Teachers 2025-2026

Viola Bachini

I graduated from Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati di Trieste with a master's in Science Communication. Currently I am collaborating with various organizations in the field of science communication. I specifically write about science and technology subjects on many national newspapers such as La Repubblica and L'Espresso. I am the recipient of a grant, working at the KDD Lab (Università di Pisa-CNR) where I manage the communication regarding their work at the lab, the master's degree in Big Data, and the University of Pisa's degree in Business Informatics.

Lorenzo Bellomo

Lorenzo Bellomo studied Computer Science at the University of Pisa, where he earned his degree with a thesis entitled “Topic Based News Recommendation”. He later obtained a Ph.D. in Data Science from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, with a dissertation titled “Building a Biomedical Knowledge Graph from PubMed Central Articles”. In the following years, he carried out research for the Computer Science departement of the University of Pisa on data compression and graph databases, often in collaboration with the company Sadas S.r.l. (https://www.sadas.com/), where he currently works.

Chiara Boldrini

Chiara Boldrini is a Senior Researcher at IIT-CNR and head of the AI & Data Science lab of the Ubiquitous Internet research unit. Her research interests are in human-centric decentralized AI, causal learning in pervasive systems, human behavioral/cognitive models for the analysis and design of online social networks/Metaverse. She is the IIT-CNR co-PI for the National Extended Partnership in Artificial Intelligence FAIR, H2020 SoBigData++ and H2020 HumaneE-AI-Net projects, and was involved in several EC projects since FP7. She currently holds the position of Editor-in-Chief for Special Issues at Elsevier Computer Communications. She served as TPC chair of IEEE PerCom'24 and, over the years, has been on the organizing committee of several IEEE and ACM conferences/workshops, including IEEE PerCom and ACM MobiHoc. Recently, she has served in the TPC of AAAI ICWSM (as senior PC member), The Web Conference, WSDM, among several others. 

Eleonora Cappuccio

Researcher at the CNR-IRPPS. Previously, she served as a Research Fellow at the CNR Institute of Information Science and Technologies “A. Faedo” and was a PhD candidate in the National Doctoral Program in Artificial Intelligence and Society, collaborating with the University of Pisa and the University of Bari “Aldo Moro.” Her research focused on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Explainable AI (XAI), and Visual Analytics. She developed a particular interest in XAI interfaces and the role of Visual Analytics in improving the usability of explainable AI systems. Currently, she is dedicated to multimodal Fake News Detection.

Alessio Cascione

I am a Graduate Student of Digital Humanities from the University of Pisa and I am currently pursuing a PhD in the Italian National PhD Program in AI.
My research interests gravitate around explainable machine learning themes, with a specific focus on case-based reasoning approaches to developing interpretable-by-design models.
I am also interested in Natural Language Processing tools, particularly in the detection of harmful online content. Additionally, I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from the University of Pisa, where I focused on philosophy of language, philosophical logic and epistemology.

Martina Cinquini

Martina Cinquini graduated in 2021 in Data Science and Business Informatics with a thesis entitled “Boosting Synthetic Data Generation with Effective Nonlinear Causal Discovery”. She is currently a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Pisa. Her main research interests focus on causality and explainable AI.

Giovanni Comandè

Giovanni Comandè (LLM Harvard Law School USA, Ph.D. Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna) is Full Professor of Private comparative law at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna where he also studied as ordinary student.
Since 1995 he has been lawyer, included in the special roll for university teachers in Pisa and Attorney at law (New York Bar) since 1997. moreover he is mediator at Organismo Conciliazione Pisa and mediation trainer. He has taught in and visited numerous universities in the world (Washington and Lee School of Law, USA; Université Laval, Canada; Fordham School of Law, USA; Université Panthéon Assas Paris II, Faculté de Droit ; Hebrew Univeristy, Jérusalem; Wake Forrest University School of Law, USA ; University of South Carolina School of Law, USA).
He has been elected as member of the American Law Institute (ALI www.ali.org) where he is an advice member for various projects  such as that concerning Information Privacy Principles. Moreover he is member of the ello European Law Institute (ELI www.europeanlawinstitute.eu) of the the European Group on Tort Law www.egtl.org and of the European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law, Vienna (www.ectil.org).
He has written 4 monographs and numerous articles and comments, has organised 14 edited volumes. He works in Italian, English, Spanish and French.
His areas of competence include: data protection law, law and technology, algorithm regulation, civil law in general, tort law, personal injury, European private law, health law, private law of public administration, product liability, A.D.R. (Alternative Dispute Resolution), American law, insurance law, technology regulation.

