Paolo Ferragina

• Google research award 2013 on "A novel graph for social-network analysis and search built by entity-annotators, and its applications".
• Google research award 2010 on TAGME's algorithms and applications. This software has been also awarded of the Working Capital Award by Telecom Italia.
• Vice-rector on "Applied Research and Innovation" for the University of Pisa.
• President of the IT Center of the University of Pisa, which is the first HPC Competence Center in Europe financed by Acer.
• Phd Plus: a series of lectures on entreprenseurship for Phd students of the University of Pisa. We have posted the videos of all lectures on YouTube's channel of the University of Pisa, and the discussion on the Linked-in group.
• Area Editor of the Encyclopedia of Algorithms, Springer Publisher, Ming-Yang Kao (Ed.), 2008.

• Member of the Steering Committee of the European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), from 2012.
• Co-chair of the European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), Raleigh (Ljubljana, Slovenia), September 2012.
• Co-chair of the ACM conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Rome (Italy), February 2013.
• Invited speaker at the Industrial Track of ECIR 2012, Barcelona (ES), April 2012. Talk on "Topic-based annotation of short texts, with applications".
• Paper on "A framework for benchmarking entity-annotation systems" accepted at WWW 2013.
• Paper on "Classification of short texts by deploying topical annotations", accepted at ECIR 2012.
• Paper on "Topical Clustering of Search Results", accepted at ACM WSDM 2012.
• Google Faculty Award on the project TAGME, December 2010.
• Italian MIUR-FIRB project on a "Web service and search engine to support a semantic and pluri-lingual access to Italian Culture on the Web" (June '09 -- June '12).
• Italian MIUR-PRIN project on "The Mad Web: Models, Algorithms and Data structures for the Web and other behavioural networks" (Mar '10 -- Mar '12).
• Italian MIUR-PRIN project on "ARS TechnoMedia-- Algorithmics for Social Technological Networks" (Feb '13 -- Feb '16).
• Google Faculty Award on the project "A novel graph for social-network analysis and sea\ rch built by entity-annotators, and its applications", February 2013.

I am Professor of Algorithmics and Vice-Rector on "Applied Research and Innovation" for the University of Pisa. I'm the President of the IT Center of the University of Pisa, which is indeed the ``World Wide Competency Center for HPC'' of ACER and hosts the ``Virtualization & Storage Lab'' of Intel.

My promotion to full professor was sponsored by Yahoo! Research. I was Vice-Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and member of the Patent Committee of the University of Pisa, member of the Advisory Board of the Consorzio Pisa Ricerche, a teacher at the Scuola Normale Superiore and one of the scientific coordinators of its research center Signum.

I got my Laurea degree (summa cum laude, 1992) and my PhD (1996) in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, and my Post-doc from the Max-Planck Institut fur Informatik (Saarbrucken, 1997-98). From 1998 to 2000, I've been Assistant Professor at the University of Pisa; and from 2000 to 2007, I've been Associate Professor at the same University. I also spent various periods of research at IBM Research (Rome), AT&T Shannon Lab (NJ), Yahoo! Research (Barcelona), Google (NY), University of North Texas.

My research is mainly devoted to the design, analysis and experimentation of algorithms and data structures for storing, compressing, mining and retrieving information from large amounts of textual data like Web repositories, XML file collections, textual databases, genomic/DNA sequences. My research results received two US Patents (one owned by Lucent and the other one by University of Pisa and Rutgers) and some international awards: "Best Land Transportation Paper Award" from IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (1995); "EATCS Doctoral Dissertation Thesis Award" (1997); "Philip Morris Award on Science and Technology" (1997); "Research Capital award" from the University of Pisa (2002); Yahoo! faculty award (2007-2010); Working Capital Award (2010); Google research award (2010 and 2013). Currently, I have three patents pending in the USA owned by Yahoo!.

I have served as PC member of many International Conferences on Theoretical Computer Science, specifically in the field of Algorithmics. I've been co-chair of International Conference on FUN with Algorithms (2004), DIMACS Workshop on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (2004), Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (2006), Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (2008), and the next European Symposium on Algorithms-- Algorithm Engineering Track (2012).

I've been invited speaker of many international conferences and workshops on Algorithmics, e.g. CPM '04 and SPIRE '05, ESA/ALGO 2010, SISAP '11. I served as (co)editor of four special issues on the international journals: Theory of Computing Systems (June 2006), Theoretical Computer Science (November 2007), Information Retrieval (August 2008) and Theoretical Computer Science (November 2009). I have also authored one chapter on "String search in external memory: Algorithms and data structures" in the Handbook of Computational Molecular Biology (CRC Press, Editor Srinivas Aluru), one Italian book on Cryptography (Bollati Boringhieri, 2001), and one Italian chapter on a book on Algorithmics (Mondadori, 2010). I'm one of the Area Editors of the Encyclopedia of Algorithms (Springer, Editor Ming-Yang Kao) for the topics "Data compression, String Algorithms and Data Structures".

I (co-)authored more than 100 publications in international refereed conferences and journals on Theoretical Computer Science and Algorithmics. A subset of them is available at the CS Bibliographic Database, or via the ACM Digital Library.