Apr. 22 – Paolo Ferragina, from Catanzaro and professor of algorithms at the Department of Computer Science and Vice Rector for Applied Research and Innovation at the University of Pisa, received the Google Research Award 2013, a prestigious honor bestowed by the famous research engine each year to research projects for new technologies and web services. Ferragina’s “A novel graph for social-network analysis and search by built-entity annotators, and its applications” is the natural continuation of another study presented in December 2010 (which also received a Google Award) on the analysis of “rich” collections of heterogenous short texts, such as those found in social networks and online platforms where content is generated by users. The study had led to the development of a new algorithm, Tagme (the most efficient and effective semantic annotator known in the literature), able to identify significant sequences of terms and to link them to other “variables,” much like Wikipedia does with its intra-site links.
