|
Contact InfoFaculty of Computer ScienceFree University of Bozen-Bolzano Dominikanerplatz 3- Piazza Domenicani 3 (office 2.16) 39100 Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
|
I am a member of the Database and Information Systems group. My research activities are focused on two main aspects. First, mining links by exploiting potential correlations between data instances to improve the predictive accuracy of learned models. Second, enhancing search capabilities of Information Retrieval Systems by: (1) developing new ranking models and query processing strategies for entity search, and (2) leveraging similarity search methodologies to handle content-based retrieval. The ultimate goal is to develop scalable solutions that address the requirements of massively distributed data.
Current Research Projects
-
RARE: Reducing Antimicrobial Resistance in Bolzano
The goal of this project is to use data mining techniques to analyze the growing number of available data about past patient therapies and discover possible correlations among data instances that can be used to improve the effectiveness of antibiotics. The project is carried out in tight collaboration with the Antimicrobial Management Program from Bolzano Hospital.
-
K2: Knowledge Kaleidoscope
I am involved in the K2 project, a part of the YAGO-NAGA project at Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken/Germany. The goal of this project is to populate knowledge bases with photos of named entities, with high precision, high recall, and diversity of photos for a given entity. The difficulty of solving this problem comes from the fact that photos of celebrities are abundant on the Internet, however they are much harder to retrieve for less popular entities, particularly rare and ambiguous entities, such as notable computer scientists or regionally interesting churches.
Past Research Projects
-
SAPIR: Search In Audio Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer IR
SAPIR is a European project that extends the power of web searches beyond centralized text and metadata searches to include distributed audio-visual content. Today, Web searches are dominated by search giants such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN that deploy a centralized approach to indexing and utilize text-only indexes enriched by page rank algorithms. Supporting real content-based, audio-visual search requires media-specific understanding and extremely high CPU utilization, which would not scale in today's centralized solutions. SAPIR aims at breaking this technological barrier by developing a large-scale, distributed P2P architecture that will make it possible to search audio-visual content using the query-by-example paradigm.