Andrea Cossu

Andrea Cossu is assistant professor at the Computer Science department of the University of Pisa. His research revolves around continual learning and non-stationary environments, with applications to pre-trained models ad recurrent neural networks. Andrea was Board Member of ContinualAI, a non-profit research organization on continual learning, and is one of the maintainers of the Avalanche library. Andrea holds a Ph.D. in Data Science from Scuola Normale Superiore, he was visiting researcher at KU Leuven and Research Intern at Google Brain. 

Daniele Fadda

Daniele Fadda, born in Milan on 10.05.81. He graduated at Density Design LAB at the School of Design - Politecnico di Milano. He is now a freelance designer coordinating projects about promotion and territorial storytelling for the municipality of Pisa and Città della Pieve (PG). He worked on the visual representation of complex systems, data visualization, especially regarding the transport infrastructures and he collaborated with several architects as communication consultant. In the spare time, he works as graphic designer for the monthly press Seconda Cronaca.
 

Tiziano Fagni

I am a computer science researcher working at NeMis lab ofISTI-CNR in Pisa. I graduated in Computer Science in 2002 at the faculty of Computer Science of the University of Pisa. After my degree, I started working as junior researcher/technologist at ISTI-CNR first in the HPC (High Performance Computing) lab and next in the NeMis (Network Multimedia Information Systems) lab. In 2006, I started my PhD in Information Engineering at the Information Engineering Department of the University of Pisa. I attended all the 3 years required by the course, making all required publications to complete my PhD. Unfortunately , I decided to change work at the end of 2008 by leaving CNR and I went to work in a private company. The lack of time was then the main reason why I not achieved the PhD title.
After various vicissitudes and a lot of pratical experience as IT consultant, I decided to come back at CNR at the end of 2012 and working again in my “old” research group (Human Language Technologies) headed by Dr. Sebastiani Fabrizio.

Andrea Failla

Andrea Failla is a PhD student in Artificial Intelligence for Society within the Italian National PhD Program in AI and a research fellow at the National Research Council of Italy, working in the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory (KDDLab). His research focuses on network science approaches to computational social science, with particular attention to higher-order and temporal network analysis. His recent work explores the opportunities and challenges of using Large Language Models in social science research.

Paolo Ferragina

He is Professor of Algorithms and Vice-Rector on "Applied Research and Innovation" at the University of Pisa. He leads the Advanced Algorithms and Applications Laboratory (Acube Lab, http://acube.di.unipi.it), at the Department of Computer Science, whose main research activities are devoted to the design, analysis and experimentation of algorithms and data structures for storing, compressing, mining and retrieving information from Big textual collections and labeled graphs. He is also the President of the IT Center of the same University, which is indeed competence center about Cloud and HPC for Dell and Intel, Xeonphi Centre for Intel, and recently Transform Data Center immersion for Microsoft. He (co-)authored more than 120 publications on (refereed) journals and international conferences, 6 US patents (3 accepted and 3 pending, some of them with Yahoo! and Lucent), and various chapters in books edited by CRC press, Springer, Mondadori and Boringhieri. He has been invited speaker and co-chair of prestigious PhD Schools and international conferences either in Theoretical Computer Science on in Information retrieval and Web Search. He is in the Editorial Board of the Journal on Graph Algorithms and Applications. His research has got numerous scientific awards, among the most recent ones: Yahoo Faculty Award (2006-2011) in the context of compressed data structures, and 2 Google Faculty Awards (2010 and 2013) in the context of semantic search and annotation.

Giulio Ferrigno

Giulio Ferrigno is a Senior Assistant Professor at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa. He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, Tilburg University, and the University of Umea. His main research themes include strategic alliances, big data, and Industry 4.0. His works have been published in Small Business Economics, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, International
Journal of Management Reviews, R&D Management, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, Review of Managerial Science, European Journal of Innovation Management, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research. He is an Associate Editor of Technology Analysis & Strategic Management.

Giacomo Fidone

Giacomo Fidone is a Ph.D. student in Artificial Intelligence at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa. His research interests primarily concern Natural Language Generation (NLG) and explainability, with a focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative methods for inducing interpretable models. Before starting his Ph.D., he worked as a research fellow on the PIANO project, developing simulators of online social networks.

Riccardo Guidotti

Riccardo Guidotti was born in 1988 in Pitigliano (GR) Italy. He graduated cum laude in Computer Science in 2013, at University of Pisa. He discussed hi thesis on Mobility Ranking: Human Mobility Analysis using Ranking Measures. He started the Ph.D. in Computer Science at the School for Graduate Studies "Galileo Galilei", (University of Pisa) in November 2013. He is currently a member of Knowledge Discovery and Delivery Laboratory. His interests regard Individual Data Mining, Mobility Data Analysis, Economic Data Analysis and Complex Network Analysis.

