GAITO SABRINA TIZIANA

Curriculum
I received a degree in Physics in 1996, a Master Degree in Material Science in 1998 and a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 2002 from the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. I am currently an associate professor at the Computer Science Department of the Università degli Studi di Milano, where I teach network science applied to social media mining.

Research interests

My research interests are in network science and data mining applied to human mobility and social media. This includes various aspects which help to build a picture of how people move and interact both offline and online. On top of the results of these studies, I investigate new approaches to optimize urban mobility, design novel services for people in mobility and new network paradigms.

Through the development and application of metrics, measurements and algorithms of network science I contribute to the understanding and modelling the structure and evolution of social media, the behaviour of their users and the development of clustering, recommendation and dissemination algorithms. In this context, I focus on two of the most relevant, but not yet sufficiently explored, aspects of these networks: temporal networks and multiplex networks.

Temporal networks, which are temporally annotated networks, allow studying the evolution of social or communication media and the temporal profile of their users' activities. In this context, thanks to the collaboration with the SandLab of UCSB and the social network RenRen, I showed the characteristics of the evolution of a large social network from its birth to full development. I also provided experimental evidence on various social and communication media - ranging from Facebook to the network built on top of cellular data provided by the collaboration with H3G - that the activities of users are bursty and I modelled their overall temporal behaviour. Besides, I analyzed and modelled the burstiness of link creation process and assessed the predictability of link strength at their creation time. I finally proposed an algorithm for counting and enumerating temporal motifs and analyzed their characteristics on various networks.

Multiplex networks are networks in which the same user acts on several different networks, allowing to reconstruct his behaviour in a more comprehensive way than evaluating just one social media. In this context, I studied the interplay between mobility and social interactions through text / call activities of individuals, dyads and cohesive groups of users. Another active research concerns the interaction on various social media. I developed a profile matching algorithm as a starting point for the characterization of the interactions on the major social media and the overall behaviour of users on them.
In the research area dedicated to mobile networks, my interests were directed to the study of the mobility of large populations to support the design of algorithms for opportunistic and ad hoc networks and the design of new services and paradigms for mobile communications. I extracted the mobility characteristics of large populations from mobile and GPS data and developed mobility and aggregation models to support the creation of new mobile services in smart cities.
Summarizing, my research activity covers a range of topics in the field of data mining, network science, social networks analysis and mobile networks. My current projects are mainly focused on the following areas:

Mining and modelling large social, communication and information networks.
Multiple networks
Dynamic networks
Off-line and online communities
Network science: metrics, measures and algorithms
Human mobility models
Mobile edge computing


Scientific excellence

I have published 60+ articles with peer reviews and indexed by Scopus (26 in international journals) in prestigious magazines and conferences, including Elsevier Computer Networks, Elsevier Ad hoc Networks, Elsevier Computer Communications, Elsevier Theoretical Computer Science, Springer Mobile Networks and Applications, Plos One, The Web Conference, ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics.

I have published 5 book chapters.
I have translated and curated 4 books for Pearson Publishing Company.
My papers have received 1000+ citations, and my H-index is 19, according to Google Scholar and 500+ citations and H-index=15, according to Scopus.
My papers submitted for evaluation in ANVUR-VQR 2010-14 have scored R=1.


Community service

Editorial Board and TPC
• Member of the Editorial Board of “PlosOne”.
• Member of the Editorial Board of “Applied Network Science”, Springer-nature.
• Member of the Editorial Board of “Journal "Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing".
• Member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Computer Networks and Communications".
• Lead Guest Editor: “Special Issue of the 6th International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications”, Applied Network Science, Springer, 2018.
• Lead Guest Editor: “Special Issue of the 5th International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications”, Applied Network Science, Springer, 2017.
• Guest Editor: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications, Springer, 2016.


• TPC member of the World Wide Web Conference (WWW): Social networks and graph analysis Track, from 2013
• TPC member of The International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), from 2014
• TPC member of SMARTOBJECTS 2017, 3rd Workshop on Experiences with the Design and Implementation of Smart Objects, MobiCom 2017.
• TPC member of IEEE INFOCOM - IEEE International Conference on Computer Communication, 2016, 2017.
• TPC member of ACM MobiCom 2015, the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.
• TPC member of CCNC: Special Session entitled "Wireless Models and Simulations for Consumer Communication and Networking", from 2015
• TPC member of AOC 2016 - IEEE WoWMoM Workshop on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications
• TPC member of IFIP Wireless Days, 2010-2012
• TPC member of AOC 2011 - IEEE WoWMoM Workshop on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications
• TPC member of IFIP/TC6 Networking, 2012-2013
• TPC member of The International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM), 2013-2015


Conference and Workshop Organization

• Program chair of the Workshop “Mining Attributed Networks”, The Web Conference, WWW 2018.
• Co-founder and Member of the steering committee of the International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications, complexnetworks.org.
• Publication chair of the International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications, VI edition, 2017.
• Publication chair of the International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications, V edition, 2016.
• Program chair of the International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications, V edition, 2016.
• Local chair of the International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications, V edition, Milan.


Management and institutional roles

• Member of the PhD Faculty Board, PhD in Computer Science, University of Milan, since 2011.
• Lecturer in network Science, PhD course, PhD in Computer Science, University of Milan, 2017.
• Lecturer in Social Media Mining at the Digital Communications bachelor, University of Milan, since 2015.
• Lecturer in Computer Networks at the Digital Communications bachelor, University of Milan, between 2010 and 2016.


National and international projects

• Principal investigator of the project “Instant posting” with Tribe Communication s.r.l. (2014-)
• Co-principal investigator of the project “Traffic and users analysis of a mobile call dataset” with H3G (2012-)
• Co-principal investigator of the project “Understanding and using the human network to improve the Internet experience” with Cisco Systems (2010-2011).
• Chief data scientist of the project “Regione Lombardia: Added value of the activation of glucose metabolism in the prognosis of lymphoma diffuse large B cell type (DLBCL): comparison with molecular variables” (2010-2011).
• Participant: STMicroelectronics- Advanced statistical methods for analysis of tolerance in the design of integrated circuits (2008-2010).
• Participant: National Research Project- Problemi inversi applicati alla radiografia (2006-2008).
• Participant: National Research Project- Stochastic Processes in Space-Time Structure and their Applications (2003-2004).
• Participant: ORESTEIA- mOdular hybRid artEfactS wiTh adaptivE functIonAlity, UE funded in the FET-IST framework (2001-2003).
• Principal investigator: Young researchers project (ITA)- Evolutionary strategies for problems of optimization and inverse problems with high complexity (2001).


Working experience and academic degrees

• Since June 2018: Associate Professor, INF/01.
• 2020: National habilitation, Full Professor, INF/01.
• 2017: National habilitation, Associate Professor, INF/01.
• 2011 July-August: Research Visit at the Sand lab, University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), hosted by Prof. Ben Zhao.
• 2002: PhD in Applied Mathematics and Operation Research, Università degli Studi di Milano.
• 1999: Training and Research on Advanced Computing Systems Visit at EPCC (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre).
• 1998: Specialization in Science and Technology of Materials (70/70 cum laude), Università degli Studi di Milano.
• 1996: Degree in Physics (110/110 cum laude), Università degli Studi di Milano.
Pubblicazioni selezionate: 20