donatellafirmani

Publications

Service

Panels and Seminars

Teaching

I am a Computer Engineer and Associate Professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome. My research activity is dedicated to different aspects of data management, including entity resolution, data quality, algorithmic methods for large-scale datasets and responsible data science. I received my Ph.D. in Computer science and Engineering at Sapienza University under the supervision of prof. Giorgio Ausiello and I was visiting student at AT&T Labs and Rutgers University. Before joining Sapenza I was assistant professor (RTD-A) in the Department of Engineering at Roma Tre University.

Since 2026 I am Scientific Coordinator of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Node of the Rome Technopole Foundation.

I am actively looking for students to work with me. If you are interested, please email me donatella.firmani@uniroma1.it

Sapienza websites

Publications

Selected papers:

PVLDB 2026, "Can we trust LLM Self-Explanations for Entity Resolution?", with Tommaso Teofili, Nick Koudas, Paolo Merialdo and Divesh Srivastava
PVLDB 2025, "Evaluating Methods for Efficient Entity Count Estimation", with Jerin George Mathew and Divesh Srivastava
ACL 2025, "R-Fairness: Assessing Fairness of Ranking in Subjective Data" with Sihem Amer-Yahia, Lorenzo Balzotti, Jerin George Mathew and Riccardo Torlone
SIGMOD 2022, "Hierarchical Entity Resolution using an Oracle", with Sainyam Galhotra, Barna Saha and Divesh Srivastava
SIGMOD 2022, "Explaining Link Prediction Systems based on Knowledge Graph Embeddings", with Andrea Rossi, Paolo Merialdo and Tommaso Teofili
ICDE 2022, "Effective Explanations for Entity Resolution Models", with Tommaso Teofili, Nick Koudas, Paolo Merialdo and Divesh Srivastava
VLDBJ 2021, Efficient and effective ER with progressive blocking, with Sainyam Galhotra, Barna Saha and Divesh Srivastava
TKDD 2021 "Knowledge Graph Embedding for Link Prediction: A Comparative Analysis", with Andrea Rossi, Denilson Barbosa, Antonio Matinata, Paolo Merialdo
SIGMOD 2018, "Robust Entity Resolution using Random Graphs", with Sainyam Galhotra, Barna Saha and Divesh Srivastava
KDD 2018, Towards Knowledge Discovery from the Vatican Secret Archives. In Codice Ratio - Episode 1: Machine Transcription of the Manuscripts, with Marco Maiorino, Paolo Merialdo and Elena Nieddu
KDD 2017, "Fast Enumeration of Large k-Plexes", with Alessio Conte, Caterina Mordente, Maurizio Patrignani and Riccardo Torlone
PVLDB 2016, "Online Entity Resolution Using an Oracle", with Barna Saha and Divesh Srivastava

Full list of papers: Google Scholar, DBLP

Service

Recent conference/workshop organization:

2027: PC member of PVLDB, SIGMOD and EDBT, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Chair of SIGMOD, Senior PC member of ICDE
2026: PC member of PVLDB, SIGMOD, CIKM and BDA, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Chair of SIGMOD, Senior PC member of CIKM Demonstration
2025: Program Chair of SEBD and IRCDL, Research Area Chair for ICDE, PC member of SIGMOD, PVLDB, ALENEX, BDA, Good-Data@AAAI and GuideAI@VLDB, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Chair of SIGMOD (see here for the panel)
2024: Program Chair of aiDM@SIGMOD, PC member of SIGMOD, SEA, IRCDL, IEEE BigData, GUIDE-AI@SIGMOD, ADBIS Workshop, BDA, SEBD, CEC@ICNP, Proceedings co-Chair of EDBT
2023: Program Chair of aiDM@SIGMOD, PC member of EDBT, SIGMOD, SEA, IRCDL, SEBD, AIxIA, ESA, AI4CH@AIxIA
2022: Program Chair of aiDM@SIGMOD, PC member of SEBD, AI*CH@AIxIA and KG@ICDM
2021: Program Chair of PIE@EDBT, PC member of EDBT, co-Chair of SIGMOD progamming contest
2020: Program Chair of PIE@EDBT, PC member of EDBT, aiDM@SIGMOD, SEBD and LSGDA@VLDB, PC member and Poster Chair of ICDE, co-Chair of SIGMOD progamming contest and Program Chair of DI2KG@VLDB
2019: Program Chair of DI2KG@KDD and PIE@CAiSE, PC member of CIKM and ICDE, Scholarship Chair of ACM WomENcourage. Sponsor for the Django Girls workshop.
2018: PC member of SEBD

Editorial:

2024-today: Member of the VLDB Journal Reviewer Board
2020-today: Associate Editor for ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality
2021-2022: Guest Editor for ACM JDIQ, Special issue in "Data Quality and Ethics"
2020-2021: Guest Editor for Frontiers in Big Data in Data Mining and Management, Special issue in "Big Data Management in Industry 4.0"

Panels and Seminars

Participant in the Dagstuhl Seminar 26281 on Multimodal Data Quality – Human, Computational, and Institutional Perspectives
Lecture "Link Prediction on Knowledge Graphs for Service-Oriented Computing" at SummerSoc 2026 (20th Symposium and Summer School on Service-Oriented Computing)
Panel Moderator at the SIGMOD 2025 DEI Panel on "Towards a Broader Impact: Expanding the Reach of Data Management Research" with panelists Sihem Amer-Yahia (CNRS, LIG, Vice President of VLDB Endowment), Yael Amsterdamer (Bar-Ilan University), Sourav S Bhowmick (Nanyang Technological University), Carlo Curino (Microsoft), Sainyam Galhotra (Cornell University), Gianmaria Silvello (University of Padua)
Panelist at the EDBT 2024 Ph.D. Workshop on "How to write (and receive) reviews", moderated by Felix Naumann (Hasso Plattner Institute), together with Paolo Missier (Newcastle University, UK), Volker Markl (TU Berlin, Germany), Anastassia Ailamaki (EPFL, Switzerland), Donatella Firmani (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), Benny Kimelfeld and (T echnion, Israel), and Sudeepa Roy (Duke University, USA)

