Biography
I’m a senior researcher in the Ubiquitous Internet group of IIT-CNR in Italy.
I am currently pursuing four main research directions.
(1) I study social-aware fully decentralized learning, where users’ personal devices (e.g., smartphones and edge nodes) collaboratively learn without a central server, going beyond classical federated learning. My work explicitly accounts for network topology effects, social relationships, and interaction patterns, considering also robustness, security, and resilience.
(2) I work on human behavioral and cognitive models for the analysis of online social networks, drawing from computational social science and network science. I study models of opinion dynamics, social influence, and signed networks capturing trust and antagonism, with applications to link prediction and the understanding of polarization and collective behavior. Concepts such as Dunbar’s social circles represent one of the cognitive lenses explored in this line of work.
(3) I investigate causal learning in pervasive and socio-technical systems, with the goal of moving beyond correlation-based models and uncovering causal mechanisms underlying human behavior, social interactions, and system-level dynamics.
(4) I explore large language models (LLMs) for computational social science, including personality prediction from text and social trait modeling. I analyze LLMs both as tools for social analysis and as actors embedded in online ecosystems.
(5) I study how social network structures may evolve in immersive and virtual environments, such as the Metaverse, and whether avatars and AI-mediated interaction can augment human social capacity.
In the past, I have studied issues related to smart transportation, with a special focus on electric 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 have also worked extensively on both the algorithmic aspects of opportunistic networks (contributing the HiBOp and ContentPlace protocols) and their analytical modelling. While opportunistic networks have never left the research labs to become mainstream, many ideas behind them have (e.g., computation at the Internet edge in 5G networks and D2D contact tracing for COVID-19). I have also worked on the modelization of human mobility (you may have heard of the HCMM protocol).
My h-index is 27 (source: Google Scholar, January 2026).
Interests
- Human-centered Decentralized AI
- Social Computing & Computational Social Science
- Causality for Machine Learning
- Metaverse
- Internet of People
- Smart Transportation and Urban Data Science
- Opportunistic/Delay-Tolerant Networks
- Human Mobility
Education & Qualifications
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National qualification for Full Professorship, 2020
Area 09/H1
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National qualification for Associate Professorship, 2018
Area 09/H1 and 01/B1
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PhD in Information Engineering, 2010
University of Pisa
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MSc in Computer Engineering, 2006
University of Pisa
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BSc in Computer Engineering, 2003
University of Pisa
