Projects

SoMe4Dem (Social Media for Democracy) investigates how digital communication and social media influence democratic processes and political participation across Europe. Bringing together a multidisciplinary consortium of researchers, policy experts, and civic tech practitioners, the project aims to understand the role of digital platforms in shaping political engagement, public discourse, and institutional trust. Through empirical research, methodological innovation, and stakeholder collaboration, SoMe4Dem seeks to support democratic resilience by developing actionable insights and tools that enhance transparency, accountability, and citizen participation in the digital public sphere.

Within the SoMe4Dem project, I develop and apply digital methodologies to investigate the socio-political dynamics of online interactions and opinion formation. My research explores how digital platforms mediate processes of identity construction, collective expression, and public deliberation. A particular focus lies in understanding how these interactions influence participation in socio-political initiatives, notably through mechanisms such as crowdfunding campaigns and online petitions. By integrating computational techniques with social science perspectives and drawing on my background in behavioral economics, my work contributes to broader inquiries into how digital communication shapes patterns of online engagement, political mobilization, and collective support.

​The MUHAI (Meaning and Understanding in Human-centric AI) project is pioneering a novel approach to artificial intelligence by focusing on the construction and comprehension of narratives. Central to this initiative is the development of computational models that enable AI systems to grasp the multifaceted nature of meaning, integrating sensory-motor experiences, linguistic data, semantic memory, and mental simulations.​

Within the MUHAI project, my work focused on designing and developing the Social Inequality Observatory, along with related tools, interfaces, datasets, analytical approaches, and case studies. This effort involved extensive coordination and collaboration with teams from Sony CSL, the Bremen University Media Lab, and the AI group at VUA. Positioned at the core of the project’s third Work Package, the observatory aimed to analyse and understand how social inequalities are perceived, discussed, and framed across different audiences and online platforms—particularly on social media and semantic web sources such as Wikipedia. 

ISEED (Inclusive Science and European Democracies) explores how citizen engagement in science can inform and strengthen democratic practices across Europe. By developing the concept of deliberative participation, ISEED investigates how knowledge, institutions and digital technology shape meaningful citizen involvement in democratic decision-making. Through interdisciplinary research and experimentation, ISEED aims to support more inclusive, participatory, and reflective democracies.

Within the ISEED project, my work focused on developing computational social science methods to support the analysis of citizen engagement and deliberative participation. I contributed to the creation of an argument extraction toolset designed to analyze large-scale public discourse. These tools were applied to key case studies, including social media debates surrounding the No Deal Brexit and discussions in the scientific literature and public sphere on the societal impacts of COVID-19. Through these applications, I explored how digital traces of argumentation can reveal the structure and dynamics of contemporary democratic discourse.

The ODYCCEUS project (Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces) was an EU-funded Horizon 2020 initiative aimed at advancing the understanding of cultural conflicts and opinion dynamics in the digital era. By integrating computational social science, game theory, and advanced natural language processing, the project sought to analyze how divergent worldviews and cultural biases contribute to societal polarization and conflict.
A central deliverable of ODYCCEUS was the development of PENELOPE, a cloud-based, open, and modular platform designed to facilitate the mapping and analysis of opinions expressed in online media. PENELOPE enables users to process data from social media and digital sources, apply digital methods, and visualize the results, thereby supporting both researchers and the general public in understanding the dynamics of public discourse.

My contribution to the ODYCCEUS project was twofold. First, as a PhD at Ca'Foscari and as a Visiting Researcher at the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) in Amsterdam, and later at the AI Lab in Brussels, I collaborated closely with researchers working on the project, particularly in the design and implementation of the first demo of the Penelope platform and opinion observatories. This involved developing related pipelines and open APIs aimed at providing digital tools for analyzing, visualizing and modelling discourse dynamics from various social media.
My contribution also included development and orchestration of a collaborative programming environment for the 2019 ODYCCEUS Summer School. Additionally, I played an important role in the conception and development of the AquaGranda project (see project below). Alongside Luc Steels and Massimo Warglien, I contributed to the design and vision of AquaGranda's Digital Community Memory and was in charge of the digital archive design and data collection.