Giancarlo Ruffo

Ph.D., Associate Professor of Computer Science
Dipartimento di Scienze e Innovazione Tecnologica · Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale “Amedeo Avogadro”
Viale Teresa Michel, 11 - 15121 Alessandria, Italy
giancarlo [dot] ruffo [at] uniupo [dot] it ·

Basically, I love science. I like to engage with both theoretical and applied challenges: they are amazing opportunities for that greatest of achievements: learning new things! I have been involved in large and complex projects. I have co-authored peer-reviewed papers with scientists from many different disciplines, such as physics, sociology, philosophy and communication science. I believe that groundbreaking societal innovations are fundamentally based on multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborations.

One of the drawbacks of multidisciplinarity is that it is difficult to find the perfect fit between what you do and how others define what you do. However, I am comfortable being classified as a data scientist whose skills lie mainly in complex networks, network science, network analysis, social media analysis and computational social science.

I am currently working on the diffusion of misinformation, polarisation of opinion, hate speech in social media, the dynamics of scientific migration, and the visualisation and application of signed networks. I have also studied "pure" computer science problems in: computer and network security, distributed applications, peer-to-peer systems, micropayment systems, proactive password checking, anomaly detection, web and data mining, recommendation systems, machine learning, and inductive logic programming.


Education and Career

University of Eastern Piedmont

Associate Professor
Department of Science and Technological Innovation (DISIT)
Oct. 2022 - today

University of Turin

Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
Oct. 2006 - 2022

Indiana University

Visiting Professor
Schools of Informatics and Computing
Aug. 2010 - Mar. 2011

New York University

Visiting Scholar
Schools of Informatics and Computing
Aug. 2008 - Oct. 2008

University of Turin

Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
Oct. 2000 - Oct. 2006

University of Turin

Ph.D. in Computer Science
Computer Science
Feb. 1995 - Feb. 2000

University of Catania

Master's Degree
110/110 cum laude
Sept. 1990 - July 1995

Achievements and Awards

Orientation Committee's Chair

University of Turin

The committee is in charge of the incoming and outgoing orientation activities at the University of Turin.

2021 - 2022

Coordinator of a Master's Degree Program

University of Turin

Coordinator of the Master's Degree Program in "Networks and Computational Systems" (Reti e Sistemi Informatici) within the Computer Science Master's Degree Programs at the University of Turin.

2015 - 2022

NetAtlas s.r.l.

Co-Founder and Partner

NetAtlas was a tech company specialized in development of business intelligence, machine learning, big data, data analysis and information visualization solutions. After I sold my shares in 2021, the company was merged to the Certimeter Group, now hold by Lutech

2013 - 2021

ISI Foundation

ISI Fellow

ISI Fellow program selects top scholars to be external members of the ISI Foundation research community, in order to collaborate on scientific problems that span across disciplines (math, physics, biology, social sciences, humanities) in the pursuit of breaking new grounds at the forefront of complex systems and network science, data and computational science, information technologies, computational epidemiology & public health, and statistical physics. Within the celebrations of the Premio Lagrange – Fondazione CRT 2015, ISI Foundation announced the scientists who joined the third round of ISI Fellow program.

2015 - 2018

SAA - Scuola di Amministrazione Aziendale

Member of the Board of Directors

SAA - Scuola di Amministrazione Aziendale is the MBA School at the University of Turin, and one of the most renowned MBA Schools in Italy.

2015 - 2017

Best Dataset Award

ICWSM'12 (Sixth Intern. AAAI Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media)

The dataset was publicly distributed with our paper presented at ICWSM'12: LM Aiello, M Deplano, R Schifanella, and G Ruffo. People are Strange when you're a Stranger: Impact and Influence of Bots on Social Networks. 2012, AAAI

2012

Adjunct Professor

Indiana University
Schools of Informatics and Computing

My profile at IU's Web Site.

