Short Bio

Francesco Bonchi is Co-Founder and Research Director at Centai (Center for Artificial Intelligence), a newly established research center in Turin, Italy. He's also member of of the Board of Directors of Centai and CEO at SOM (Sound of Mind) S.r.l., the holding of researchers owning the 51% of Centai.

Earlier he was Scientific Director at the ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy, where he was also coordinating the "Learning and Algorithms for Data Analytics" Research Area. Even earlier he was Director of Research at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain. He is also (part-time) Research Director for Big Data & Data Science at Eurecat (Technological Center of Catalunya), Barcelona.

His recent research interests include algorithms and learning on graphs and complex networks (e.g., financial networks, social networks, brain 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 filed 16 US patents, and got granted 9 US patents.

He is member of the Steering Committee of ECML PKDD and IEEE DSAA, and is in the editorial board of several journals in the Data Science area. He has been PC Chairs of many international conferences, including ECML PKDD (2010 and 2018), the 16th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2016), the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT 2017), the "Social Network Analysis and Graph algorithms for the Web" track @ The International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2018), the 6th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2019), among the others.

Dr. Bonchi has been the General Co-Chair of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2018). He will be General Chair, together with Elena Baralis, of ECML PKDD 2023, to be held in Turin (Italy). He will be General Chair, together with Ricardo Baeza-Yates, of ACM SIGKDD 2024, to be held in Barcelona (Spain).

Awards

• Best AI-Track Paper at The Third ACM conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO'23) for the paper: J. Fonesca, A. Bell, C. Abrate, F. Bonchi, J. Stoyanovich Setting the Right Expectations: Algorithmic Recourse Over Time.
• Best Paper Award at The World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2022) for the paper: F. Fabbri, Y. Wang, F. Bonchi, C. Castillo, M. Mathioudakis Rewiring what-to-watch-next Recommendations to Reduce Radicalization Pathways.
• IEEE DSAA Service Award, 2018.
• Yahoo Master Inventor award, 2013.
• Best Paper Award at the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2009), with the paper: P. Boldi, F. Bonchi, C. Castillo, S. Vigna. From "Dango" to "Japanese Cakes": Query Reformulation Models and Patterns.
• Best Student Paper Award at the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), with the paper: M. Potamias, F. Bonchi, C. Castillo, A. Gionis. Fast Shortest Path Distance Estimation in Large Networks.
• Best Student Paper Runner-up at the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), with the paper: M. van Leeuwen, F. Bonchi, A. Siebes, B. Sigurbjörnsson. Compressing Tags to Find Interesting Media Groups.