Welcome to Maurizio Atzori's Home

Short CV

Maurizio Atzori was born in 1978 in Italy. He graduated in Computer Science (Informatica) summa cum laude in 2002, from the University of Pisa. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the School for Graduate Studies “Galileo Galilei”, University of Pisa, obtained in 2006. He has been member of the ISTI-CNR, holding a research fellowship from CNR of Pisa, and a member of Knowledge Discovery and Delivery Laboratory. He has been visiting scholar at Purdue University (Indiana, USA), working with Prof. Christopher W. Clifton and his research team. He has been visiting resercher working with Prof. Yucel Saygin at Sabanci University (Istanbul, Turkey) and at UCLA, collaborating with Prof. Carlo Zaniolo. Since December 2010 he is Assistant Professor (Ricercatore Universitario, Professore Aggregato) at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Cagliari (Italy). His major research interests regard databases, data mining, knowledge graphs and privacy-preserving algorithms for data management.

Highlights

• PC co-Chair of the 26th IEEE WETICE track on Data Exploration in the Web 3.0 Age (DEW 2017), in Poland! Accepted papers will be published on IEEE Proceedings

• Area Editor of the Encyclopedia with Semantic Computing. Interested in publishing an entry in the enciclopedia? Details are available, or just drop me an email!

• Co-PI with Prof. Carlo Zaniolo (UCLA) of a Google Research Award. Our project Exploiting Structured Queries in Question Answering and Search got extended coverage on local press such as Wired.it (Italian). Previous related work described by international magazine New Scientist, ZDNet, Communications of the ACM and translated in several languages.

Teaching

Computer Science @ Unica

• Programmazione 2 - Object-Oriented Programming (through Moodle e-learing platform, since A.A. 2010/11)

I previously tought as Aggregate Professor at the University of Sassari and as Teaching assistant at the University of Pisa.

Recent Talks

A list of few recent talks:

• A User-Friendly Interface for Structured and Temporal Queries over Wikipedia @PoliMi, 21 October 2016

• A User-Friendly Interface for Structured and Temporal Queries over Wikipedia @UniBZ, 17 October 2016

• Structured Queries over Unstructured Data @UCLA, DB-UCLA, 16 February 2016

Publications

An updated list of my publications can be found at DBLP, as reported in the Computer Science Bibliography maintained by Michael Ley.

Another source is the Research Catalog of the University of Cagliari.

1. User-Friendly Temporal Queries on Historical Knowledge Bases. Carlo Zaniolo, Shi Gao, Maurizio Atzori, Muhao Chen, Jiaqi Gu. Information and Computation, Time 2015 special issue, Elsevier (accepted for publication, 2017)
2. Answering End-User Questions, Queries and Searches on Wikipedia and its History. Atzori M., Gao S., Mazzeo G. M., Zaniolo C. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Volume 39 (2016)
3. A Machine-Learning Approach to Ranking RDF Properties. Dessi A., Atzori M. Future Generation Computer Systems Journal, Special Issue on Semantic Technologies for Collaborative Web (2016; appeared online on May 2015).
4. SPARQL Queries over Source Code. Setzu M., Atzori M. ICSC 2016 - 10th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (2016)
5. Write-Once Run-Anywhere Custom SPARQL Functions. D. S. Ferru, Atzori M. ICSC 2016 - 10th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (2016)

6. SPARQLT and its User-Friendly Interface for Managing and Querying the History of RDF Knowledge Bases. Gao S., Chen M., Atzori M., Gu J. and Zaniolo C. ISWC 2015 - Proceedings of the 14th International Semantic Web Conference, Demo Track (2015)