March 2011 - Today

Recognition of Service Award

ACM - Association for Computing Machinery
Recognition of service as co-organizers of ACM Hypertext 2009
2009

Research

Papers

Online profiles
1995 - today

Research group

ARC2S
Please, keep updated on our ARC2S activities.
2011 - today

My GitHub repos

Codes and sources (mainly for educational purposes)
2012 - today


Teaching

Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale "A. Avogadro" (from 2021/22)

Network Science and Information Retrieval

Master's Degree Class (6 credits)

The purpose of the course is threefold. First, students will learn what an information retrieval (IR) system is, what are the basic techniques for designing an efficient and scalable IR system on large collections of documents, the main applications (for example, how to build a web search engine) and future directions. Secondly, they will learn the fundamental principles of network science (NS), including the analysis of complex networks, the basic models for studying network dynamics (e.g., social contagion, viral phenomena, spread of epidemics, etc.). Finally, it will be explained how network science can be used to design modern information retrieval systems.

The course was officially referred as "Information Retrieval" only until 2022, then renamed to "Intelligent Information Retrieval" in 2023, and finally known as "Network Science and Information Retrieval" from 2024 on.

[link]

Second Semester (from 2021/22 on)

Programming Methodologies for the Web

Bachelor's Degree Class (6 credits)

The goal of the course is to learn how to design and build web sites and applications by following a 3-tier architecture (client/application/data). During the course, concepts related to markup languages like HTML5 will be introduced, together with concepts related to style notations like CCS3. The course will also cover client-side programming (JavaScript) and server-side programming (Node.js), as well as methods for interacting with relational DBMS (RDBMS). Accessibility and usability aspects will be considered along the course, to allow web pages and applications to be usable by everyone.

[link]

Second Semester (from 2022/23 on)

Programming Paradigms

Bachelor's Degree Class (9 credits)

The goal of this teaching is to know the theoretical foundations of object-oriented and functional programming. The student that passes the exam are supposed: (1) to model an application by identifying the components and the best paradigm for their description; (2) to design and implement the chosen solution using both Java and Python; (3) to perform tests with Junit; - to master the Java and Python Collections framework; (4) to be able to recognize and manage non-standard cases through exception.

[link]

First Semester (from 2022/23 on)

Università degli Studi di Torino (until 2022/23)

Complex Networks Analysis and Visualization

Master's Degree Class (9 credits)

This course introduces the fundamental concepts, principles and methods in the interdisciplinary field of network science, with a particular focus on analysis techniques, modeling, and applications for the World Wide Web and online social media. Topics covered include graphic structures of networks, mathematical models of networks, common networks topologies, structure of large scale graphs, community structures, epidemic spreading, centrality measures, dynamic processes in networks. In addition to that, another learning objective of this course falls in the field of scientific data visualization. Students will learn basic visualization design and evaluation principles, and learn how to acquire, parse, and analyze large datasets. Students will also learn techniques for visualizing multivariate, temporal, text-based, geospatial, hierarchical, and (above all) network/graph-based data. Additionally, students will utilize GePhi, D3, Python, networkx and plot.ly, and many other tools to prototype many of these techniques on existing datasets.

Course's language: English (Complex Network), Italian (Data Viz)

Past editions of this course have been co-taught with other visiting teachers: Prof. Johan Bollen, Indiana University, USA (2015/16), Prof. Romain Boulet, University of Lyon, FR (2019/20), Prof. Alessandro Flammini, Indiana University, USA (from 2016/17 to 2018/19, and 2021/22)

[link]

Second Semester (from 2015 on)

Web Technology

Bachelor Degree Class (6 credits)

The objectives of this course are the following:

  • To produce dynamic, animated, interactive and database driven web sites;
  • To learn different languages and client-side technologies like HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Prototype and JQuery;
  • To learn server side programming principles using mainly PHP and data base connectivity with MySQL, exploiting different open source technologies and software components like web browsers, web servers (Apache), and and PHPMyAdmin.

Course's language: Italian

[link]

First Semester (from 2011 on)

Indiana University (2010/11)

Mobile Applications Development

Bachelor's Degree Class (6 credits)

I delivered this course on programming mobile applications for iPhone when I was on sabbatical leave at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Course's language: English

First Semester (2010/11)

Eulero

Trasmissione radiofonica con Stefano Vassallo su Radio Banda Larga

Seconda Stagione