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Degrees and Positions
[2024-xx] Full-Professor at Department L'EMbeDS, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa.
[2007-24] Full-Professor at Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Pisa.
[2019-23] Vice-Rector on ICT at the University of Pisa.
[2017-20] Director of the PhD Program in Computer Science of the University of Pisa, in collaboration with Universities of Florence and Siena.
[2017-23] Member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione per l'innovazione e lo sviluppo imprenditoriale, Camera di Commercio di Pisa.
[2016-19] Delegate on "Research and innovation" of the Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa.
[2010-16] Vice-rector on "Applied research and innovation" of the University of Pisa.
[2010-15] President of the IT Center of University of Pisa. First HPC competence center in Europe financed by Acer (read this article or this one).
[2010]Member of the Patent Committee of the University of Pisa.
[2009-11] Teacher at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, with a course on "Algorithms and Complexity".
[2007-10] Vice-Chairman of the Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa.
[2004-07] Scientific Coordinator of Signum Research Center, Scuola Normale Superiore.
[2000-07] Associate Professor at Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Pisa.
[1998-00] Assistant Professor at Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Pisa.
[1997-98] Post-Doc at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken (Germany).
[1992-96] PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pisa.
[1987-92] Laurea degree "summa cum laude" in Computer Science from the University of Pisa.
Research Experiences
[August 2018] Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital, USA.
[July 2018] Google, Zurich.
[July 2017] Google, Zurich.
[August 2016] Google, Zurich.
[September 2012] Courant Institute for Mathematical Science, New York University.
[September 2011] Google, Zurich.
[March 2007] Yahoo, Barcelona.
[July 2006] Yahoo, Barcelona.
[March 2006] Google, New York (USA).
[January 2001] AT&T Shannon Labs, Florham Park (NJ, USA).
[August 2000] Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken (Germany).
[July 1999] Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken (Germany).
[Apr '97 - Jul '97] Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken (Germany).
[May '95 - Jun '95] AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray-Hill (NJ, USA).
[Nov '93 - Dec '93] Computer Science Department, University of North Texas, Denton (Texas, USA).
[Sep '92 - Jul '93] IBM Research Center (Rome, Italy).
Industrial Collaborations
[2020 - ] SADAS
[2019 - ] CityPost
[2010 - ] Google (mainly with its Research Centre in Zurich)
[2018 - 2019] Google EMEA Educator Grant Award
[2017 - 2018] Bloomberg (mainly with its sites in London and New York)
[2015 - 2016] ST Microelectronics (Milano and other sites)
[2012 - 2016] Tiscali (Istella's search engine)
[2014 - 2014] CERVED Group
[2013 - 2014] Spazio Dati
[2012 - 2014] Bassilichi
[2007 - 2011] Yahoo! (mainly with its Research Centre in Barcelona)
[1995 - 1997] AT&T Labs (Murray Hill and Floram Park, NJ)
Awards
[2017] Bloomberg Data Science research grant on the project "Entity salience via sophisticated syntactic and semantic features".
[2016] Google research award on the project "An algorithmic analysis of Brotli, towards personalized data compression".
[2014] The system SMAPH, designed in collaboration with Massi Ciaramita (Google) and Stefan Rued and Hinrich Schutze (U. Munich), won the short track (query) of the Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (ERD) Challenge within the ACM SIGIR 2014 Conference. See the Google+ post for details.
[2012] Google research award on the project "A novel graph for social-network analysis and search built by entity-annotators, and its applications".
[2010] Google research award on "On-the-fly annotation of short texts (by Wikipedia pages), with applications".
[2010] Working Capital award assigned by Telecom to my student Ugo Scaiella for our software TAGME.
[2002] Research Capital Award from the University of Pisa.
[1997] Scientific and Technological Research Award 1997 from Philip Morris.
[1997] PhD Thesis ranked among the four finalists of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Thesis Award.
[1995] The paper "Optical recognition of motor vehicle license plates" received the Best Land Transportation Paper Award from IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.
Patents
[2013] US Patent no. 10,346,551 (9 jul '19) co-authored by B. Mishra. Owner University of New York. Titled "Systems, methods and computer-accessible mediums for utilizing pattern matching in stringomes".
[2011] US Patent no. 8,156,156 (10 apr '12) co-authored by F. Luccio, G. Manzini and S. Muthukrishnan. Owners Universities of Pisa and University of Rutgers. Titled "Method of structuring and compressing labeled trees of arbitrary degree and shape", see also papers appeared on IEEE Focs '05 and WWW '06
[2008] US Patent no. 8,996,622 B2 (31 mar 2015) co-authored by C. Corsi, D. Donato, C. Castillo, A. Gionis. Owner Yahoo!. Titled "Query-Log mining for detecting spam hosts", see paper appeared in WebKDD '08
[2008] Pending US Patent no. 20,100,082,694 co-authored by C. Corsi, D. Donato, C. Castillo, A. Gionis. Owner Yahoo!. Titled "Query-Log mining for detecting spam-attracting queries", see paper appeared in Web KDD '08.