Teaching

2026: Big Data Analytics, Master Degree in Statistical Methods and Applications, Sapienza University.
2024-2025: Introduction to Computer Programming, Master Degree in Statistical Methods and Applications, Sapienza University.
2023-2026: Data Cleaning and Integration in Official Statistics, Master Degree in Statistical Methods and Applications, Sapienza University.
2021-2025: Informatica, Laurea in Statistica, economia, finanza e assicurazioni e Statistica gestionale, Sapienza University. (in Italian)
2022: Introduction to Big Data Integration, Ph.D. program in Computer and Data Science, Modena and Reggio Emilia University.
2021-2023: Data Management, Master Degree in Statistical Methods and Applications, Sapienza University.
2019: Modern approaches to Entity Resolution, Ph.D. program in Computer Science, Roma Tre University.
2020: Elementi di Informatica, Laurea in Ingegneria Meccanica, Roma Tre University. (in Italian)
2017-2020: Fondamenti di Informatica, Laurea in Ingegneria Elettronica, Roma Tre University. (in Italian)

Advising

Adriano Izzi, Ph.D. in Engineering in Computer Science at Sapienza University (expected 2029)
Lorenzo Balzotti, post-doc in Statistical Sciences at Sapienza University
Flavia Tagliafierro, Ph.D. in Statistical Sciences at Sapienza University (expected 2026) currently Senior Statistician at Ministero della Giustizia
Jerin George Mathew, National Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at Sapienza University (2025) currently post-doc at University of Alberta, Canada
Tommaso Teofili, Ph.D. in Computer Science and Automation at Roma Tre University (2023) currently Principal Software Engineer at Elastic
Andrea Rossi, Ph.D. in Computer Science and Automation at Roma Tre University (2022) currently Head of AI at SylloTips, formerly at Google
Elena Nieddu, Ph.D. in Computer Science and Automation at Roma Tre University (2021) currently Data Scientist / ML Engineer at Poste Italiane AI Hub

Projects

Recent research projects:

2025-2028: APM "Automotive Predictive Maintenance". Fondo per la Crescita Sostenibile - Accordi per l'innovazione. (Co-Unit Leader)
2025-2027: "Knowledge Graph technologies for the next-generation Computing Continuum". Sapienza Research Project B83C2500088005. (Principal Investigator)
2024-2027: INTEND "Intent-based data operation in the computing continuum". HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions 101135576. (Unit Leader)
2024-2026: "Performing arts, economics, and cultural policies. New interpretative paradigms between aesthetics and social sciences." PRIN National Research Project 2022P749MT
2023: FAIR - Spoke 5
2023-2025: "Trustworthy Technologies for Augmenting Knowledge Graphs". Sapienza Research Project B83C22007180001. (Principal Investigator)
2021-2024: FLOWER "Frontiers in Linking records: knOWledge graphs, Explainability and tempoRal data". SEED PNR Project B89J21032850001. (Principal Investigator)

Recent industry/government projects:

GRU project, with Dipartimento della funzione pubblica. Innovazione organizzativa e strategie di gestione delle risorse umane
Master data management of administrations, with Dipartimento della funzione pubblica. The project aims at providing a unified view over different administration indices, such as IPA and ISTAT, and a collection of tools for semi-automatic data integration and data quality management.
Data extraction from fiscal documents, with LAMBO. The project aimed at prototyping advanced OCR tools for fiscal documents, with high-performance on mobile devices (possibly without Internet access). Read the blog articleon our results. (in Italian)
Data managment of fiscal documents, with Mediatica. The project aimed at prototyping indexing and image processing tools for fiscal documents, in order to recognize their main layout features efficiently and speed up their manual processing.

Awards

2026: Distinguished Reviewer of SIGMOD 2026
2021: DL4KG Best Paper Award "Knowledge Graph Embeddings or Bias Graph Embeddings? A Study of Bias in Link Prediction Models'', with Andrea Rossi and Paolo Merialdo
2019: IEEE ICWS Best Paper Award "On Computing Throttling Rate Limits in Web APIs through Statistical Inference", with Francesco Leotta and Massimo Mecella
2018: SIGMOD Reproducibility Award for the paper "Robust Entity Resolution using Random Graphs", with Sainyam Galhotra, Barna Saha and Divesh Srivastava

Other (in Italian)

2026-present: Coordinatore Scientifico del nodo di calcolo High Performance Computing (HPC) della Fondazione Rome Technopole
2026-2038: Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (ASN) I Fascia Settore Concorsuale 01/B1 INFORMATICA
2026-present: Coordinatrice della Commissione Tirocini https://www.dss.uniroma1.it/en/didattica/internships, Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche. (Coordinamento iniziative di incontro tra studenti della laurea magistrale e stakeholder per lo svolgimento di tirocini)
2023-2025: Co-organizzatrice per l'evento annuale DSS Internship Day https://www.dss.uniroma1.it/en/didattica/internships
2021-present: Componente della Commissione per l'Orientamento in Entrata, Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche. (Coordinamento iniziative di incontro con le scuole superiori)
2025: General Co-Chair per il progetto G4GRETA 2025 https://g4greta.di.uniroma1.it/home (Terza Missione)

Contacts

name.lastname at uniroma1.it

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