About
Welcome to my personal webpage. I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Udine, affiliated with the Social, Media, Data & Crowd Laboratory. I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics.
My research interests center around Human Computation, Crowdsourcing, and Information Retrieval. At present, I am focusing on using crowdsourcing to address the ever-increasing challenge of misinformation spread.
You can download my Curriculum Vitae in English or Italian.
Feel free to also check out my Ph.D. thesis, along with my Master's, Bachelor's, and High School theses (in Italian).
Interests
- Human Computation
- Crowdsourcing
- Information Retrieval
Education
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PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics, Cum Laude, Nov. 2019 - Jan. 2023
University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
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Master Degree in Computer Science, 109/110, Mar. 2015 - Mar. 2018
University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
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Bachelor Degree in Web Technologies and Multimedia, 101/110, Oct. 2011 - Mar. 2015
University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
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High School Diploma in Computer Science, 77/100, Oct. 2006 - Jun. 2011
I.S.I.S. Raimondo D’Aronco, Gemona del Friuli, Italy.
Experience
Postdoctoral Researcher
Research contract pursuant to Art. 22 of Law 240/2010, governed by the new University Regulation approved on April 30, 2025.
Research activities in the field of information and disinformation, with a focus on automatic truthfulness assessment, model experimentation, and definition of evaluation metrics.
Self-employed Worker
Design, implementation, and evaluation of a conversational system for accessing regional public health services.
Activities included prototype development, experimental evaluation, and data analysis, carried out within the interdepartmental project “Governance and Digital Public Administration”.
Postdoctoral Researcher
PRIN 2022 Project – “MoT—The Measure of Truth: An Evaluation-Centered Machine-Human Hybrid Framework for Assessing Information Truthfulness” (Code No. 20227F2ZN3, CUP No. G53D23002800006), funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU – PNRR M4 C2 I1.1.
Definition of an evaluation framework for misinformation detection systems, including dataset curation, bias mitigation, and suitable evaluation measures.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Research project focused on exploring conversational agent-based eGovernment applications for the Italian public administration, with a particular emphasis on healthcare.
Self-employed Worker
Development of a web application dedicated to the comparability and reproducibility of research results in the field of combinatorial optimization.
Research Fellow
Research project co-funded by SISSA Medialab focused on designing, implementing, and evaluating an ecosystem as an alternative to standard peer review in scholarly publishing.
Self-employed Worker
Development as a full-stack web developer of a web application for managing and visualizing financial assets.
Self-employed Worker
Design, development, and maintenance as a full-stack web developer of various types of web applications and a chatbot.
Self-employed Worker
Troublezine
Design, development, and maintenance as a full-stack web developer of a blog that offers news and events related to music.
Visits
Visiting Student
Visiting period during PhD studies.
Metrics
| Google Scholar | Scopus | ACM Digital Library | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Articles | 31 | 23 | 19 |
| Citations | 416 | 221 | 127 |
| h-index | 11 | 7 | - |
| i10-index | 11 | - | - |
Last update: June 27, 2025
Publications
View details
Talks
Academic Activity
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Organizational Roles
- Workshop “AI, Misinformation and Disinformation” – Ital-IA 2025, Trieste, 23 Jun 2025. Organizer. https://www.ital-ia2025.it/workshop/ai-misinformation-and-disinformation.html
- 21ᵗʰ Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL 2025), Udine, 20 – 21 Feb 2025. Website Chair. https://ircdl2025.uniud.it/
- 14ᵗʰ Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2024), Udine, 5 – 6 Sep 2024. Organizer & Website Chair. https://iir2024.uniud.it/
- CARE – Conversational Agents and Responsible Ethics in Healthcare (Workshop @ EFMI STC 2023), Turin, 27 Oct 2023. Organizer
- Fourth Symposium on Biases in Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (BHCC 2022), Online, 12 – 13 Oct 2022. Organizer, Proceedings Chair & Website Chair. https://bhcc2022.org/
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Program Committee Roles
- 15ᵗʰ IIR 2025, Cagliari, 3 – 5 Sep 2025 — Full & Short Papers Tracks
- 12ᵗʰ AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2024), Pittsburgh (PA), USA — Full Papers Track
- 47ᵗʰ ACM SIGIR 2024, Washington DC, USA — Full & Short Papers Tracks
- 45ᵗʰ ECIR 2023, Dublin, Ireland — Short Papers Track
- 45ᵗʰ ACM SIGIR 2022, Madrid, Spain — Short Papers Track
- Third BHCC 2021, Online — Program Committee Member
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Reviewer
- Umanistica Digitale – Italian Journal of Digital Humanities (ISSN 2532-8816), 2025 — https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/
- International Journal on Digital Libraries (ISSN 1432-5012), 2025 — https://www.springer.com/journal/799
- Data Science and Engineering (ISSN 2364-1541), 2025 — https://www.springer.com/journal/41019
- Information Processing & Management (ISSN 0306-4573), 2023 — contribution recorded on ORCID — https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/information-processing-and-management
- Scientific Reports (ISSN 2045-2322), 2023 — https://www.nature.com/srep/
- 13ᵗʰ IIR 2023, Pisa, Italy
- Information Processing & Management (ISSN 0306-4573), 2022
- 10ᵗʰ HCOMP 2022, Online
- CLEF 2022, Bologna, Italy
- 44ᵗʰ ECIR 2022, Stavanger, Norway
- Second BHCC 2021, Delft, Netherlands — Online
- 30ᵗʰ ACM CIKM 2021, Online
- 32ⁿᵈ ACM Hypertext 2021, Online
- 29ᵗʰ ACM CIKM 2020, Galway, Ireland — Online
- 31ˢᵗ ACM Hypertext 2020, Online
- 15ᵗʰ IRCDL 2019, Pisa, Italy
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Mentoring
- Co-supervision of 11 MSc and 16 BSc theses, plus several advanced projects and seminars (2020 – today)
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Affiliations
- Member, Social, Mobile, Data & Crowd Laboratory (SMDC) — https://smdc.uniud.it/smdc/en/members/
Honors & Grants
- PhD Award 2024 Recipient of an award from the University of Udine for the best PhD thesis in the scientific area for 2023. Thesis title: In Crowd Veritas: Leveraging Human Intelligence to Fight Misinformation.
- Student Grant to attend the 15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. Online (Held remotely due to COVID-19). Provided by WSDM. Free conference subscription.
- Student Grant to attend the 29th ACM International Conference On Information And Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020), Galway, Ireland. Online (Held remotely due to COVID-19). Provided by CIKM. Free conference subscription.
- Volunteer at the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2020), Xi’an, China. Online (Held remotely due to COVID-19). Provided by SIGIR. Free conference subscription.
Contact
- michael.soprano@uniud.it
- Via delle Scienze 206, Udine (Italy), 33100
- Rizzi Building, 2° Floor, South Node, Lab SMDC (LC2-04-DE), A2 32 Room