[2007] Pending US Patent no. 20090063465 (5 mar '09) co-authored by R. Venturini. Owner Yahoo!. Titled "System and method for string processing and searching using a compressed permuterm index", see paper appeared in ACM SIGIR '07
[2002] US Patent no. 6,434,566 (13 Aug '02) co-authored by S. Muthukrishnan and owned by Lucent Technologies (USA).
Books, Chapters and Special Issues
[2018] P. Ferragina and F. Luccio, Computational Thinking: First algorithms, then code, Springer, 2018 (link).
[2017] P. Ferragina and F. Luccio, Il Pensiero Computazionale: dagli algoritmi al coding, Il Mulino, 2017 (link).
[2013] P. Ferragina and R. Venturini, Web Search, in "The Power of Algorithms", Eds G. Ausiello and R. Petreschi, Springer-Verlag, 2013.
[2013] P. Ferragina, I motori di ricerca, in "Documenti digitali", a cura di R. Guarasci e A. Folino, ITER, Aprile 2013.
[2010] P. Ferragina and F. Luccio, Ricercare su Internet, in "L'Informatica invisibile: come gli algoritmi regolano la nostra vita... e tutto il resto", G. Ausiello e R. Petreschi eds, Mondadori, 2010.
[2009] P. Ferragina and G. Landau editors, Theoretical Computer Science: Special Issue on best papers of CPM '08, 410(51): November 2009.
[2008] P. Ferragina and G. Landau editors, Procs of the 19th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5029, Springer-Verlag, 2008.
[2008] P. Ferragina, Area Editor of the topic ``String algorithms and data structures, data compression'' of the Encyclopedia on Algorithms, Springer Publisher, Ming-Yang Kao (Ed.), 2008.
[2007] F. Crestani and P. Ferragina and M. Sanderson editors, Information Retrieval: Special Issue on SPIRE '06, Springer-Verlag, (11)4, 2008.
[2007] P. Ferragina and G. Manzini and S. Muthukrishnan editors, The Burrows-Wheeler Transform and its Applications, Special Issue of Theoretical Computer Science, Elsevier Publisher, 3(387), 2007.
[2006] P. Ferragina and R. Grossi and F. Luccio editors, Selected Papers of FUN with Algorithms 2004, Special Issue of Theory of Computing Systems, Elsevier Publisher, June 2006.
[2006] P. Ferragina, Il messaggio nella bottiglia: come scrivere i siti web per farsi trovare dai motori di ricerca, Chapter in ``Business Writing'', edited by Alessandro Lucchini, Sperling & Kupfer, June 2006.
[2006] F. Crestani and P. Ferragina and M. Sanderson editors, Proceedings of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, Springer-Verlag, LNCS 4209, October 2006.
[2005] P. Ferragina, String search in external memory: Data structures and algorithms, Chapter 35 in Handbook of Computational Molecular Biology, edited by S. Aluru, Chapman&Hall, CRC Computer and Information Science Series, December 2005.
[2001] P. Ferragina and F. Luccio, Crittografia: principi, algoritmi e applicazioni, Bollati Boringhieri editore. (errata, photos)
Invited Talks and Tutorials
[2015] Invited speaker at the DIITET 2015 Conference of the CNR at Pisa, November 2015. I gave a talk on "The dark side of Big Data: efficient algorithms and data structures" (slides).
[2014] Invited speaker at the final meeting of the DFG Priority Program 1307 "Algorithm Engineering" with a talk on "BiCriteria compression", and at the subsequent PhD School on Algorithm Engineering, with a talk on "Data Compression: Past, Present and a foresight". This was at Karlsruhe (DE), September 2014.
[2014] Invited tutorial at the Internet Festival, Pisa (IT), October 2014. Talk on "An inside look at the future of search engines".
[2013] Invited tutorial at the Internet Festival, Pisa (IT), October 2013. Talk on "Search Engines from algorithmic principles to apps".
[2012] Invited speaker at the Industrial Track of ECIR 2012, Barcelona (ES), April 2012. Talk on "Topic-based annotation of short texts, with applications".
[2011] Invited Speaker at the 4th International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP), Lipari (IT), July 2011. He gave a talk on "Beyond the bag-of-words representation of texts".
[2010] Invited Speaker at the 18th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2010), Liverpool (UK), September 2010. He gave a talk on "Data Structures: time, I/Os, entropy, joules!".
[2010] Invited Speaker at the BISS (Bertinoro international Phd School), with a course on Advanced Algorithms for Massive DataSets, March 2010.
