Luca de Alfaro

Professor, Computer Science

University of California, Santa Cruz

Contact Information

• Email: luca@ucsc.edu
• Office: E2-339A
• Phone: 650-248-2856
• Office hours: Tuesdays 4-5pm.

Here is my curriculum vitae and resume.

Interests

• Crowdsourcing and reputation systems.
• Machine learning over structures.

Selected Recent Papers

• R. Agrawal, L. de Alfaro. Learning Edge Properties in Graphs from Path Aggregations. In Proceedings of The Web Conference, 2019.
  • E. Tacchini, G. Ballarin, M.L. Della Vedova, S. Moret, L. de Alfaro. Some Like It Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social Networks. Technical report UCSC-SOE-17-05, 2017. Also available as https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.07506.
  • M. Daltayanni, A. Dasan, L. de Alfaro. Automated Audience Segmentation Using Reputation Signals. In proceedings of KDD 2018, the 24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2018.
  • R. Agrawal, L. de Alfaro, V. Polychronopoulos. Learning from Graph Neighborhoods Using LSTMs. In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Crowdsourcing, Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence Agents, 2017, held with the 31st AAAI Conference (AAAI-17). Also available as https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.06882

All publications

Book: Programming Abstractions in Python

Projects for Undergraduates

I am looking for outstanding undergraduate students interested in joining these projects.

Personal Projects

• Camio is a startup I co-founded that specializes in processing for webcam (and more!) images. Camio learns what you consider important and gives you intelligent alerts, and makes you whole video history searchable: "humans garden Tuesday" or "humans approaching door", or "car driveway" -- try it!
• CrowdGrader, a system for crowdsourcing the grading of homework assignments. Students upload their submissions to homework assignments, and then review and grade each others' solutions. The system then computes consensus grades for the submissions, relying on a reputation system.
• SimiCheck is a tool for detecting documents and homework similarity. SimiCheck understands code, text, Word (.docx), pdf, zip, tag, tgz, html, and more, and is able to compare code without being fooled by things like variable renaming and code moves.

See also the past and archived projects.

Teaching

Interested in UCSC?

UCSC is a great university where to study for an undergraduate or graduate degree. UCSC combines a wonderful campus, academically excellent degree programs, and a proximity to Silicon Valley that makes industrial collaborations, startups, exchange of ideas, and internships very easy. If you are considering UCSC for your undergraduate or graduate studies, you might want to check where my past collaborators are now. The strongest testament to the excellence of a program are the careers of the people who were part of it!