Andrea Iommi

Andrea Iommi obtained a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa in 2024 with 110/110, specialising in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Currently, he is engaged in a PhD (National PhD for Society) at the same institution. His research focuses on topics such as Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) and Ranking.

Cristiano Landi

Cristiano Landi (born in 1998 in Cecina, LI, Italy) is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa and a member of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory (KDDLab), a research group in collaboration with ISTI-CNR of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore. Cristiano graduated with a Master’s Degree in Data Science & Business Informatics from the University of Pisa in 2022, with a thesis on “Interpretable Machine Learning Models for Trajectory Classification”. He also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the same university, obtained in 2017.

Cristiano’s research focuses on developing alternative data representations to improve the performance of current state-of-the-art machine learning models. Throughout his academic career, he has collaborated with the Data Science Lab at the University of Piraeus, Greece, on “Mobility Data Representation for Sub-Trajectory Clustering.” His other research interests include Mobility Data Analytics, Explainable and Interpretable AI, and Human-Centered AI.

Fabrizio Lillo

Fabrizio Lillo is Full Professor of Mathematical Methods for Economics and Finance at the <a href="http://www.mathematics.unibo.it/en">University of Bologna</a> (Italy). Formerly he has been Associate Professor of Mathematical Finance and leader of the group of Quantitative Finance at the <a href="https://en.sns.it/">Scuola Normale Superiore</a>, Pisa (Italy). He has been also External Faculty and Professor (2009-2012) at the Santa Fe Institute (USA). He received the Master (laurea) in Physics and PhD in Physics at the University of Palermo (Italy). He has been postdoc (1999-2001) and then researcher of the National Institute of the Physics of Matter, INFM (2001-2003). After that he has been postdoc (2003) and member of the External Faculty (2004-2009) of the Santa Fe Institute. He has been awarded the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics of the German Physical Society in 2007. He is author of more than 85 referred scientific papers, which, according to Google Scholar, his papers have received more than 5,600 citations and his h-index is 36. He has been invited speaker in more than 25 international conference in the last 4 years. He is also member of the editorial board of 5 journals (including Journal of Statistical Mechanics (JSTAT) and Market Microstructure and Liquidity) and he is referee for many international journals and national funding agencies. Besides other projects, he is responsible of one of the units of the H2020 project SoBigData. He has also been responsible of one of the units of the FP7 funded European project CRISIS (Complexity Research Initiative for Systemic InstabilitieS) and of an INET grant, both focused on financial systemic risk and of ELSA and ComplexWorld, two European projects on Air Traffic Management.
His current research activity is focused on financial markets, with a special emphasis on high frequency finance and market microstructure, network models and inference of temporal networks, systemic risk, data science in finance, economics, and social sciences. For more information, please refer to https://fabriziolillo.wordpress.com

Angelica Lo Duca

Angelica Lo Duca is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council of Pisa. In 2012, she received her Ph.D. in Ingegneria dell'Informazione from the University of Pisa. She received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Engineering from University of Pisa respectively in 2005 and 2007. Currently, she works at the Web Applications for the Future Internet Laboratory, in the Semantic Web and Data Visualization group. Her research interests include Semantic Web, Data Integration, Data Science and Data Security, applied to the fields of tourism and cultural heritage. She wrote more than 10 papers covering these topics. She also supervised different thesis about open linked data, cultural heritage and tourism.

Andrea Macrì

Andrea Macrì obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Economics (2017) and Master’s degree in Finance (2020) from the University of Siena. Since 2021, he has been a PhD candidate (XXVII cycle) in Computational Methods and Mathematical Models for Sciences and Finance, under the supervision of Professors F. Lillo and S. Marmi.

His research primarily focuses on financial microstructure and the application of machine learning techniques to financial markets, aiming to study the behaviour of financial agents and price formation. Specifically, his contributions centre on reinforcement learning techniques for optimal execution and optimal investment, with a particular emphasis on algorithmic game theory and market impact games.

Lorenzo Mannocci

Lorenzo Mannocci received the Phd.D. degree in the Italian National PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pisa and IIT-CNR. Currently, he is a Research Fellow on the european TANGO project on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence models for detection of (in)authentic behaviour and content. He is interested in the overlap between web science and data science, particularly in the study of bot detection and coordinated online behavior. He also conducts research in Explainable AI and Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on using RAG-based systems.

