The Crew

Professor Rocco De Nicola is the coordinator of the TOFFEe project.

De Nicola is a professor of Computer Science at IMT School For Advanced Studies Lucca. He has been full professor at Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica of Università di Firenze from 1995 till 2011, and at Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione, Università di Roma 'La Sapienza' from 1990 till 1995. Before that he was a full time researcher at IEI-CNR in Pisa and worked at Edinburgh University and for Italtel in Milano and Olivetti in Pisa. He has been visiting professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and visiting scholar at Microsoft Research Cambridge. De Nicola graduated in Scienze dell'Informazione at Unversità di Pisa in 1978 and received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh (UK) in 1985.

At IMT, he is the director of the SysMA Research Unit and the director of the research area in Computer Science and Application.

Guido Caldarelli is Full Professor of Physics at University Ca' Foscari in Venice, and a LIMS Fellow. At IMT, professor Caldarelli founded the NETWORKS Unit, that he leaded until July 2020.

Professor Guido Caldarelli studied Statistical Physics, and work in the field of Complex Networks. He got his degree in 1992 in Rome (La Sapienza), his PhD in 1996 in Trieste (SISSA). After Postdocs in Manchester and Cambridge Guido became firstly "Research Assistant" in INFM and secondly "Primo Ricercatore" at ISC-CNR where he is still working with many friends and colleagues.

From 2018 Guido is the President of the Complex Systems Society

From 2016 he is in the board of the SNP Division of European Physical Society

Irene Crimaldi is Associate Professor of Statistics at IMT School For Advanced Lucca (Italy). Moreover, she is a member of the Scientific Board of the IMT PhD programs.

In 2006-2011 she was researcher and "Professore aggregato" of Probability and Mathematical Statistics at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Bologna and then, in 2011-2014 she was tenured assistant professor and "Professore aggregato" of Probability and Mathematical Statistics at IMT.

She graduated cum laude in Mathematics from the University of Pisa and she got her PhD in Financial Mathematics (grade: 70/70 cum laude) from the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa). She won the "Bruno de Finetti" prize (2001), awarded by the "Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei" (Rome). She held a scholarship from the National Institute for Advanced Mathematics ("Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica") at the University of Milano-Bicocca, an internship with the Risk Management area of the "Monte dei Paschi di Siena" bank, a fellowship from the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Pisa and a postdoctoral position at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Bologna.

Marinella Petrocchi is a Researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the Italian National Research Council.

Since years, she collaborates with IMT Lucca, as guest scholar of the SySMA Research Unit.

Marinella received her PhD in Information Engineering from University of Pisa, in 2005, with a thesis titled `Aspects of modeling and verifying secure procedures', where a series of formal techniques were applied to verify security properties of multicast communication protocols.

The years passed, and the research themes changed as well. In 2012, she started studying detection techniques able to unveil fake accounts and fake reviews, with a group of valorous girls and boys. Topics were exciting and the team she collaborated with marvellous. Thus, she continues walking on the same path, really greedy to find something magic to unveil fake news. This is the reason why she refined her magical arts and has earned a degree in witchcraft.

Her web page is here. Do not forget to visit the MIB dataset web page: you can find precious datasets of fake accounts to download.

Fabio Saracco is Assistant Professor (RTDa) at IMT School For Advanced Studies since May 2016. He works in the NETWORKS research unit guided by prof. Caldarelli. In his post-doc experience at the Institute for Complex Systems (ISC-CNR, Sapienza Department, Rome), he focused on the complex network approach to the World Trade Web. In 2013 he obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics (String Theory) at the University of Milano Bicocca with a thesis with Alessandro Tomasiello (INFN, Milano Bicocca department).

Fabio actual research is devoted to the theoretical development of tools for the analysis of complex networks. The theoretical perspective of his work is based on the extension of concepts of Information Theory and Statistical Physics to Complex Networks. The framework that he developed, in collaboration with the colleagues at IMT, is general and was successfully applied for the description of different phenomena, as international trade networks, biological systems or social network platforms. Fabio is involved in the European project SoBigData. He is also mentoring some Ph.D. students, as well as lecturing on complex networks analysis as well as Python programming.