Research

Complex networks
Human mobility
Epidemics

Every day we produce large amounts of data about ourselves simply by living in our technological world. Such masses of digital data are collected by institutions and companies, and this striking proliferation of data has generated an industrial revolution, a phenomenon for which scientists have coined a new term: Big Data.

Big data offer the opportunity to compile human digital traces into comprehensive pictures of both individual and group behavior at an unprecedented level of details. We are able to transform the exploding world of data in a giant laboratory of human behavior, with the potential to revolutionize the understanding of our lives, organizations, and societies.

Starting from the current research on human activity patterns, I am investigating mobility related issues to improve the understanding of human mobility, investigating the interplay between human mobilty, social links, and the predictive power of data mining. Finally, I aim to use such results to study diffusion in biological, mobile and information contexts (epidemic models, mobile virus spreading, diffusion of ideas and trends), and to develop novel opportunistic routing protocols and adequate mobility models for opportunistic networks.