[2007] Invited Speaker at the PhD School on Algorithmic Data Analysis (Helsinki, FI) with a talk on "Compressed Data Structures for strings". [slides, pdf, biblio]
[2006] Invited Speaker at the Workshop on Human Language Technology (Trento, IT) with a talk on "Next Generation Search Engines". [slides]
[2005] Plenary speaker at the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE), Buenos Aires (Argentina). [slides]
[2004] Plenary speaker at the Combinatorial Pattern Matching Symposium (CPM), Instanbul (Turkey). [slides]
[2003] Invited Speaker on "Motori di ricerca: presente e futuro prossimo", Forum PA, Rome (Italy).
[2002] Invited Speaker at the EEF Summer School on "Massive Data Sets", Aarhus (Denmark). [notes]
[1999] Invited Speaker at the Workshop on Data Structures, held as a part of the Conference Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FST&TCS), Chennai (India).
[1998] Invited Speaker at the International School/Workshop on Computational Biology, CISM, Udine (Italy).
[1997] Invited Talk on "Sequence Sorting in Secondary Storage", presented at the Conference on Compression and Complexity of SEQUENCES, Positano (Italy).
[1997] Tutorial on "Data structures for Indexing Sequences in External Storage---Application to Biological Sequence Data Analysis", presented at the German Conference on BioInformatics (GCB), Munich (Germany).
Chairman and PC member
[2014-] Scientific Committee of the PhD School on "Computational Social Science, Lipari.
[2013] Co-chair of the ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Rome.
[2012-14] Steering Committee Member of the European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA).
[2012] Co-chair of the European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), track algorithm engineering, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
[2008] Co-chair of the Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM), Pisa.
[2006] Co-organizer of the meeting on Space-conscious algorithms, Bertinoro (Italy).
[2006-09] Steering Committee Member of the Symposium on String Processing and Information retrieval (SPIRE).
[2006] Co-chair of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE), Glasgow (UK).
[2004] Co-chair of the Conference on FUN with Algorithms, Isola d'Elba (Italy).
[2004] Co-organizer of the DIMACS Working Group on the "The Burrows-Wheeler Transform: Ten years later", DIMACS (USA).

I served as PC member of many International Conferences: CPM '98, FUN '01, WAE '01, SPIRE '01, EuroWeb '01, ICALP '02, CPM '02, LATIN '04, ESA '04, SPIRE '05, CPM '06, ECIR '07, ECIR '08, WWW '08, ACM WSDM '08, InfoScale '08, SPIRE '08, ACM WSDM '09, ECIR '09, ESA '09 -- Algorithmic Engineering Track, WWW '09 (Search Track), CPM '09, NAACL HLT, SPIRE '09, LATIN '10, WWW '10 (Search Track), Italian Workshop on IR '10 and '11, ACM WSDM 2012 doctoral consortium, CPM '14, WSDM '15, CPM '15, ACM WSDM '16.
Past and current grants
[2017.today] Bloomberg research grant on the project "Entity salience via sophisticated syntactic and semantic features".
[2016.today] Google research award on the project "An algorithmic analysis of Brotli, towards Personalized Data Compression".
[2013.today] Google research award on the project "A novel graph for social-network analysis and search built by entity-annotators, and its applications".
[2013.2016] Italian MIUR-PRIN project on "ARS Techno-media: Algorithmics for Social Technological Networks".
[2013.2014] Regional Project Bando Unico di Ricerca e Sviluppo 2012 on "Sentaclaus: Text and Trend Analysis of Big Data".
[2009.2013] Italian MIUR-FIRB project on a "Web service and search engine to support a semantic and pluri-lingual access to Italian Culture on the Web".
[2010.2012] Google Faculty Award on the project TAGME.
[2010.2012] Italian MIUR-PRIN project on "The Mad Web: Models, Algorithms and Data structures for the Web and other behavioural networks".
[2006.2011] Yahoo! Research grant on "Data compression and indexing in hierarchical memories".
[2006.2009] MIUR Project FIRB Internazionalizzazione Italia-Israele on "Pattern matching and discovery algorithms on discrete structures, with applications to bioinformatics".
[2007.2009]MIUR Project "Algorithms for Massive Information Structures and Data Streams" (MAINSTREAM).
[2005.2007] MIUR Project "Next generation algorithms for the Internet and the Web -- Methodologies, Design and Experimentation" (ALGO-NEXT).
[2002.2005] MIUR Project "Technologies and services for enhanced contents delivery" (ECD).
[2001.2004] MIUR Project "High-performance distributed platform".
[2002.2004] MIUR Project "Algorithms for the Internet and the Web" (ALINWEB).
[2003] Subcontract on the EU Project "QUESTION-HOW: Algorithms and data structures to implement a subset of the XQuery Language".
