Paolo Ferragina

paolo.ferragina@santannapisa.it
050 883368
Complesso edilizio Sede Centrale

Bio

Paolo Ferragina was born in Catanzaro, Italy, in 1969. He graduated in Computer Science at the University of Pisa (1992, cum laude), then he got his PhD in Computer Science from the same University (1996) and his post-doc from the Max-Planck Institut fur Informatik (1997-98). Since 2007 he is Full Professor of Computer Science, first at the University of Pisa and now at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. His promotion was sponsored for five years (2007-2011) by Yahoo!.

His research interests are concerned with designing and implementing algorithms and data structures for compressing, indexing, searching, and mining Big Data. During these studies he set up collaborations with Senseable City Lab at MIT (Boston, USA), Pinello Lab at Harvard and MassGeneral Hospital (Boston, USA), European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Google (Zurich), Bloomberg (London), ST Microelectronics, Tiscali (Istella's search engine), Yahoo! Research (Barcelona), Bassilichi, CERVED Group, ENEL Foundation, SadasDB, Spazio Dati, etc. etc..

He is currently also:

a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the CNR national department on ``Engineering, ICT, and Technologies for energy and mobility" (since 2023),
a member of the Steering Committee of the SIAM Symposium on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (since 2024),
a member of the Steering Committee of the Ph.D. in Computer Science of the Universities of Pisa-Florence-Siena (since 2002),
a member of the Scientific Board of the National Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence for Society (since 2023),
co-director of the International Ph.D. School ``Jacob T. Schwartz'' on ``Computational Social Sciences'', held every year in Lipari (since 2016),
a member of the Advisory Board of the Master in ``Big Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence for Society'' (since 2014),
a member of the Working Group on ``AI and Justice'', established by the Ministry of Justice of Italy (2024),
area editor of the Encyclopedia of Algorithms (Springer, Editor Ming-Yang Kao, 2016), and of the Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies (Springer, Editor Zomaya and Sakr, 2018),
member of the Editorial Board of the Journal on Graph Algorithms and Applications (JGAA) (since 2011).

Among other important services at the University of Pisa: Vice-Rector on ICT (2019-2022), President of the regional PhD in Computer Science (2017-2020), Vice-Rector on "Applied Research and Innovation" (2010-2016); Vice-chairman of the Department of Computer Science (2006-2010).

Ricerca

His research has been mainly devoted to the design, analysis, and experimentation of algorithms and data structures for the compressed storage, mining, and search of information in large amounts of data, mainly in the form of texts and (labeled) graphs. Therefore, his scientific results draw from the fields of String Matching, Information Theory, Data Compression, Graph Algorithms, Information Retrieval, and AI.

Among the honors got recently about his professional and scientific achievements, we mention:

Co-recipient (with G. Manzini) of the ``2023 ESA Test of Time award" for the paper on ``Engineering a Lightweight Suffix Array Construction Algorithm'', published in the Proceedings of the European Symposium on Algorithms, 2002.
Co-recipient (with U. Scaiella) of the ``2023 ACM CIKM Test of Time award" for the paper on ``TAGME: on-the-fly annotation of short text fragments (by wikipedia entities)'', published in the Proceedings of ACM CIKM 2010.
Co-recipient (with G. Manzini and M. Burrows) of the ``2022 ACM Paris Kanellakis from theory to practice", with the motivation ``for inventing the BW-transform and the FM-index that opened and influenced the field of Compressed Data Structures with fundamental impact on Data Compression and Computational Biology".
``Ordine del Cherubino'' (2019), assigned by the University of Pisa to distinguished Professors in scientific and professional activities; and ``Pegaso d'Argento'' (2023), assigned by the Tuscan Region for scientific achievements.
PI of the Google Cloud Research Innovator program (2022).
Co-author of the paper on PlayeRank indicated by ACM in January 2022 among the "Five Outstanding Papers" of the journal ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.
PI of the Google Educator grant award for spreading Computational Thinking among teachers and students of high schools (2018).
Co-author of the system SMAPH, developed in collaboration with Google Research (Zurich) and some colleagues of the University of Munich, which has won the short-track (query) of the challenge Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (ERD 2014), organized by the Conference ACM SIGIR 2014.
PI of three Google research awards (2010, 2012, and 2016).
Among the ``top-100 renowned scientists'' according to Google EMEA, because of his research on Search Engines and Information Retrieval (2012).
Working Capital Award from Telecom Italia (2010) for the invention of TagMe.
PI of a Yahoo! faculty award (2006-2011).
For his Phd Thesis, he got the ``EATCS Doctoral Dissertation Thesis Award" (1997) and the ``Philip Morris Award on Science and Technology" (1997).
``Best Land Transportation Paper Award" from IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (1995).

Pubblicazioni

He (co-)authored more than 190 (refereed) publications in journals --- such as 5 JACM, 3 SIAM J. COMP, 5 ACM Trans on Algorithms, 7 Theoretical Computer Science, 7 Algorithmica, 2 Information and Computation, 2 ACM Trans. on Information Systems, etc.. --- and conferences --- such as 3 ACM STOC, 5 IEEE FOCS, 7 ACM-SIAM SODA, 14 ESA, 6 WWW, 3 ACM WSDM, 3 ACM SIGIR, etc..

He authored the book ``Pearls of Algorithm Engineering" published by Cambridge University Press (2023), and co-authored another international book on ``Computational Thinking'' by Springer (2018), and two Italian books: one on Cryptography (Bollati Boringhieri, 2001 and 2007; now UniPI Press, 2015), and one on Computational Thinking (Il Mulino, 2017).

He was the (co)editor of 5 special issues in Theory of Computing Systems (2006), Theoretical Computer Science (2007 and 2009), Information Retrieval (2008), and Algorithmica (2014). He contributed to several entries in three Encyclopedias by Springer (on Algorithms, on DataBase Systems, and on BigData Technologies) and various book chapters: such as, ``String search in external memory: Algorithms and data structures" in the ``Handbook of Computational Molecular Biology'' (CRC Press, 2005), ``Web Search" in the book ``On the power of algorithms'' (Springer, 2013), and ``Computational Biology'' in the ``Handbook of Data Structures and Applications'' (Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2018).

For an updated and complete list of his publications, please refer to Google Scholar or DBLP.

Brevetti

For an updated and complete list of his patents, please refer to the following web site.

He had an intense technology transfer and research valorization activity as vice-rector on "Applied Research and Innovation" at the University of Pisa (2010-2016), as a researcher by contributing and leading several projects funded by companies (such as Yahoo!, Google, ST-Microelectronics, Bloomberg, European Broadcasting Union, etc..), and as co-founder of the spin-off PlayeRank (2018-2023), specialized in algorithms and AI techniques for the evaluation of the performance of soccer players, the prediction of their injuries, or for the planning of soccer matches based on Big Data. This start-up hinged upon a technology published in a paper that was indicated in January 2022 among the ``Five Outstanding Papers" of the journal ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.