Paolo Ferragina

BIO. Paolo Ferragina is Professor of Algorithms at the University of Pisa, where he serves also
as Vice-Rector on ICT. From 2010 to 2016, he served his University as Vice-rector on Innovation and
Applied Research, during this period he contributed to start the PhD+ program for nurturing the
entrepreneurial mindset among your researchers and PhDs. He funded and leads the Acube Lab
(http://acube.di.unipi.it), whose researchers design algorithms for Big Data, mainly in the form of
texts and graphs, in collaboration with companies worldwide: such as Google, Bloomberg, Yahoo!,
ST Microelectronics, etc.. His research results got four US Patents and some international awards:
e.g. “1995 Best Land Transportation Paper Award” from IEEE Vehicular Technology Society; “1997
EATCS PhD Thesis Award”; “1997 Philip Morris Award on Science and Technology”; a Bloomberg
research grant, and three Google Research Awards. Among the other services as Editor and Program
Committee member/chair, he was one of the Area Editors of two Encyclopedias: the one
on Algorithms and the one on Big Data Technologies (both published by Springer). He (co-)authored
more than 170 (refereed) publications, some books and chapters, achieving an H-index of 31 on
Scopus and about 9500 citations on Google Scholar. Ferragina is the co-founder of Playerank, a spin-
off of the University of Pisa specialized in AI and Big Data tools for Sport Analytics.