As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento I am currently working on different topics. I am primarily continuing my research track blending complex network science, machine learning, graph learning to represent, describe, and forecast terrorist behaviors. Furthermore, I am concluding a book for which I signed a contract with Routledge that will be published in early 2022. The book will survey the current trends at the intersection between crime research and AI and will also review future perspectives, attempting to critically offer some educational and epistemological proposals for reducing the risk of the misuse of novel methodologies to study, anticipate or counter criminal phenomena.
Besides this, in the last year I have also extensively studied the effects of COVID-19 on crime and social unrest, with three studies specifically focusing on crime in Chicago and Los Angeles and disorder events such as riots in India, Israel and Mexico.
I am also collaborating with a group of economists based at Bocconi University, University of Milan and Burgundy School of Business on a set of survey experiments for investigating and capturing individuals' attitudes towards mafias in Italy.
Finally, a fifth line of inquiry regards the study of homicide patterns and homicide offenders in the United States.
At Transcrime, I worked on different topics regarding organised crime.
As a Master student, I have updated and improved an existing composite indicator for measuring the presence of mafia groups in Italy at municipal level. I have also taken part in a project in collaboration with the Calabrian provinces of Crotone and Vibo Valentia that aimed at quantifying and monitoring the infiltration of organised crime into the legal economy.
As a PhD student, I am fortunate to participate full-time in PROTON project (https://www.projectproton.eu/), funded by the ambitious EC Horizon 2020 Programme. Transcrime - UniversitĂ Cattolica is the coordinator of PROTON, leading a high-level research consortium which incorporates, among the others, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Maryland, the University of Cambridge, Fraunhofer, IBM, Europol, the Italian National Research Council, UNODC, Free University of Amsterdam. During the first year of the my PhD I worked on three different tasks. The first one was on the systematic review of the social, economic and psychological factors leading to the recruitment into OC. The second task was on the statistical analysis of a unique database containing all the Italian mafia members convicted from 1982 to 2017 (13k+). During this latter activity, I have applied clustering/classification algorithms to analyze the criminal and socio-economic nature of Italian mafiosi and I have also applied Group-Based Trajectory Modeling to the detection of latent strata within the mafia population. Finally, I am currently participating in the development of an agent-based simulation that will seek to model the dynamics that lead individuals to join organised crime, testing moreover different scenarios and policies.
In 2018, I have been working as visiting research scholar at CASOS - Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University.
Regarding my PhD dissertation, I will be lucky to be supervised by Prof. Kathleen M. Carley. The aim of the dissertation is to detect and predict behavioral patterns of different jihadist terrorist organizations.
Some of my on-going projects deal with the empirical analysis of the territorial governance carried out by Italian organised crime, the statistical improvement and sensitivity of an indicator that measure the presence of mafia groups at municipal level, the over-time detection of different clusters/strata of Italian provinces regarding mafia presence, the implementation of machine learning techniques to identify patterns in Jihadist terrorism.