Riccardo Massidda

Riccardo Massidda is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Computer science of the Università di Pisa. His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and causality, focusing on causal abstraction methods. He completed his PhD as part of the ELLIS Society network, under the supervision of Davide Bacciu (University of Pisa) and Sara Magliacane (University of Amsterdam).

Giovanni Mauro

Giovanni Mauro was born in 1995 in Catanzaro (CZ). He holds a BSc in Computer Science from University of Pisa (during which he win a one-year Erasmus+ grant at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and a MSc in Data Science from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech. 
Before joining the PhD in Artificial Intelligence he worked as Data Engineer and cooperated with KDD-lab at ISTI-CNR for projects regarding Sport Analytics and Human Mobility Analysis.
Currently, his main research interest are the development of algorithms for understanding and predicting human mobility flows and trajectories, as well as the study of the segregation mechanism that take place in a city. Besides that he is a Research Associate at ISTI-CNR and collaborates with the Networks Research Unit at IMT Lucca. He is Community Activist for the Task “Sustainable Cities for Citizens” of the research infrastructure “SoBigData++"
Soccer, tennis, sea, journeys and motorcycling are his main passions.

Anna Monreale

Anna Monreale is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa and a member of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory (KDD-Lab), a joint research group with the Information Science and Technology Institute of the National Research Council in Pisa. She has been a visiting student at Department of Computer Science of the Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NewJersey, USA) (2010).

Mirco Nanni

He is a researcher at the ISTI institute of CNR, Pisa. He holds a degree (1996) and a PhD (2001) in Computer Science, both obtained at the Pisa University. His research topics include data mining in general, clustering methods, mobility data analysis and their applications. He participated to several national and international projects, the most recent being PETRA, a UE project centered around mobility in a "smart cities" context. He has been a visiting in a few international institutes, including M.I.T. in Boston and University of New Brunswick in Canada. He has been teaching for around 10 years on various topics, mainly data mining and its applications.

Franco Maria Nardini

Franco Maria Nardini (http://hpc.isti.cnr.it/∼nardini/) is currently a Researcher at ISTI–CNR in Pisa. He received his Ph.D. in Information Engineering from the University of Pisa in 2011 discussing his thesis ``Query Log Mining to Enhance User Experience in Search Engines''. His research interests are focused on Web Information Retrieval, Data Mining, and Machine Learning. Franco Maria Nardini is member of the program committee of important conferences in IR and DM like ACM CIKM, SIGKDD, WSDM, etc. He authored more than 25 papers spanning from Web Information Retrieval to Data mining in peer reviewed international journal and conferences.

Francesca Naretto

Francesca Naretto is a researcher at the University of Pisa. She holds a PhD in Data Science from the Scuola Normale Superiore, where she worked on the intersection of explainability and privacy in machine learning. Her research interests are in the field of ethical artificial intelligence, focusing on privacy, fairness, and federated learning. She studies how these principles can be integrated into the design of trustworthy AI systems that are transparent, accountable and compliant with the regulations.

Luca Pappalardo

Born in Salerno (Italy), I earned my PhD in Computer Science at University of Pisa with the thesis "Human Mobility, Social Networks and Economic Development: a Data Science perspective". In my research, I exploit the power of Big Data to study many aspects of human behavior: the patterns of human mobility, the structure and evolution of complex networks, the patterns of success in sports, and the usage of data-driven measures of human behavior to monitor and predict the economic development of countries, cities, and territories.

Dino Pedreschi

Dino Pedreschi is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, and a pioneering scientist in mobility data mining, social network mining and privacy-preserving data mining. He co-leads with Fosca Giannotti the Pisa KDD Lab - Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory, a joint research initiative of the University of Pisa and the Information Science and Technology Institute of the Italian National Research Council, one of the earliest research lab centered on data mining. His research focus is on big data analytics and mining and their impact on society. He is a founder of the Business Informatics MSc program at Univ. Pisa, a course targeted at the education of interdisciplinary data scientists. Dino has been a visiting scientist at Barabasi Lab (Center for Complex Network Research) of Northeastern University, Boston (2009-2010), and earlier at the University of Texas at Austin (1989-90), at CWI Amsterdam (1993) and at UCLA (1995). In 2009, Dino received a Google Research Award for his research on privacy-preserving data mining. He is also Director of the Master in Big Data.

Roberto Pellungrini

Born and raised in Viareggio, Tuscany, Roberto Pellungrini is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Pisa. His main research interests concern ethical aspects related to Data Science, in particular regarding Privacy issues. Before winning the PhD scholarship, he attained a Master Degree in Business Informatics with a thesis on Assessing Privacy Risk and Quality in Human Mobility Data.

