Michael Soprano

Welcome to my personal webpage. I am a Researcher at the University of Udine and a member of the Social, Mobile, Data & Crowd Laboratory . I hold a PhD in Computer Science and Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

My research interests include Human Computation, Crowdsourcing, Information Retrieval, and Large Language Models. My current work focuses in particular on the use of crowdsourcing to address the growing challenge of misinformation.

You can explore my PhD thesis (written in English), as well as my Master’s , Bachelor’s , and High School theses (written in Italian).

Education

Nov. 2019 - Jan. 2023

PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics, Cum Laude

University of Udine, Udine, Italy.

Mar. 2015 - Mar. 2018

Master's Degree in Computer Science, 109/110

University of Udine, Udine, Italy.

Oct. 2011 - Mar. 2015

Bachelor's Degree in Web Technologies and Multimedia, 101/110

University of Udine, Udine, Italy.

Sep. 2006 - Jun. 2011

Technical High School Diploma in Computer Science, 77/100

I.S.I.S. Raimondo D’Aronco, Gemona del Friuli, Italy.

Experience

Postdoctoral Researcher

Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics (DMIF), University of Udine

Jun 2025 – Present Udine, Italy

Research contract pursuant to Article 22 of Law 240/2010, under the University Regulation approved on April 30, 2025. Research on information and disinformation, with a focus on the automatic evaluation of information truthfulness, experimentation with detection models, and the definition of evaluation metrics.

Self-employed Worker

Department of Economic and Statistical Sciences (DIES), University of Udine

Mar 2025 – May 2025 Udine, Italy

Design, implementation, and evaluation of a conversational system for accessing regional public healthcare services. Activities included prototype development, experimental evaluation, and data analysis within the interdepartmental project “Governance and Digital Public Administration”.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics (DMIF), University of Udine

Dec 2023 – May 2025 Udine, Italy

Research activity within the PRIN 2022 project “The Measure of Truth: An Evaluation-Centered Machine-Human Hybrid Framework for Assessing Information Truthfulness” (Code 20227F2ZN3, CUP G53D23002800006), funded by the European Union, NextGenerationEU, PNRR M4 C2 I1.1. Definition of an evaluation framework for misinformation detection systems, including the creation of labelled datasets, bias prevention, and truthfulness-oriented evaluation metrics.

Self-employed Worker

Archeido S.r.l.

Aug 2017 – Feb 2018 Udine, Italy

Development, as a full-stack developer, of a web application for the management and visualization of financial assets.

Self-employed Worker

Datamantix S.r.l.

Jun 2017 – Feb 2019 Udine, Italy

Design, development, and maintenance of several web applications and a chatbot as a full-stack developer.

Self-employed Worker

Troublezine

Nov 2015 – Feb 2016 Udine, Italy

Design, development, and maintenance of a blog on music news and events as a full-stack web developer.

Visits

Bibliometrics

Bibliometric indicators by source
IndicatorGoogle ScholarScopusWeb of ScienceACM Digital Library
Publications38312026
Citations719357237194
h-index1499--
i10-index15------

Scopus

Publications
31
Citations
357
h-index
9
i10-index
--

Last updated: September 1, 2026

Publications

View all 38 publications

Presentations

See all events

Activity

Organizational Roles

  • 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2026). Tutorials Chair
  • Workshop “AI, Misinformation and Disinformation”, held as part of the 5th National CINI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Ital-IA 2025), Trieste, 23 Jun 2025. Organizer
  • 21st Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL 2025), Udine, 20–21 Feb 2025. Website Chair. Website
  • 14th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2024), Udine, 5–6 Sep 2024. Organizer and Website Chair. Website
  • CARE: Conversational Agents and Responsible Ethics in Healthcare Workshop, held as part of the European Federation of Medical Informatics Special Topic Conference 2023 (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, and Website Chair

Program Committee Memberships

  • 15th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2025), Cagliari, 3–5 Sep 2025. Full and Short Papers tracks
  • 12th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2024), Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Full Papers track
  • 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024), Washington, DC, 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. Program Committee Member

Reviewing Activities

  • 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026), Budapest, Hungary
  • 19th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2026)
  • Umanistica Digitale - Italian Journal of Digital Humanities, ISSN 2532-8816, 2025. Website
  • International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL), 2025. Website
  • Data Science and Engineering, 2025. Website
  • Information Processing & Management, 2023. Review activity recorded on ORCID
  • Scientific Reports, 2023. Website
  • 13th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2023), Pisa, Italy
  • Information Processing & Management, 2022
  • 10th 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
  • Third 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, Italy

Supervision and Mentoring

  • Thesis supervision: 1 BSc thesis
  • Thesis co-supervision: 13 MSc and 16 BSc theses

Counts include completed and ongoing theses. Additional mentoring activities include advanced student projects, seminars, course assignments, and internships.

Affiliations

  • Member of the Social, Mobile, Data & Crowd Laboratory (SMDC), University of Udine. Website

Teaching

Course

Social Computing

Bachelor's Degree in Internet of Things, Big Data, and Machine Learning at the University of Udine

Course details

Honors & Grants

Award

PhD Award 2024

One of the two awards conferred by the University of Udine in the technical-scientific area for the best PhD theses completed in 2023. Thesis title: In Crowd Veritas: Leveraging Human Intelligence to Fight Misinformation.
Grant

WSDM 2022 Student Grant

15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2022), Phoenix, USA. Conference registration waiver provided by WSDM. Held remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Grant

CIKM 2020 Student Grant

29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020), Galway, Ireland. Conference registration waiver provided by CIKM. Held remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Service

SIGIR 2020 Student Volunteer

43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2020), Xi’an, China. Conference registration waiver provided by SIGIR. Held remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Topics

Contact

Get in touch

For collaborations, teaching, academic service, or other enquiries, send me a message or contact me directly.

  • AddressVia delle Scienze 206, 33100 Udine, Italy
  • OfficeRizzi Building, 2° Floor, South Node, Lab SMDC (LC2-04-DE), Room A2 32

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Office location

University of Udine · Rizzi Building

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