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’m studying social-aware fully decentralized learning approaches, where users’ personal devices such as smartphones collaborate in a learning task without the coordination of a central server (aka moving beyond federated learning).

(2) I also work on human behavioral/cognitive models for the analysis and design of online social networks. As an example, I am investigating the role that Dunbar’s social circles play in how we interact online (e.g., for link prediction or opinion dynamics). While Dunbar’s social circles may not be known to you, Dunbar’s number should be.

(3) I am investigating how to apply causal learning in pervasive systems. The challenge here is to move beyond current correlation-based learning and achieve knowledge of causal relations rather than simple associations.

(4) What would happen to our social network structures in the Metaverse? Can avatars augment our 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 24 (source: Google Scholar, January 2024).