7. Expressivity and Accuracy of By-Example Structured Queries on Wikipedia. Atzori M., Zaniolo C. 24th IEEE International Conference on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE), Web2Touch Track (2015)
8. Schema-Agnostic Ranking of RDF Properties. Dessi A., Atzori M. SEBD 2015 - Proceedings of the 23rd Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (2015)
9. Introducing the Web of Functions: Interoperable Higher-Order Functions in Pure SPARQL. Atzori M. SEBD 2015 - Proceedings of the 23rd Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (2015)
10. Beyond Text-based Web Search: Question Answering and By-Example Structured Queries compared on Wikipedia. Atzori M., Zaniolo C. SEBD 2015 - Proceedings of the 23rd Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (2015)
11. Text-Mining, Structured Queries, and Knowledge Management on Web Document Corpora. Mousavi H., Atzori M., Gao S., Zaniolo C. SIGMOD Record Journal, Vol. 43(3), (2014)
12. Expressivity and Accuracy of By-Example Structured Queries on Wikipedia. Atzori M., Zaniolo C. UCLA Computer Science Technical Report 140017 (2014)
13. Toward the Web of Functions: Interoperable Higher-Order Functions in SPARQL. Atzori M. ISWC 2014 - Proceedings of the 13th International Semantic Web Conference, Research Track, doi (2014)
14. call: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Functions. Atzori M. ISWC 2014 - Proceedings of the 13th International Semantic Web Conference, Demo Track (2014)
15. Supporting Semantic Web Search and Structured Queries on Mobile Devices. Dessi A., Maxia A., Atzori M., Zaniolo C. SEBD 2014 - Proceedings of the 22nd Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (2014)
16. Ranking DBpedia Properties. Atzori M., Dessi A. 23rd IEEE International Conference on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE), Web2Touch Track (2014)
17. Computing on-the-fly DBpedia Property Ranking. Dessi A., Atzori M. ICSC 2014 - 8th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (2014)
18. Computing Recursive SPARQL Queries. Atzori M. ICSC 2014 - 8th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (2014)
19. Improving Spatial Decision Making in Cloud Computing. Argiolas M., Atzori M., Dessi N., Pes B. In book Contemporary Advancements in Information Technology Development in Dynamic Environments, (2014)
20. Supporting Semantic Web Search and Structured Queries on Mobile Devices. Dessi A., Maxia A., Atzori M., Zaniolo C. 3rd Intl. ACM Workshop Semantic Search over the Web (SSW 2013 / VLDB 2013) (2013)
21. User-Friendly Structured Queries on Wikipedia: the SWiPE System. Atzori M., Zaniolo C. SEBD 2013 - Proceedings of the 21th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (2013)
22. SWiPE: Searching wikipedia by example. Atzori M., Zaniolo C. WWW’12 - Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web Companion (2012)
23. Dataspaces enhancing decision support systems in clouds. Argiolas M., Atzori M., Dessi N., Pes B. International Journal of Web Portals (2012)
24. Dataspaces: Where structure and schema meet. Atzori M., Dessi N. Studies in Computational Intelligence (2011)
25. Co-clustering numerical data under user-defined constraints. Pensa R.G., Boulicaut J.-F., Cordero F., Atzori M. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (2010)
26. Towards trajectory anonymization: A generalization-based approach. Nergiz M.E., Atzori M., Saygin Y., Baris G. Transactions on Data Privacy (2009)
27. Towards trajectory anonymization: A generalization-based approach. Nergiz M.E., Atzori M., Saygin Y. Proceedings of the SIGSPATIAL ACM GIS 2008 International Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and LBS, SPRINGL’08 (2008)
28. Anonymity preserving pattern discovery. Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F., Pedreschi D. VLDB Journal (2008)
29. Privacy-aware knowledge discovery from location data. Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F., Pedreschi D., Abul O. Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (2007)
30. Hiding sequences. Abul O., Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F. SEBD 2007 - Proceedings of the 15th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (2007)
31. Hiding sequences. Abul O., Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F. Proceedings - International Conference on Data Engineering (2007)
32. Hiding sensitive trajectory patterns. Abul O., Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F. Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM (2007)
33. Hiding the presence of individuals from shared databases. Nergiz M.E., Atzori M., Clifton C. Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (2007)
34. Secure distributed k-anonymous pattern mining. Jiang W., Atzori M. Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM (2006)
35. Towards low-perturbation anonymity preserving pattern discovery. Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F., Pedreschi D. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (2006)
36. Weak k-anonymity: A low-distortion model for protecting privacy. Atzori M. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (2006)
37. Maurizio Atzori: An Effective Framework for Data Anonymity. Atzori M. SEBD 2006 - Proceedings of the 15th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (2006)
38. Memory-Aware Frequent k-Itemset Mining. Atzori M., Mancarella P., Turini F. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (2005)
39. Blocking anonymity threats raised by frequent itemset mining. Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F., Pedreschi D. Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM (2005)
40. k-Anonymous patterns. Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F., Pedreschi D. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (2005)
41. Anonymity and data mining. Atzori M., Bonchi F., Giannotti F., Pedreschi D. Computer Systems Science and Engineering (2005)
42. Abduction in classification tasks. Atzori M., Mancarella P., Turini F. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science) (2003)

