About
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 download my Curriculum Vitae in English or Italian. You can also explore my PhD thesis, together with my Master's, Bachelor's, and High School theses (in Italian).
Interests
- Human Computation
- Crowdsourcing
- Information Retrieval
- Large Language Models
Education
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PhD in Computer Science and Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Cum Laude, Nov. 2019 - Jan. 2023
University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
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Master's Degree in Computer Science, 109/110, Mar. 2015 - Mar. 2018
University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
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Bachelor's Degree in Web Technologies and Multimedia, 101/110, Oct. 2011 - Mar. 2015
University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
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Technical High School Diploma in Computer Science, 77/100, Oct. 2006 - Jun. 2011
I.S.I.S. Raimondo D’Aronco, Gemona del Friuli, Italy.
Visits
Visiting PhD Student
Research visit carried out during the PhD programme.
Experience
Postdoctoral Researcher
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
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
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.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Research on e-government applications based on conversational agents for the Italian public administration, with particular emphasis on the healthcare domain.
Self-employed Worker
Development of a web application supporting the comparability and reproducibility of research results in combinatorial optimization.
Research Fellow
Research project co-funded by SISSA Medialab on the design, implementation, and evaluation of an ecosystem providing an alternative to traditional peer review in scholarly publishing.
Self-employed Worker
Development, as a full-stack developer, of a web application for the management and visualization of financial assets.
Self-employed Worker
Design, development, and maintenance of several web applications and a chatbot as a full-stack developer.
Self-employed Worker
Troublezine
Design, development, and maintenance of a blog on music news and events as a full-stack web developer.
Bibliometrics
| Google Scholar | Scopus | ACM Digital Library | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publications | 38 | 31 | 26 |
| Citations | 691 | 346 | 191 |
| h-index | 14 | 9 | – |
| i10-index | 14 | – | – |
Last update: August 1, 2026
Publications
View details
Beyond Seeing Is Believing: On Crowdsourced Detection of Audiovisual Deepfakes.
6th Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval (ROMCIR 2026), held in conjunction with ECIR 2026.,
2026.
Analyzing AI Evaluation Benchmarks Through Information Retrieval and Network Science.
Advances in Information Retrieval: 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 16484, Springer, Cham. Conference Rank: CORE A; GGS A-.,
2026.
Large Language Models as Assessors: On the Impact of Relevance Scales.
Advances in Information Retrieval: 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026). Conference Rank: CORE A; GGS A-.,
2026.
Large Language Models for Combinatorial Optimization: A Systematic Review.
ACM Computing Surveys. Journal Ranks: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q1 (2024), Scimago (SJR) Q1 (2024).,
2026.
AIDME: A Scalable, Interpretable Framework for AI-Aided Scoping Reviews.
Proceedings of the 2025 International ACM SIGIR Conference on Innovative Concepts and Theories in Information Retrieval (ICTIR),
2025.
Efficiency and Effectiveness of LLM-Based Summarization of Evidence in Crowdsourced Fact-Checking.
Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Conference Rank: GGS A++, Core A.*,
2025.
PILs of Knowledge: A Synthetic Benchmark for Evaluating Question Answering Systems in Healthcare.
Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Conference Rank: GGS A++, Core A.*,
2025.
The Magnitude of Truth: On Using Magnitude Estimation for Truthfulness Assessment.
Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Conference Rank: GGS A++, Core A.*,
2025.
In Crowd Veritas: Leveraging Human Intelligence To Fight Misinformation.
arXiv preprint 2506.09221,
2025.
Agent-Based Healthcare Chatbots for Regional System Services: A Case Study in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region.
Intelligent Health Systems – From Technology to Data and Knowledge.,
2025.
Search Trajectory Networks Applied to a Real-World Parallel Batch Scheduling Problem.
Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2025). Conference Rank: GGS B.,
2025.
Evaluation of Crowdsourced Peer Review using Synthetic Data and Simulations.
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Information and Research Science Connecting to Digital and Library Science.,
2025.
Report on the 14th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2024).
SIGIR Forum,
2024.
Report on the Hands-On PhD Course on Responsible AI from the Lens of an Information Access Researcher.
SIGIR Forum,
2024.
Enhancing Fact-Checking: From Crowdsourced Validation to Integration with Large Language Models.
Proceedings of the 14th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop.,
2024.
