Research interests.  I am interested in the spatial dimension of data and knowledge, especially related to mobility phenomena. My current research focuses primarily on the study of behavior patterns in traces of people and animals.  These patterns are of primary interest in a variety of applications, including visitor profiling, computational sociology, security, animal ecology.   Behavior analysis requires the observation of real world mobility phenomena, the development of data models and analytical tools, the investigation of quality metrics and benchmarking.   An additional stream of research is to bridge spatial computing and cybersecurity, focusing on location-based security for authentication, access control, privacy.   Main contributions and artifacts developed in my research:

• Discovery of stop-move patterns in trajectories  from UWB, GNSS, Telco data.   We developed : the clustering-based SeqScan  family of stop detection techniques for the segmentation of continuous and discrete trajectories;  quality metrics for the evaluation of stop-move patterns; stop-driven analytics for individuals, groups and POI profiling; benchmarking.   We have recently released the software package  Stop@.

• Data models for the high-level representation of mobility data:  the Semantic Trajectory conceptual data model; the Symbolic Trajectory logical data model; query models for Symbolic Trajectories processing

• Location-based access control:  the Geo-RBAC model and its extensions, Geo-RBAC has been a pioneering model in access control, compliant with the  RBAC standard

• Location privacy: the PROBE technique for semantic location obfuscation in free and network spaces, The technique targets location protection against background knowledge on sensitive locations

• Applications in a variety of domains, including:

-  animal ecology:  migration analysis from low sampled GPS trajectories (MigrO)

-  museums:   behavior analysis of visitors from UWB trajectories

-  geology:  Etna Lava Flow Model (EFLM), a  simulator of volcanic lava flows

Short bio.  I graduated cum laude in Computer Science from the University of Pisa and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from EPFL. Before joining academia in 2003, I held various positions in applied research across public and private companies in Italy, including CSELT, Datamont Spa, and Elda Ingegneria Spa. My work spanned several European research projects, primarily focusing on knowledge representation and semantic networks,  including Esprit Esteam, Itacha 1, ADKMS, Business Class, and AIMS. Additionally, I co-founded a start-up specializing in geographical information systems for civil engineering.

In academia, I participated in various European research projects, including the FP6 GeoPKDD (as an EPFL subcontractor), FP7 Modap (Mobility Data Mining and Privacy), and COST Action Move (Knowledge Discovery from Moving Objects). I've also been involved in national research projects funded by the Italian Ministry of Research, such as PRIN Next-generation Ultra-wideband Localization and Communication for the Internet of Things (2019–2023) and PNRR Serics - Security and Rights in Cyberspace (January 2023–2025).

I currently serve as an associate editor for ACM TSAS and Springer GeoInformatica, and from 2017 to 2022, I was an associate editor for IEEE TDSC. In recent roles, I served as PC co-Chair for IEEE Mobile Data Management 2023 and General co-Chair for ACM SIGSpatial 2023, and I am serving as PC co-Chair for ACM SIGSpatial 2025. I was elected as a member of the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (https://www.sigspatial.org/) (Mid-2023 to Mid-2026). Currently, I am also serving on the VQR4 Committee for Research Quality Assessment in Italy (Mid-2024 to Mid-2026).