Overview

Gender

male

Emilio Ferrara is Associate Professor at the USC Department of Computer Science, and research leader and principal investigator in the Machine Intelligence and Data Science (MINDS) group at the University of Southern California‘s Information Sciences Institute.

Ferrara's research interests include designing machine-learning systems to model and predict individual behavior in techno-social systems, characterize information diffusion and information campaigns, and predict crime and abuse in such environments.

He has held various visiting positions in institutions in Italy, Austria, and UK (2009-2012). Before joining USC in 2015, he was a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University (2012-2015).

Ferrara holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Messina (Italy), and has published over 70 articles on machine learning, network science, and social media, appeared in venues including PNAS, Communications of the ACM, Physical Review Letters, and several ACM and IEEE transactions and conferences.

His research on social network abuse and crime prediction has been featured on the major news outlets (TIME, BBC, The New York Times, etc.) and tech magazines (MIT Technology Review, Vice, Mashable, New Scientist, etc). He was named 2015 IBM Watson Big Data Influencer, and ranked 28th as 2016 Big Data Experts by Maptive. He received the 2016 DARPA Young Faculty Award, and he is the recipient of the 2016 Complex Systems Society Junior Scientific Award for outstanding contributions to computational social sciences.

He is Guest Editor of two special issues on computational social sciences, on EPJ Data Science and Future Internet. He serves as reviewer for top journals and member of the PC for conferences like ACM WWW, ICWSM, and SocInfo. Ferrara is General Co-chair of Social Informatics 2016, and of various workshops recurring at ECCS, WWW, SocInfo, and WebScience; he was Local & Sponsor Chair of ACM Web Science 2014 and Publicity Co-chair of SocInfo 2014.