was Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University, Shanghai. She holds a PhD in Computational Biology from Dublin City University, Ireland and a BSc in Computer Science from AI Cuza. University in Iasi, Romania. She was recipient of the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology EMBARK scholarship award in 2008.