• PhD Thesis Abduction and Anonymity in Data Mining. Atzori M. Ph.D. Thesis: TD-01/06. University of Pisa, Italy (2006)

Projects

• Security Horizons A consortium of universities working on security and privacy issues (PRIN 2010-11 project)
• DENIS DENIS: Dataspaces Enhancing the Next Internet in Sardinia (RAS)
• U-DID PI of project Unstructured Data Integration for Dataspaces (RAS)
• DIVA A predictive system aimed at fighting against tax evasion in VAT domain
• KDubiq Ubiquitous Knowledge Discovery (WG5: Privacy and Security)
• GeoPKDD Geographic Privacy-aware Knowledge Discovery and Delivery
• GeoPKDD.it Italian Project on Geographic Privacy-aware Knowledge Discovery and Delivery (MIUR COFIN2004)
• P3D - Privacy Preserving Pattern Discovery A “Curiosity Driven and Independent Research” ISTI Internal Project
• KDDML-MQL Knowledge Discovery in Databases Markup Language
• ClickWorld Data analysis of Click Streams

Attended PhD Courses

• Security and Cooperation in Wireless Networks Prof. J.P. Hubaux, EPFL, Switzerland.
• Privacy in Wireless Networks Prof. G. Tsudik, University California Irvine, CA, U.S.A.
• Search Engines and Question Answering Prof. G. Attardi, University of Pisa, Italy.
• Economic and Game-Theoretic Aspects of Information Systems Prof. C. Papadimitriou, University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.
• Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment Prof. P. Raghavan, Verity and Stanford University.
• Search and Data Mining in the Internet Prof. A. Broder, IBM Research.
• From Data Mining to Relational Data Mining Prof. S. Dzeroski, Department of Intelligent Systems, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia.
• Some Computational Aspects of Geoinformatics Prof. M. Worboys, Department of Spatial Information Engineering, University of Maine, U.S.A.
• Data Compression of Massive Prof. P. Ferragina, University of Pisa, Italy.

Advisor

This list is not complete nor frequently updated.

• Flore Massimo Realizzazione di una applicazione Android per la gestione dei contatti e personalizzazione delle chiamate (UniCA 2012)
• Rota Gabriele Motore di ricerca veloce per il supporto del query by example in Wikipedia (UniCA 2012)
• Cuccu Michela Un portale per l’Ufficio Scolastico Provinciale di Cagliari (UniCA 2012)
• Manias Omar Stato dell’Arte nelle Interfacce per Motori di Ricerca (UniCA 2012)
• Sanna Andrea Implementazione di una libreria in Java per la comunicazione tra un computer e un dispositivo Android (UniCA 2012)
• Massa Fabio Studio e implementazione di un Back End per DBpedia (UniCA 2011)
• Frau Gianluigi Realizzazione di un cluster Hadoop e programmazione Pig Latin (UniCA 2011)
• Mascia Peppino Relizzazione di un cluster Hadoop e programmazione in Pig Latin (UniCA 2011)
• Muggiri Emanuele aTouchLib: smartphone come dispositivo di input per PC (UniCA 2011)
• Simone Loru’s Bachelor Degree AndroidLogin: an Android-based login system (Apr 2011)
• Michela Piotti’s Master Degree Abductive Techniques for Classification(University of Pisa, July 2005)
• Davide Carfi’s Bachelor Degree Tools for Privacy Preserving Data Mining (CNR, July 2005)
• Romeo Zitarosa’s Bachelor Degree Development of an Online Data Mining Algorithm for Association Rules Extraction (University of Pisa, Feb 2005)
• Daniele Sgandurra’s Bachelor Degree Development of Tools for Privacy Preserving Distributed Data Mining (CNR, July 2004)