Crowdsourcing Statement Classification to Enhance Information Quality Prediction.
Proceedings of the 6th Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM 2024). Münster, Germany.,
2024.
Longitudinal Loyalty: Understanding The Barriers To Running Longitudinal Studies On Crowdsourcing Platforms.
Journal Rank: Scimago (SJR) Q2 (2023).,
2024.
Crowdsourced Fact-checking: Does It Actually Work?.
Information Processing & Management. Journal Ranks: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q1 (2023), Scimago (SJR) Q1 (2023).,
2024.
Cognitive Biases in Fact-Checking and Their Countermeasures: A Review.
Information Processing & Management. Journal Ranks: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q1 (2022), Scimago (SJR) Q1 (2022).,
2024.
Towards a Conversational-Based Agent for Health Services.
Proceedings of the Italia Intelligenza Artificiale - Thematic Workshops co-located with the 3rd CINI National Lab AIIS Conference on Artificial Intelligence.,
2023.
Fact-Checking at Scale with Crowdsourcing Experiments and Lessons Learned.
Proceedings of the 13th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop.,
2023.
How Many Crowd Workers Do I Need? On Statistical Power When Crowdsourcing Relevance Judgments.
ACM Transactions on Information Systems. Journal Ranks: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q1 (2021), Scimago (SJR) Q1 (2021).,
2023.
Transparent assessment of information quality of online reviews using formal argumentation theory.
Information Systems. Journal Ranks: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q2 (2021), Scimago (SJR) Q1 (2021).,
2022.
A Neural Model to Jointly Predict and Explain Truthfulness of Statements.
Journal of Data and Information Quality, July 2022. Journal Ranks: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q3 (2021), Scimago (SJR) Q2 (2021).,
2022.
The Effects of Crowd Worker Biases in Fact-Checking Tasks.
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.,
2022.
Crowd_Frame: A Simple and Complete Framework to Deploy Complex Crowdsourcing Tasks Off-the-Shelf.
Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2022). Virtual Event, AZ, USA. Conference Ranks: GGS A+, Core A,
2022.
The Many Dimensions of Truthfulness: Crowdsourcing Misinformation Assessments on a Multidimensional Scale.
Information Processing & Management. Journal Ranks: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q1 (2021), Scimago (SJR) Q1 (2021).,
2021.
E-BART: Jointly Predicting and Explaining Truthfulness.
Proceedings of the 2021 Truth and Trust Online Conference,
2021.
Can The Crowd Judge Truthfulness? A Longitudinal Study on Recent Misinformation About COVID-19.
*Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Journal Ranks: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q2 (2020), Scimago (SJR) Q1 (2021).,
2021.
Assessing the Quality of Online Reviews Using Formal Argumentation Theory.
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Web Engineering. Conference Ranks (2021): GGS B-, Core B.,
2021.
The COVID-19 Infodemic: Can the Crowd Judge Recent Misinformation Objectively?.
*Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. Conference Ranks: GGS A+, Core A.,
2020.
Can The Crowd Identify Misinformation Objectively? The Effects of Judgment Scale and Assessor's Background.
Proceedings of the 43st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Conference Rank: GGS A++, Core A.*,
2020.
Bias and Fairness in Effectiveness Evaluation by Means of Network Analysis and Mixture Models.
Proceedings of the 10th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop.,
2019.
HITS Hits Readersourcing: Validating Peer Review Alternatives Using Network Analysis.
Proceedings of the 4th Joint Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing for Digital Libraries co-located with the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.,
2019.
Crowdsourcing Peer Review: As We May Do.
Digital Libraries: Supporting Open Science,
2019.
Crowdsourcing Peer Review in the Digital Humanities?.
Book of Abstracts, 8th AIUCD Conference 2019 – Pedagogy, Teaching, and Research in the Age of Digital Humanities,
2019.
Reproduce and Improve: An Evolutionary Approach to Select a Few Good Topics for Information Retrieval Evaluation.
Journal of Data and Information Quality. Journal Rank: Scimago (SJR) Q2 (2018),
2018.
Effectiveness Evaluation with a Subset of Topics: A Practical Approach.
Proceedings of the 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Conference Rank: GGS A++, Core A*,
2018.
Presentations
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
- 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, 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
Honors & Grants
- PhD Award 2024. 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. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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