I am a researcher at CENTAI, a research institute in Turin. Before, I was a postdoc at ISI Foundation, and before that I lived in Berlin and Zürich — working on machine learning applications — and in Milan – getting my PhD in Computer Science.

My Research

I study collective behavior in socio-technical systems.

I focus on how social media affects opinion formation. I investigated how nationalists, far-right, and conspiratorial groups can assemble online, use platforms to influence public opinion, and how they react to deplatforming. I argue for a more holistic approach in computational social science, taking into consideration demographics and material conditions from the offline world. I showed how some online echo chambers are not sorting people by beliefs but instead by demographic boundaries, such as class, gender or age, entrenching offline communication silos more than creating new ones. This can happen for instance because of people-recommender algorithms or through targeted ads. I analyze interactions across ideological camps, how they are the norm in some online environments, making political contexts collapse, and showed their inefficacy in driving opinion change. Instead, I documented how opinion change online can sometimes derive from both knowledge and precursors of empathy, how in turn it affects our information diets, and how it can lead to political activism.

I also study the collective behavior of sperm whales and how they use sounds, as part of the CETI Project.

In researching such topics, I apply and create novel quantitative data science methods and machine learning algorithms. I use probabilistic models to encode theories, make them predictive and testable, and to guide the creation of data-driven synthetic populations. For instance, I investigate how to integrate agent-based models with empirical data, for instance in economics or opinion dynamics. Or how to develop information propagation models that can learn the complexity of political ideologies.

You can write me an email to know more.

For Students

If you are a Master's or PhD student interested in working together on these topics, please get in touch! We have openings and projects, both in Turin and remote.

Latest Works

[List all papers] [Browse by topic] [Public Talks]