Pier Paolo Tricomi

Ritratto Pier Paolo Tricomi

Curriculum
Computer Science for Societal Challenges and Innovation, XXXVI series
Grant sponsor

CARIPARO, Intesa Sanpaolo S.p.A., Fondazione UniSMART Università degli Studi di Padova
Supervisor

Mauro Conti
Co-supervisor
s
Anna Spagnolli
Contact
pierpaolo.tricomi@studenti.unipd.it

Project description
Online Social Networks (OSNs), are web-based platforms that allow users to create a profile and connect to other users within the network. There are plenty of such platforms, and they have been used for several purposes. Due to the massive use of OSNs, the data produced every day by their users can be very useful to study and give insights into society and its response to particular events or commercial products. This is exactly what is done in Social NetworkAnalytics, i.e., gathering and analyzing data from Social Networks to answer a particular question or solving a problem(e.g., politicians' popularity, users' reaction). However, many factors can undermine the success of such analysis. For instance, users’ reactions (e.g., posts or comments) can be manipulated to acquire, for automatic systems, the opposite meaning of the intended one, or a popularity analysis can be distorted if thousands of fake profiles are used to vote on a poll or to comment on a certain post. A resilient Social Network analytics is the purpose of this Ph.D. project, which means building tools to carry out the aforementioned analysis even in adversarial settings.