Software and Tools

• SWiPE Searching WikiPedia by Example, as published at WWW2012 and featured by the international magazine New Scientist, ZDNet, Communications of the ACM, KurzweilAI and translated in several languages

"By making Wikipedia search simple, though, SWiPE has the potential to bring this benefit to a far greater audience. I, for one, can’t wait to try it out myself." (Lee Feigenbaum, W3C SPARQL WG co-Chair)

• CodeOntology RFD-ization of source code and use of SPARQL for finding design patterns over code

• Web of Functions Higher-order interoperable functions within any SPARQL endpoint

• runSPARQL A tool to compute Recursive SPARQL Queries.

• rankProp A tool to rank RDF properties of DBpedia entities, based on MLR algorithms.

• Qpedia A visual query interface focused on mobile devices. It compiles queries to SPARQL and run them against DBpedia servers.

• Java Privacy-Preserving Pattern Discovery Package (jp3d) A pure java package for privacy-preserving pattern discovery. MathCollection, an extension for the Java Collection Framework by Dietmar Lippold, is required. See CNR description for further details.

• k-Privacy A pure java application for table anonymization through k-anonymity generalization and suppression. It has both console and graphical user interface. Joint work with Davide Carfi. See CNR description for further details.

• Privacy-Preserving Distributed Data Mining Library (PPDDM-Lib) An open source ANSI C/C++ library of functions and protocols useful to exchange sensible information while computing Data Mining Models from several servers, as described in Clifton et al., 2003. The OpenSSL Toolkit is required. Joint work with Daniele Sgandurra, developed at ISTI-CNR, Pisa.

I am also developing a number of other applications in the fields of abduction, data privacy, and data mining. I planned to publish them here as soon as the documentation is ready. If you need details on experiments on my papers or software published here, please feel free to email me.

Scientific Activities

• Serving as Reviewer for the following major database and data mining international journals: ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB Journal), ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), International Journal on Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE), International Journal on Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal (DAMI), International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS), Transactions on Data Privacy (TDP), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST), Information Sciences (INS), Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC), Information Processing & Management (IPM).

• Serving for the Zentralblatt-Math review database of mathematics.

• Organizing Committee Member and Publicity co-Chair of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2018)

• Panel Chair and moderator at IEEE WETICE 2017 Panel on Data centricity of digital world: opportunities and challenges

• Workshop and Special Session Committee Co-Chair of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2017)

• Workshop Committee Co-Chair of the The First IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC 2017)

• Session Chair of the Semantics Integration and Analysis Session,at the 10th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2016), Laguna Hill, California.

• PC co-Chair of the 26th IEEE WETICE track on Data Exploration in the Web 3.0 Age (DEW 2017), in Poland! Accepted papers will be published on IEEE Proceedings. Submission deadline: February 26, 2017

• Area Editor of the Encyclopedia with Semantic Computing. Interested in publishing an entry in the enciclopedia? Details are available, or just drop me an email!

• Organizing Committee Member of The 15th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) 2004 and the 8th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD) 2004, Pisa, Italy

PC Member for a number of International Conferences and Workshops, including:

• 8th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2018)
• 12th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2018) - Newport Beach, California, USA
• 10th International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in Information Society (PAIS 2017)
• 1st International Workshop on Application of Semantic Web technologies in Robotics - AnSWeR 2017, co-located with the 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2017) - Portoroz, Slovenia, 28 May - 1st June 2017
• First International Workshop on Semantic Multimedia Computing (SMC 2017, in conjunction with IEEE ICSC 2017)
• First IEEE International Workshop on Semantic Robots (WSR 2017, in conjunction with IEEE IRS 2017)
• 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Analytics for Big Geospatial Data (BigSpatial-2016), held in conjunction with the ACM GIS Conference on October 31st in San Francisco, CA
• The Third International Conference on Big Data, Small Data, Linked Data and Open Data (ALLDATA 2017)
• 1st IEEE ICDM International Workshop on Privacy and Discrimination in Data Mining (PDDM 2016)
• 7th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2016)
• International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2016, BIS 2015, BIS 2014)
• International Workshop on Analytics for Big Geospatial Data (BigSpatial-2015)
• International Workshop on Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2015 co-located with IEEE BigData 2015).
• International Workshop on Trust, Security and Privacy for Big Data (TrustData 2015)
• IFIP Conference on Computer Science and its Applications (CIIA-2015 Security and Network Technologies Track)
• International Workshop on Spatial and Spatiotemporal Data Mining (SSTDM-14 co-located with IEEE ICDM, PC Member since SSTDM-08)
• International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information Society (PAIS 2016, in conjunction with EDBT/ICDT, in the PC since its first edition in 2008)
• International Workshop on Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2014 co-located with CIKM 2014).
• Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (SEBD2016, SEBD2014, SEBD2013, SEBD11)
• IEEE International Workshop on Trust, Security and Privacy for Big Data (IEEE TrustData 2014, TrustData 2013)
• International Conference on Computer Science and Its Applications (CIIA 2013, Security & Network Technologies Track)
• International Workshop on Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy Preserving anonymity in geographically referenced data, at the headquarter of the Italian Privacy Authority, Rome, 14 February 2008
• Program Committee member (PC Member) of the Second ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Privacy, Security, and Trust in KDD (PinKDD’08), joint with ACM SIGKDD 2008
• Organizing Committee and Publicity Chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM08)
• PC Member of the 19th Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (SBIA 2008)
• PC Member of the IADIS European Conference on Data Mining 2008 (MCCSIS-DM08)
• PC member of the First ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Privacy, Security, and Trust in KDD (PinKDD’07), joint with ACM SIGKDD 2007

Served as Reviewer for a number of international conferences and workshops, including: AI*IA03, SEBD04, ECML04 and PKDD04, IEA-AIE05, SIAM DM05, PAKDD05, AI*IA05, ECML05 and PKDD05, ICDM05, ADMA05, KDID05, ACM SAC06 DM Track, PAKDD06, ICDM06, PADM06, PKDD06, ECML-PKDD07, ACM SAC08-DM, SIAM SDM08, ACM PODS08, ACM SIGMOD17.

Links

• SHERPA/RoMEO - Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving information
• CORE Portal - Official Australian CS Conference Rankings; see also the Italian GII-GRIN Ratings
• 2048 infUnica Edition - the popular game 2048 as seen by CS students at the University of Cagliari. Tetris also available.
• PhD Comics
• Compute Collaboration Distance - My Erdös Number (collaboration distance with Paul Erdös) is 4 (via Prof. C. Zaniolo)
• Internet Laws - to explain the law to techies, and tech to laywers

Resources

• Uptime Monitor This page contains monitors of online services related to my work
• Calendario Accademico UniCA Calendario Accademico 2016/2017
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) - Framework to develop AJAX application with Java
• Drag and Drop with GWT - A useful tutorial on how to support D’n D in GWT
• AlphaMiner - An Open Source Data Mining Platform by ETI
• TeXnicCenter - An excellent, freely available tool to create TeX files
• CTAN - TeX package repository
• Portable Apps - Free software that you can use from an USB Pen
• Dataset - a list of useful datasets for text mining, including CAW2 data
• P3P Online Privacy Policy Generator - It’s free and easy to use!
• Unix Utils for Windows - *nix commands porting to Windows
• Shared Wi-Fi with iMac - How to share an internet connection from iMac to PC using Wi-Fi
• Wiki in 20 minutes - How to create a wiki site with Django (by Siddharta Govindaraj)
• SSH settings - no passwords anymore, with nice default configuration
• Trace route online - info on DNS configuration of your server
• Setting up Virtuoso with DBpedia - set up RAM and swappiness, RDF performance tuning
• Ubuntu can look like Windows - Packages and themes to make Ubuntu look like Windows 7 or 8
• Production tools Guide - A Java-focused guide to production tools (Alert, log, visualization and metrics, APM, build, deployment)
• A discussion on students and their course’s ratings