Since 2000, he is Full Professor of Computer Science at Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He was awarded with a Member status to the Academy of Sciences in 2019 and to the Institute of Advanced Studies at UNIBO in 2024. Since 2022, he has been serving on the Scientific Board of the Italian Space Agency. He has been a Visiting Scholar at UCLA (2011-2015) and a Visiting Scientist at ICSI in Berkeley (1993). In 2017-2018, he was the Coordinator of the PhD School on Data Science and Computation at UNIBO.
His current research interests include human data science, prescient intelligence, human-AI partnership, data & AI for social good and biomedinformatics. He has published over 250 papers, whose quality has been recognized with numerous awards including five best paper awards, a Microsoft Research Star Award and a Web Accessibility Challenge Delegates Award (W3C Consortium).
Currently a PhD student at the Department of History and Cultures (UNIBO), specializing in Near Eastern Landscape Archaeology, her research focuses on the settlement dynamics of southern Mesopotamia through the use of remote sensing techniques, geomorphological analysis of the landscape and, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna, the application of advanced predictive models to archaeological investigations.
She participated to the EU-financed projects WALADU and EDUU, where she had an active role in the training of Iraqi academic staff on GIS skills.