Bio

Short Bio (Academic)

Francesco Bonchi is Head of Intesa Sanpaolo AI Research. Earlier he was Co-Founder and Research Director at Centai (Center for Artificial Intelligence), Scientific Director at the ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy, and Director of Research at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain. His recent research interests include algorithms and learning on graphs and complex networks, fair and explainable AI, and more in general, privacy and all ethical aspects of data analysis and AI. He has more than 250 publications in these areas. He also got granted 9 US patents.

He is member of the Steering Committee of ECML PKDD and IEEE DSAA, and member of the editorial board of several journals in the AI and Data Science area. He has been General Chair of ACM SIGKDD 2024, the 2023 European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2023), the 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2018). Dr. Bonchi has been PC Chairs of many international conferences, including The Web Conf 2026, ECML PKDD (2010, 2018, and 2026), the 16th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2016), the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT 2017), the 6th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2019), among the others.

He got a PhD in Computer Science from University of Pisa (2003).

Primary Appointments

2026 - Present
Head of Intesa Sanpaolo AI Research
Intesa Sanpaolo
2022 - 2026
Co-Founder and Research Director
Centai (Center for Artificial Intelligence), Turin, Italy
2020 - 2022
Scientific Director
ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
2018 - 2020
Deputy Scientific Director (with responsibility on the Industrial Research Area)
ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
2015 - 2018
Research Leader
ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
2014 - 2015
Director of Research
Yahoo Labs, Barcelona, Spain
2008 - 2014
Senior Research Scientist (and Team Leader since 2012)
Yahoo Labs, Barcelona, Spain
2003 - 2007
Researcher
KDD Lab ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

Current Advisory & Scientific Roles

2026 - Present
Member of the Steering Committee
Anti-Financial Crime Digital Hub, Turin, Italy
2025 - Present
2025 - Present
Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
The Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Germany
2024 - Present
Member of the Governmental Task-Force on AI
Commissione Intelligenza Artificiale per l'informazione, Italian Government, Rome, Italy
2024 - Present
Member of the Ethics Committee
The ONCODIR EU project
2024 - Present
"Computational Complexity" Section Editor
PLOS Complex Systems
2018 - Present
Member of the Academic Board of the PhD program in Data Science
"La Sapienza" University of Rome, Italy
2018 - Present
Member of the Steering Committee
IEEE Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA)
2018 - Present
2015 - Present
Scientific Advisor
Eurecat (Technological Center of Catalunya), Barcelona, Spain
2010 - Present
Member of the Steering Committee
ECML PKDD

Other Past Appointments

2022 - 2026
Member of the Board of Directors
Centai (Center for Artificial Intelligence), Turin, Italy
2022 - 2026
Member of the Board of Directors
Anti-Financial Crime Digital Hub, Turin, Italy
2022 - 2026
CEO at SOM (Sound of Mind) S.r.l.
(the holding of researchers owning the 51/% of Centai), Turin, Italy
2019 - 2023
2019 - 2022
Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
Competence Center Machine Learning Rhine-Ruhr (ML2R), Germany
2017 - 2019
Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
Veritone Inc., USA(NASDAQ: VERI)
2017 - 2018
Member of the Academic Board of the PhD program in "Data Science and Computation"
University of Bologna (the first PhD program in Data Science in Italy)
2018 - 2024
2013 - 2018
2015 - 2018
2013 - 2016
2015 - 2018
2014 - 2016