Research Statement
My research focuses on scalable data mining. In particular, my interest is in mining the Web by using data-intensive scalable computing systems. As such, my research develops along two main axes: (i) tapping into the Web as a source of data and (ii) dealing with its immense scale. These two aspects combined create what people call “big data”. I usually apply my research to help people dealing with information overload.
In the first area, I am interested by the insights that come from exploring news and social networks. I enjoy finding creative ways to extract new information from the data. In the second area, I am thrilled by the challenges created by the sheer size of the data. I like developing new scalable data mining algorithms that take advantage of parallel and streaming solutions.
Inspired by Ernest Hemingway, my research in 6 words.
Big data: because more is different.
Publications
- G. AbuOda, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Aboulnaga
“Link Prediction via Higher-Order Motif Features”
ECMLPKDD ’19: European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, pp. _−_, Würzburg, 2019. - T. Vasiloudis, G. De Francisci Morales, H. Boström
“Quantifying Uncertainty in Online Regression Forests”
JMLR: Journal of Machine Learning Research, _(_):_−_, 2019. - J. An, G. De Francisci Morales, H. Kwak, Y. Mejova
“Modeling Gun Culture in United States – Demographics, Networks, Ideologies”
IC2S2 ’19: International Conference on Computational Social Science, Amsterdam, 2019. [extended abstract] - A. Cossard, G. De Francisci Morales, Y. Mejova, D. Paolotti
“Mapping the Anti-Vaccination Debate in Italy”
IC2S2 ’19: International Conference on Computational Social Science, Amsterdam, 2019. [extended abstract] - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship”
IC2S2 ’19: International Conference on Computational Social Science, Amsterdam, 2019. [extended abstract] - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“Reducing Polarization by Connecting Opposing Views”
IC2S2 ’19: International Conference on Computational Social Science, Amsterdam, 2019. [extended abstract] - I. Tsalouchidou, F. Bonchi, G. De Francisci Morales, R. Baeza-Yates
“Scalable Dynamic Graph Summarization”
TKDE: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering, _(_):_−_, 2018. - C. Aslay, M. A. U. Nasir, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis
“Mining Frequent Patterns in Evolving Graphs”
CIKM ’18: 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 923−932, Torino, 2018. - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship”
WWW ’18: The Web Conference, pp. 913−922, Lyon, 2018. - N. Kourtellis, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Bifet
“Large-Scale Learning from Data Streams with Apache SAMOA”
Learning from Data Streams in Evolving Environments, pp. 177−207, Springer, 2018. - R. Stanojevic, S. Abbar, S. Thirumuruganathan, G. De Francisci Morales, S. Chawla, F. Filali, A. Aleimat
“Road Network Fusion for Incremental Map Updates”
LBS ’18: 14th International Conference on Location Based Services, pp. 91−109, Zurich, 2018. - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“Quantifying Controversy on Social Media”
TSC: ACM Transactions on Social Computing, 1(1):3, pp. 1−27, 2018. - T. Vasiloudis, F. Beligianni, G. De Francisci Morales
“BoostVHT: Boosting Distributed Streaming Decision Trees”
CIKM ’17: 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 899−908, Singapore, 2017. - M. A. U. Nasir, A. Gionis, G. De Francisci Morales, S. Girdzijauskas
“Fully Dynamic Algorithm for Top-k Densest Subgraphs”
CIKM ’17: 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 1817−1826, Singapore, 2017. - M. Serafini, G. De Francisci Morales, G. Siganos
“QFrag: Distributed Graph Search via Subgraph Isomorphism”
SoCC ’17: 2017 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, pp. 214−228, Santa Clara, 2017. - P. Lahoti, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis
“Finding Topical Experts in Twitter via Query-Dependent Personalized PageRank”
ASONAM ’17: 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, pp. 155−162, Sydney, 2017. - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“The Effect of Collective Attention on Controversial Debates on Social Media”
WebSci ’17: 9th International ACM Web Science Conference, pp. 43−52, Troy, 2017. (best student paper award) - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“Factors in Recommending Contrarian Content on Social Media”
WebSci ’17: 9th International ACM Web Science Conference, pp. 263−266, Troy, 2017. - E. Hussein, A. Ghanem, V. V. dos Santos Dias, C. H. C. Teixeira, G. AbuOda,
M. Serafini, G. Siganos, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Aboulnaga, M. Zaki
“Graph Data Mining with Arabesque”
SIGMOD ’17: ACM International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 1647−1650, Chicago, 2017. [demo] - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“The Ebb and Flow of Controversial Debates on Social Media”
