Organizers

Lai Mirko: He is currently a researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy, where he holds a fixed-term research position (tenure track). His research focused on language and structure in polarized communities, exploring the interplay between linguistic expressions and social division providing insights into the dynamics of online discourse, especially in the context of polarized debates on social media. He also conduct research in the field of chrono-urbanism, focusing on the relationship between urban segregation, accessibility to services, and urban connectivity. He employs network-based approaches to analyze how spatial structures, service distribution, and transport networks interact across multiple scales, with particular attention to the socio-demographic inequalities embedded in contemporary urban models.

Mazzoli Mattia: Mattia Mazzoli is Senior Research Scientist at ISI Foundation in Turin. His research is a multidisciplinary blend employing a complex systems approach to computational epidemiology, human mobility and urban studies. Mattia’s research embraces both passive, e.g. mobile phone data, and active data collections, e.g. participatory surveillance systems, to study health-relevant behavior in the population, from mobility flows to the adoption of preventive measures against infectious diseases. Mattia’s work focuses on the integration of human behavior in epidemic modeling for respiratory and vector-borne diseases at multiple spatial scales. Mattia is passionate about informing novel public health policy to improve urban health and epidemic preparedness in the face of emerging health threats.

Sapienza Anna: Anna Sapienza is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DiSIT) at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy. She holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Polytechnic University of Turin. Her research focuses on modelling human behaviour through high-dimensional digital traces, including smartphone data, mobility records, and online interactions. She collaborates with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark and with the Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) at the University of Copenhagen, where she studied how exposure to urban and rural contexts shapes smartphone usage behaviour. More broadly, her current research has focused on understanding the resilience of mobility networks and the interplay between urban segregation and accessibility to services through network analysis. Her research lies at the intersection of computational social science, data science, and complex systems, focusing on developing data-driven approaches to study human behaviour and socio-technical systems across online and offline contexts.

Schifanella Rossano: He is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Turin and a researcher at ISI Foundation, where he is a member of the Data Science for Social Impact and Sustainability group. His research embraces the creative energy of a range of disciplines across machine learning, urban science, computational social science, complex systems, and data visualization. He leverages data-driven approaches to model the behaviour of (groups of) individuals and their interactions in space and time, aiming at understanding the interplay between online and offline social behaviour. He is passionate about understanding the dynamics of complex phenomena in modern cities and building interactive web interfaces to explore urban spaces and access human knowledge through geography.