Marco Podda

Marco Podda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, and he is a member of che Computational Intelligence & Machine Learning (CIML) group. He got his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Pisa in 2021. His research interests are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Deep Learning, and Generative Models applied to structured data such as sequences and graphs. His research finds application for the most part in the biomedical field.

Alessandro Poggiali

Alessandro Poggiali is a Ph.D. student in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pisa, researching hybrid quantum algorithms for clustering, feature selection, and anomaly detection. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science at the same university. He has collaborated with the Fraunhofer IKS in Munich on quantum autoencoders and is active in teaching and outreach, co-organizing the Quantum Festival.  His current research aims to develop more efficient and interpretable models in quantum artificial intelligence.

Giuseppe Prencipe

Giuseppe Prencipe is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa. His research interests are mainly on distributed systems, mobile and wearable computing; he has published more than 50 scientific publications on international journals and conference proceedings, and participated in several national and international research projects. He also contributed to the design and development of software solutions dedicated to environments populated by mobile robots, and developed several mobile applications on Android, Android Wear and iOS platforms.

Salvatore Rinzivillo

Salvatore Rinzivillo was born in 1976 in Ragusa, and holds a Laurea degree in Computer Science (University of Catania, 2001). Since 2002 he has been a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Pisa. His current research interests are data mining, knowledge discovery in spatial and spatio-temporal databases, and visual analytics methods for Big Data.

Giulio Rossetti

Giulio Rossetti earned his PhD in Computer Science at University of Pisa in 2015 with the thesis "Social Network Dynamics". He is a researcher at ISTI-CNR and a member of the KDD Lab (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory). His research interests involve the analysis of Big Data to study and model the heterogeneous aspects of human behaviours, with a special focus on: dynamic networks analysis, diffusion and epidemic spreading, data-driven model for the science of success.

Salvatore Ruggieri

Salvatore Ruggieri is Full Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa, and he is currently the director the Master Programme in Business Informatics. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1999), whose thesis has been awarded by the Italian Chapter of EATCS as the best Ph.D. thesis in Theoretical Computer Science. He is a member of the KDD LAB, with research interests focused in the data mining and knowledge discovery area, including: discrimination discovery and prevention, privacy and fairness, languages and systems for modelling the process of knowledge discovery; sequential and parallel classification algorithms; web mining; and applications. He was the coordinator of Enforce, a national FIRB (Italian Fund for Basic Research) young researcher project on Computer science and legal methods for enforcing the personal rights of non-discrimination and privacy in ICT systems (2010-2014, enforce.di.unipi.it). He was the program chair of the XIII Italian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Pisa 10-12 December 2014. http://pages.di.unipi.it/ruggieri

Cosimo Rulli

Cosimo Rulli is a researcher at the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy. He obtained his PhD in 2023 from the University of Pisa, with a thesis on deep neural network compression. His research interests include Deep Learning, Model Compression, and Approximate Nearest Neighbor techniques, particularly applied to Information Retrieval. He was awarded the ACM SIGIR 2024 Best Paper Runner-Up prize and the ECIR 2025 Best Student Short Paper award. He is a reviewer for ACM TOIS, IEEE TKDE, and PMC, and serves on the program committee for SIGIR, ECIR, CIKM, and WSDM.

Francesco Spinnato

Francesco Spinnato earned his Bachelor's degree in Economics and Management from the University of Padua in 2017 and his Master's degree in Data Science from the University of Pisa in 2020. He obtained his Ph.D. in Data Science from the Scuola Normale Superiore in 2024.

He is currently an assistant professor (RTD-A) at the University of Pisa and a member of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory (KDDLab), a joint research group with the Information Science and Technology Institute of the National Research Council in Pisa. His research focuses on explainable AI (XAI) applied to sequential data, particularly on interpreting black-box models for univariate and multivariate time series.

Dr. Spinnato received the 2023–2024 Socint G-Research Italian National Prize for his Ph.D. thesis, “Explanation Methods for Sequential Data Models.”

Salvatore Trani

Salvatore Trani got his master degree at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa in 2013. He then started a collaboration with the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione (ISTI) "A. Faedo" of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Pisa. The collaboration continued also during his PhD course at the PhD school of Computer Science of the University of Pisa. In 2016 he submitted his PhD thesis titled "Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness of Document Understanding in Web Search". Currently he is a research fellow at ISTI-CNR. His main research interests ranges from Information Retrieval to Web Mining and Machine Learning. He authored several papers on these topics, published on journals and international conferences.