ICWSM ’17: 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, pp. 524−527, Montreal, 2017. - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: Exposing Twitter Users to Contrarian News”
WWW ’17: 26th International World Wide Web Conference, pp. 201−206, Perth, 2017. [demo] - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“Reducing Controversy by Connecting Opposing Views”
WSDM ’17: 10th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 81−90, Cambridge, 2016. (best student paper award) - N. Kourtellis, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Bifet, A. Murdopo
“VHT: Vertical Hoeffding Tree”
BigData ’16: 4th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, pp 915−922, Washington, 2016. - I. Tsalouchidou, G. De Francisci Morales, F. Bonchi, R. Baeza-Yates
“Scalable Dynamic Graph Summarization”
BigData ’16: 4th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, pp 1032−1039, Washington, 2016. - P. Micholia, M. Karaliopoulos, I. Koutsopoulos, L. M. Aiello, G. De Francisci Morales, D. Quercia
“Incentivizing Social Media Users for Mobile Crowdsourcing”
IJHCS: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2016. - D. M. Shankaralingappa, G. De Francisci Morales. A. Gionis
“Extracting Skill Endorsements from Personal Communication Data”
CIKM ’16: 25th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 1961−1964, Indianapolis, 2016. - G. De Francisci Morales, A. Bifet, L. Khan, J. Gama, W. Fan
“IoT Big Data Stream Mining”
KDD ’16: 22nd ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 2119−2120, San Francisco, 2016. [tutorial] - G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis
“Streaming Similarity Self-Join”
PVLDB: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 9(10):792−803, 2016. - F. Bonchi, G. De Francisci Morales, M. Riondato
“Centrentrality Measures on Big Graphs: Exact, Approximated, and Distributed Algorithms”
WWW ’16: 25th International World Wide Web Conference, pp. 1017−1020, Montreal, 2016. [tutorial] - K. Garimella, M. Mathioudakis, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis
“Exploring Controversy in Twitter”
CSCW ’16: 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, pp. 33−36, San Francisco, 2016. [demo] - N. Kourtellis, G. De Francisci Morales, F. Bonchi
“Scalable Online Betweenness Centrality in Evolving Graphs”
ICDE ’16: 32nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, pp. 1580−1581, Helsinki, 2016. [extended abstract] - M. A. U. Nasir, G. De Francisci Morales, N. Kourtellis, M. Serafini
“When Two Choices are not Enough: Balancing at Scale in Distributed Stream Processing”
ICDE ’16: 32nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, pp. 589−600, Helsinki, 2016. - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Mathioudakis
“Quantifying Controversy in Social Media”
WSDM ’16: 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 33−42, San Francisco, 2016. - N. Kourtellis, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Bifet
“Analyzing Big Data Streams with Apache SAMOA”
MUSE ’15: 6th Workshop on Mining Ubiquitous and Social Environments, @ECMLPKDD, Porto, 2015. - M. A. U. Nasir, G. De Francisci Morales, D. Garcia-Soriano, N. Kourtellis, M. Serafini
“Partial Key Grouping: Load-Balanced Partitioning of Distributed Streams”
arXiv:1510.07623, 2015. - K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Sozio
“Scalable Facility Location for Massive Graphs on Pregel-like Systems”
CIKM ’15: 24th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 273−282, Melbourne, 2015. - A. Bifet, G. De Francisci Morales, J. Read, G. Holmes, B. Pfahringer
“Efficient Online Evaluation of Big Data Stream Classifiers”
KDD ’15: 21st ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 59−68, Sydney, 2015. - C. Castillo, G. De Francisci Morales, M. Mendoza, N. Khan
“Automatic analysis of television news: Media, people, framing, and bias”
IC2S2 ’15: International Conference on Computational Social Science, Helsinki, 2015. [extended abstract] - P. Micholia, M. Karaliopoulos, I. Koutsopoulos, L. M. Aiello, G. De Francisci Morales, D. Quercia
“Getting Jobs Done for the Sharing Economy”
IC2S2 ’15: International Conference on Computational Social Science, Helsinki, 2015. [extended abstract] - N. Kourtellis, G. De Francisci Morales, F. Bonchi
“Scalable Online Betweenness Centrality in Evolving Graphs”
TKDE: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering, 27(9):2494−2506, 2015. - M. A. U. Nasir, G. De Francisci Morales, D. Garcia-Soriano, N. Kourtellis, M. Serafini
“The Power of Both Choices: Practical Load Balancing for Distributed Stream Processing Engines”
ICDE ’15: 31st IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, pp. 137−148, Seoul, 2015. - G. De Francisci Morales, A. Bifet
“SAMOA: Scalable Advanced Massive Online Analysis”
JMLR: Journal of Machine Learning Research, 16(Jan):149−153, 2015. - R. Blanco, G. De Francisci Morales, F. Silvestri
“IntoNews: Online News Retrieval using Closed Captions”
