My work focuses on measuring and understanding complex phenomena in systems that entangle human behaviors and digital platforms. I am interested in Data Science, Computational Social Science, Network Science, Infectious Diseases, Digital Epidemiology, and, more broadly, the Social Impact of Data Science.
I am the Scientific Director of ISI Foundation and a founder and principal investigator of the SocioPatterns collaboration. I was formerly an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Torino and an Expert in the Italian Department of Digital Transformation.
News
new preprint: An embedding-based distance for temporal graphs
new paper in PLoS ONE: Estimating household contact matrices structure from easily collectable metadata
new paper in eLife: Association of close-range contact patterns with SARS-CoV-2: a household transmission study
new paper in Frontiers in Big Data: Strengths and limitations of relative wealth indices derived from big data in Indonesia
book on Data Science for Social Good: Philanthropy and Social Impact in a Complex World
new paper in Scientific Reports: Psychotropic drug purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and their relationship with mobility restrictions
side event at the UN High-Level Political Forum: Nonprofit Leadership and Data Stewardship in the COVID-19 recovery
event on The Public Value of Big Data with Fortune Italia
new paper in PLoS Computational Biology: Interplay between mobility, multi-seeding and lockdowns shapes COVID-19 local impact
new paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface: Effect of manual and digital contact tracing on COVID-19 outbreaks: a study on empirical contact data
new paper in EPJ Data Science: Using wearable proximity sensors to characterize social contact patterns in a village of rural Malawi
new paper in PLoS ONE: Early social distancing policies in Europe, changes in mobility & COVID-19 case trajectories: Insights from Spring 2020
new paper in Nature Communications: Digital proximity tracing on empirical contact networks for pandemic control [featured in Nature Italy’s research highlights]
new comment in Nature Medicine: Time to evaluate COVID-19 contact-tracing apps [arXiv version]
new paper in EPJ Data Science: Evaluation of home detection algorithms on mobile phone data using individual-level ground truth
new paper in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: Gender Gaps in Urban Mobility
new paper in Science Advances: Mobile phone data for informing public health actions across the COVID-19 pandemic life cycle
new paper in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance: Combining Wearable Devices and Mobile Surveys to Study Child and Youth Development in Malawi: Implementation Study of a Multimodal Approach
new paper in Scientific Data: COVID-19 outbreak response: a first assessment of mobility changes in Italy following national lockdown
new paper in Ethics and Information Technology: Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment
new paper in the European Journal of Risk Regulation: The Institutionalization of Digital Public Health: Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 App
new paper in Demographic Research: Traditional versus Facebook-based surveys: Evaluation of biases in self-reported demographic and psychometric information
new paper in Computers in Human Behavior: Predicting Demographics, Moral Foundations, and Human Values from Digital Behaviors
Bio
I received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Perugia, Italy. I worked as a research scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA) and then joined 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 joined the "Enrico Fermi Center" in Roma as a Fellow, where I was affiliated with the Physics Department of Sapienza University. In 2008 I joined ISI Foundation, where I led its first Data Science group since 2010. Since 2014, I have served as Scientific Director of the Institute. From 2020 to 2023 I was an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Torino, and in 2022 I worked at the Italian Department of Digital Transformation as an Expert. I am a Steering Board Member of CRT Foundation,