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 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 | 29 | 22 | 17 |
| Citations | 404 | 204 | 116 |
| Citations / Article | 13.39 | 9.27 | 6.82 |
| h-index | 11 | 7 | - |
| i10-index | 11 | - | - |
Last update: May 16, 2025
Publications
View details
Talks
Academic Activity
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Organizational Roles:
- 21th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL 2025), Udine, February 20-21, 2025. Website Chair. https://ircdl2025.uniud.it/
- 14th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2024), Udine, September 5-6, 2024. Organizer and Website Chair. https://iir2024.uniud.it/
- CARE: Conversational Agents and Responsible Ethics in Healthcare - Workshop at the European Federation of Medical Informatics Special Topic Conference 2023 (EFMI STC 2023), Turin, October 27, 2023. Organizer.
- Fourth Symposium on Biases in Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (BHCC 2022), Online. Organizer, Proceedings Chair, and Website Chair. https://bhcc2022.org/
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Program Committee Roles:
- 15th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2025), Cagliari, September 3-5, 2025. Full and Short Papers Tracks.
- 12th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2024), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Full Papers Track.
- 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024), Washington D.C., USA. Full and Short Papers Tracks.
- 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023), Dublin, Ireland. Short Papers Track.
- 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2022), Madrid, Spain. Short Papers Track.
- Third Symposium on Biases in Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (BHCC 2021), Online.
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Reviewer:
- International Journal on Digital Libraries (2025). Journal ISSN: 0378-2484
- Data Science and Engineering (2025). Journal ISSN: 2364-1541
- Information Processing & Management (2023). Journal ISSN: 0306-4573. Contribution registered on ORCID profile.
- Springer Nature Scientific Report (2023). Journal ISSN: 2045-2322
- 13th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2023), Pisa, Italy.
- Information Processing & Management (2022). Journal ISSN: 0306-4573
- Tenth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2022), Online.
- Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2022), Bologna, Italy.
- 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022), Stavanger, Norway.
- Second Symposium on Biases in Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (BHCC 2021), Delft, Netherlands (Online).
- 30th ACM International Conference On Information And Knowledge Management (CIKM 2021), Online.
- 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT 2021), Online.
- 29th ACM International Conference On Information And Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020), Galway, Ireland (Online).
- 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT 2020), Online.
- 15th Italian Research Conference On Digital Libraries (IRCDL 2019), Pisa.
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Mentoring:
- Co-supervision of the theses of 10 Master’s (MSc) and 15 Bachelor’s (BSc) students, as well as various advanced projects and seminars.
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Affiliations:
- Member of the Social, Mobile, Data, & Crowd Laboratory (SMDC).
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