IP&M: Information Processing & Management, 51(1):148−162, 2015. - A. Bifet, G. De Francisci Morales
“Big Data Stream Learning with SAMOA”
ICDM ’14: 14th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, pp. 1199−1202, Shenzhen, 2014. [demo] - A. T. Vu, G. De Francisci Morales, J. Gama, A. Bifet
“Distributed Adaptive Model Rules for Mining Big Data Streams”
BigData ’14: 2nd IEEE International Conference on Big Data, pp. 345−353, Washington, 2014. - B. Thomée, G. De Francisci Morales
“Automatic Discovery of Global and Local Equivalence Relationships in Labeled Geo-Spatial Data”
HT ’14: 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, pp. 158−168, Santiago, 2014. - D. Marron, A. Bifet, G. De Francisci Morales
“Random Forests of Very Fast Decision Trees on GPU for Mining Evolving Big Data Streams”
ECAI ’14: 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 615−620, Prague, 2014. - S. Gonzalez-Bailon, G. De Francisci Morales, M. Mendoza, N. Khan, C. Castillo
“Cable News Coverage and Online News Stories: A Large-Scale Comparison of Media Bias”
SSRN preprint 2389525, 2014. - C. Castillo, G. De Francisci Morales, M. Mendoza, N. Khan
“Says who? Automatic Text-Based Content Analysis of Television News”
MNLP ’13: 1st Workshop on Mining unstructured big data using Natural Language Processing, @CIKM, pp. 53−60, Burlingame, 2013. - M. Das, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, I. Weber
“Learning to Question: Leveraging User Preferences for Shopping Advice”
KDD ’13: 19th ACM Conference on Knowledge, Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 203−211, Chicago, 2013. - F. Bonchi, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, A. Ukkonen
“Activity Preserving Graph Simplification”
DMKD: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 27(3):321−343, 2013. - C. Castillo, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Shekhawat
“Online Matching of Web Content to Closed Captions in IntoNow”
SIGIR ’13: 36th ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 1115−1116, Dublin, 2013. [demo] - G. De Francisci Morales
“SAMOA: A Platform for Mining Big Data Streams”
RAMSS ’13: 2nd International Workshop on Real-Time Analysis and Mining of Social Streams, @WWW, pp. 777−778, Rio De Janeiro, 2013. [extended abstract] - R. Blanco, G. De Francisci Morales, F. Silvestri
“Towards Leveraging Closed Captions for News Retrieval”
WWW ’13: 22nd International World Wide Web Conference, pp. 135−136, Rio de Janeiro, 2013. [poster] - G. De Francisci Morales, A. Shekhawat
“The Future of Second Screen Experience”
Workshop on Exploring and Enhancing the User Experience for Television, @CHI, Paris, 2013. - I. Bordino, G. De Francisci Morales, I. Weber, F. Bonchi
“From Machu_Picchu to “rafting the urubamba river”: Anticipating Information Needs via the Entity-Query Graph”
WSDM ’13: 6th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 275−284, Rome, 2013. - G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, C. Lucchese
“From Chatter to Headlines: Harnessing the Real-Time Web for Personalized News Recommendation”
WSDM ’12: 5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 153−162, Seattle, 2012. - G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis, M. Sozio
“Social Content Matching in MapReduce”
PVLDB: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 4(7):460−469, 2011. - R. Baraglia, G. De Francisci Morales, C. Lucchese
“Document Similarity Self-Join with MapReduce”
ICDM ’10: 10th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, pp. 731−736, Sydney, 2010. - G. De Francisci Morales, C. Lucchese, R. Baraglia
“Scaling Out All Pairs Similarity Search with MapReduce”
LSDS-IR ’10: 8th Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval, @SIGIR, pp. 25−30, Geneva, 2010. - G. De Francisci Morales, C. Lucchese, R. Baraglia
“Large-scale Data Analysis on the Cloud”
XXIV Convegno Annuale del CMG-Italia, Rome, 2010. (best paper award) - M. Iacono-Manno, M. Fargetta, R. Barbera, A. Falzone, G. Andronico, S. Monforte, A. Muoio, R. Bruno, P. Di Primo, S. Orlando, E. Leggio, A. Lombardo, G. Passaro, G. De Francisci Morales, S. Blandino
“The Sicilian Grid Infrastructure for High Performance Computing”
IJDST: International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies, 1(1):40−54, 2010. - V. Catania. G. De Francisci Morales, A. Di Nuovo, M. Palesi, D. Patti
“An Effective Methodology to Multi-objective Design of Application Domain-specific Embedded Architectures”
DSD ’09: 12th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design, pp. 643−650, Patras, 2009. - V. Catania. G. De Francisci Morales, A. Di Nuovo, M. Palesi, D. Patti
“Multi-objective Design Space Exploration of Embedded Systems in a Grid Environment”
Workshop finale dei Progetti Grid PON Ricerca 2000−2006, pp. 80−81, Catania, 2009. - V. Catania. G. De Francisci Morales, A. Di Nuovo, M. Palesi, D. Patti
“High Performance Computing for Embedded System Design: A Case Study”
DSD ’08: 11th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design, pp. 656−659, Parma, 2008.