PhD Thesis Advisor
  • Marco Ponza, Algorithms and Applications for Web-Scale Knowledge Graphs, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Nov 2015.
  • Francesco Piccinno, Algorithms and data structures for big labeled graphs, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Nov 2013 - Nov 2016 (co-advisor Rossano Venturini).
    For his current position please look at his LinkedIn page.
  • Marco Cornolti, Entity Linking on Text and Queries, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Nov 2012 - Nov 2016 (co-advisor Massi Ciaramita, Google).
    For his current position please look at his LinkedIn page.
  • Andrea Farruggia, On the use of optimization techniques for designing compressed indexes and data compressors, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Nov 2012 - Nov 2016 (co-advisor Rossano Venturini).
    For his current position please look at his LinkedIn page.
  • Giovanni Micale, "A Gibbs sampling strategy for mining of protein-protein interaction networks and protein structures", Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Nov 2011-Giu 2015 (co-advisor Prof. A. Ferro, UniCT).
    For his current position please look at his LinkedIn page.
  • Rossano Venturini, "On searching and extracting strings from compressed textual data", Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, 2010. Currently he is researcher at the Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa.
    For his current position please look at his LinkedIn page.
  • Igor Nitto, "Parsing algorithms for data compression", Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, 2010.
    For his current position please look at his LinkedIn page.
  • Antonio Gullì, "On two WebIR boosting tools: Ranking and Clustering", Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, December 2005.
    For his current position please look at his LinkedIn page.
  • Andreas Crauser, LEDA-SM: External memory algorithms and data structures in theory and practice, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken (Germany), January 2000.
    For his current position please look at his LinkedIn page.
Cariche Istituzionali (in italian)
[2017-xx] Direttore del Dottorato di Ricerca in Informatica dell'Università di Pisa, in collaborazione con le Università di Firenze e Siena (dottorato regionale Pegaso).
[2017- ] Membro del Comitato Scientifico della Fondazione per l'innovazione e lo sviluppo imprenditoriale, Camera di Commercio di Pisa.
[2016- ] Delegato alla Ricerca e Innovazione per il Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa.
[2002-17] Membro del Consiglio del Dottorato di Ricerca in Informatica, Università di Pisa.
[2011-16]Prorettore per la Ricerca Applicata e l'Innovazione dell'Università di Pisa.
[2010-15]Presidente dell'IT Center dell'Università di Pisa. Primo HPC Comptetence Center finanziato da ACER in Europa.
[2010]Membro della Commissione Tecnica Brevetti dell'Università di Pisa.
[2008-10]Presidente della Commissione Centro di Calcolo del Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa.
[2006-10]Vice-direttore del Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa.
[2006-08]Membro del Consiglio di Amministrazione del Consorzio Pisa Ricerche, in rappresentanza dell'Università di Pisa.
[2001-08] Membro della Commissione Personale della Facoltà di Scienze MFN, Università di Pisa.
[2002-06] Garante della Laurea specialistica in Informatica per l'economia e l'azienda, Università di Pisa.
[2001-06] Presidente della Commissione Didattica della Laurea di Primo Livello in Informatica Umanistica, Università di Pisa.
[2001-06] Garante della Laurea di Primo Livello in Informatica Umanistica, Università di Pisa.
[1999-01] Membro della Commissione Relazioni Internazionali "Socrates-Erasmus" per il Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa.
Docenza di Corsi per Laurea e Dottorato (in italian)
[2009- ] Docente del Corso di Algorithm Engineering per la Laurea Specialistica in CS & Networking, Università di Pisa e Scuola S. Anna.
[2004- ] Docente del Corso di Information Retrieval per la Laurea Specialistica in Informatica, Università di Pisa.
[2014-17] Docente del Corso di Laboratorio di Algoritmi per Big Data per tutte le Lauree Specialistiche in Informatica, Università di Pisa.
[2009-11] Docente del Corso di Algoritmi e Complessità presso la Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
[2005-11] Coordinatore e Docente del Corso su Web Algorithmics per il Dottorato di Ricerca in Scienze e Tecnologie Informatiche, IMT Lucca.
[2008-10] Docente del Corso di Algoritmica per la Laurea Triennale in Informatica, Università di Pisa.
[2006-08] Docente del Corso di Algoritmica per la Laurea di Primo Livello in InformaticaUmanistica, Università di Pisa.
[2001-07] Docente del Corso di Recupero Documenti per la Laurea di Primo Livello in Informatica Umanistica, Università di Pisa.
[1998-06] Docente del Corso di Algoritmica per la Laurea di Primo Livello in Informatica, Università di Pisa.

Ha tenuto corsi su: Compressione testi, Information Retrieval e Motori di Ricerca, Algoritmi per Memoria Esterna, Crittografia, Bioinformatica, anche in Scuole Internazionali di PhD.