RESEARCH AREA AND FOCUS
I work in the broad area of "data exploration". Exploration is one of the primordial ways to accrue knowledge about the world and its nature. As we accumulate, mostly automatically, data at unprecedented volumes and speed, our datasets have become complex and hard to understand.
In this context I study new methods to help both expert and novice users find the information they need with as little effort as possible.
Exploratory methods should be simple enough to avoid complicate declarative languages (such as SQL) and mechanisms, and at the same time retain the flexibility and expressiveness of such languages.
My approach to this combines a method called "Search by Example" or "Exemplar Queries", in which the user, or the analyst circumvent query languages by using examples of what they are interested in as input and delegate to the system the hard work to figure out what else could be interesting and how to distill relevant insights.
Moreover, to make systems more "intelligent", I work with Knowledge Graphs, that is a representation of information that uses a graph-structured data model representing concepts and the links among them.
PROJECTS
Currently, I am working on data exploration systems which allow users to extract insights within complex and unfamiliar open data repositories.
We are studying how to employ the Exemplar Query paradigm in for Business Intelligence (BI) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). Example-based methods have proven to be extremely valuable since they avoid complex query languages by using examples to represent the required information. Yet, they have never been studied in the OLAP/BI context. Therefore, w are studying a new Example-Driven Exploration system to bridge the gap between example-based queries and BI methods.
Other areas of interest are performance optimization for Graph Data Management Systems (Graph DBMS) and in general exploration and recommendations in different domains using Knowledge Graphs.
PRIVATE/FUN FACTS
One of my favorite ways of relaxing after a long day is cooking, mostly but not only, Italian food for friends and family.
Whenever I have the opportunity, I make sure to make people try my signature dish "strawberry risotto", which -- surprisingly to many -- is not a dessert but a main course!