Presentations
- “Controversy on Social Media: Collective Attention, Echo Chambers, and Price of Bipartisanship”
EPFL, Lausanne, 19 Sep 2018. [slides] - “Quantifying and Reducing Controversy in Social Media”
IIIT, Hyderabad, 27 Jun 2018. [slides] - “Quantifying and Reducing Controversy in Social Media”
QCRI, Doha, 3 May 2017. [slides] - “Big Data Streams: The Next Frontier”
KTH, Stockholm, 24 Jun 2015. [slides] - “To Stream or Not To Stream? The Landscape of Online Analytics”
EVAM Solutions Day, Istanbul, 28 May 2015. [slides] - “Mining Big Data Streams: Better Algorithms or Faster Systems?”
KAIST, Seoul, 20 April 2015. [slides] - “SAMOA: A Platform for Mining Big Data Streams”
Strata ’14, Barcelona, 20 Nov 2014. [slides] - “Mining Big Data Streams”
Workshop on “Online Social Networks: Emerging Trends”, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, 8 Oct 2014. - “SAMOA: A Platform for Mining Big Data Streams”
University Federico Santa Maria / University of Chile / University of Santiago, Santiago de Chile, Aug 2014. [slides] - “SAMOA: Scalable Advanced Massive Online Analysis”
NoSQL Matters ’13, Barcelona, 30 Nov 2013. [video|slides] - “SAMOA: A Platform for Mining Big Data Streams”
RAMSS ’13 Keynote, Rio De Janeiro, 14 May 2013. [slides] - “Big Data and the Web”
IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, 21 March 2012. [slides] - “Harnessing the Real-Time Web for Personalized News Recommendation”
Yahoo! Labs, Sunnyvale, 16 February 2012. [slides] - “Big Data and the Web: Algorithms for Data Intensive Scalable Computing”
WSDM’12 Doctoral Consortium, Seattle, 8 February 2012. - “Social Content Matching in MapReduce”
Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, 10 March 2011. [slides] - “Cloud Computing for Large Scale Data Analysis”
Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, 2 December 2010. [slides] - “Scaling Out All Pairs Similarity Search with MapReduce”
Summer School on Social Networks, Lipari, 6 July 2010. [slides] - “How to Survive the Data Deluge: Petabyte Scale Cloud Computing”
ISTI-CNR, Pisa, 18 January 2010. [slides]
Patents
- “Two methods for matching social content in MapReduce architecture”
- “An automatic method to build flowcharts for e-shopping recommendations”
- “An information retrieval method for online news suggestion using closed captions”
- “A system for recommending relevant Web content to second-screen application users”
Community Service
- Chair: SNOW ’13-14-16-17 (Social News on the Web, workshop @WWW). [web]
- Tutorial:
“Big Data Streams: The Next Frontier” @EAIA ’18 Advanced School on Data Science for Big Data [web]
“Polarization on Social Media” @ICWSM ’17, @WWW ’18, @KDD ’18. [web]
“IoT Big Data Stream Mining” @KDD ’16, @CIKM ’16, @AAAI ’17, @SDM ’17. [web]
“Centrality Measures on Big Graphs: Exact, Approximated, and Distributed Algorithms” @WWW ’16. [web]
“Big Data Stream Mining” @IEEE BigData ’14. [web|slides] - Track Chair:
- EuroPar ’18
- PC member:
- WSDM ’13-14-16-17-18-19
- WWW ’14-16-17-18-19
- ICWSM ’14-17-18-19-20
- ICDM ’16-17-18-19
- KDD ’15-16-17-18
- CIKM ’14-15-17
- IJCAI ’15-17
- ECMLPKDD ’15-16
- BigMine ’14-15-16-17-18-19
- LSRS ’15-16-17
- DSSD ’17
- MAISoN ’17
- IIR ’15-16
- SMNews ’16
- RTStreams ’15
- External reviewer: KDD ’12, ICDE ’13, ICDM ’14, KDD ’14, ICALP ’14.
- Reviewer: TWEB, TKDE, TKDD, WWWJ, VLDBJ, KAIS, PARCO, MACH, JPDC, Network Science.
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