General Chair

National Council of Research of Italy

Francesca Pratesi received the MS degree and the Ph.D. in computer science from Pisa University, Italy, respectively in 2013 and in 2017. She is a Researcher at Information Science and Technology Institute of the National Research Council in Pisa since December 2021 and a member of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab, a joint research group with the Computer Science Department of University of Pisa. Her research interests include data mining, data privacy and privacy risk assessment, mainly in spatio-temporal data. Recently, she broadens her interest, moving towards the Ethics-by-Design paradigm and Trustworthy AI.

Programme Chair

National Council of Research of Italy

Chiara Boldrini is a senior researcher and Principal Investigator (PI) of the AI/DataScience Lab within the Ubiquitous Internet group at IIT-CNR. Her research focuses on four main areas: (1) fully decentralized, social-aware learning, exploring collaborative learning among personal devices without central servers, beyond conventional federated learning, with attention to network topology, social relationships, robustness, security, and resilience; (2) computational social science and network science, investigating opinion dynamics, social influence, and signed networks representing trust and antagonism, including the cognitive perspective of Dunbar’s social circles; (3) causal learning in pervasive and sociotechnical systems, aiming to uncover the mechanisms underlying human behaviour, social interactions, and system-level dynamics; and (4) large language models (LLMs) for computational social science, including text-based personality prediction and social trait modelling, studying LLMs both as analytical tools and as actors in online ecosystems. Chiara also investigates how social network structures evolve in immersive virtual environments such as the Metaverse, and whether avatars and AI-mediated interactions can expand human social capacity.

Programme Chair

Central European University

Petra Kralj Novak, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Network and Data Science at Central European University. Her research belongs to the broad area of knowledge discovery from databases. She researches social and mainstream media, focusing on subjective and ambiguous tasks such as sentiment analysis and hate speech detection, combined with network analysis. Avant-garde research analyzing the role of emojis in conveying sentiment was published in P. Kralj Novak, et al. Sentiment of emojis and is the main reference for current research on emoji analysis. She is involved in the European University of Social Sciences CIVICA as a theme leader of the theme Data-Driven Technologies for Social Sciences. She is also a researcher at the Department of Knowledge Technologies at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, where she is involved in EU-funded projects OppAttune: Countering Oppositional Political Extremism and TRUSTroke: Trustworthy AI for Improvement of Stroke Outcomes. She was the PI and coordinator of the European Union REC project IMSyPP: Innovative Monitoring Systems and Prevention Policies of Online Hate Speech (2020-2022) as well as participated in several other European and national (Slovenian) research projects.

Advisory Board

Université de Rennes

Elisa Fromont is a full professor at Université de Rennes France, since 2017 and a Junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) (2019-2024). She works at the IRISA research institute where she leads the Inria MALT (Machine Learning with Temporal Constraints) team. From 2008 until 2017, she was associate professor at Université Jean Monnet in Saint-Etienne, France. She worked at the Hubert Curien research institute in the Data Intelligence team. Elisa received her Research Habilitation (HDR) in 2015 from the University of Saint-Etienne. From 2006 until 2008 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Machine Learning group of the KU Leuven, Belgium. She received her PhD in 2005 from Université de Rennes 1.

Advisory Board

Leiden University

Matthijs likes data, patterns, algorithms, and information theory. He strives for data mining and machine learning methods and results that are principled, interpretable, and incorporate existing knowledge. He is director of education of the Computer Science, Media Technology and ICT in Business and the Public Sector master's programmes. Besides this, he is member of the LIACS management team and of the interdisciplinary research programme Society, Artificial Intelligence and Life Sciences (SAILS).

PhD Forum Chair

University of Helsinki

Katsiaryna Haitsiukevich is a Postdoctoral researcher at University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science supervised by Prof. Kai Puolamäki. She is passionate about deep learning methods for science and engineering. Her research focuses on developing sample-efficient methods for modeling of physical systems. She did her PhD at Aalto University School of Science supervised by Prof. Pekka Marttinen and advised by Dr. Alexander Ilin. Prior to starting her PhD studies, she worked as a Data Scientist and a Quantitative Analyst in the financial industry. She earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Applied Mathematics.

Local Chair

University of Pisa

Bio to be added.

Local Chair

National Council of Research of Italy

Bio to be added.

Proceedings Chair

Scuola Normale Superiore

Bio to be added.

Financial Chair

University of Pisa

Laura Pollacci is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory (KDDLab), a joint research group of the Information Science and Technology Institute of the National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa and the University of Pisa. Born in Viareggio (LU) in Italy on 28th April 1988, she studied arts and graphics at the Liceo Artistico Passaglia of Lucca in the Experimental and Visual Ambiental course. In 2015 and 2014, she graduated cum laude in Digital Humanities (MS and BS) at the University of Pisa. Both theses have been developed in the Computational Linguistics area at CoLingLab (Computational Linguistic Laboratory). She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a thesis on the conjunct usage of Big Data and Sentiment Analysis for the study of Human Migration in the same institution. Her research interests lie in the area of Social Network Analysis and Visual Analytics for Social Mining, Human Migration, and Sentiment Analysis.

Webmaster and Publicity Team

National Council of Research of Italy

Daniele Fadda is an information designer, graduated in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano in 2010. He's got a master of Science (M.Sc.) from University of Pisa in Big Data Analytics and Social Mining in 2015. His current research interests are Mobility Data Analysis, Data Visualization for complex systems and Visual Analytics methods for Big Data.