Salvatore Vilella

Ph.D. in Computer Science · Network Science, NLP and Data Science · salvatore [dot] vilella [at] gmail [dot] com

I am a computer scientist working at the intersection of Network Analysis, Computational Social Sciences, Machine Learning and Data Science. I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Turin (Italy), where I studied how segregation emerges in social networks and how it affects the spreading of ideas, contents, behaviours, rumours and whatever else can spread. In my most recent postdoc, at the University of Eastern Piedmont in 2024, I worked on Large Language Models — in particular on forgetting mechanisms and on the evaluation of LLM-based web search engines — and on applying AI and data science to real-world problems in finance and media. Along the way I have been a member of the ARCS group and I have taught at the University of Turin, the Polytechnic of Turin and the University of Eastern Piedmont.

Education

University of Turin (IT)

Ph.D. in Computer Science

My Ph.D. is focused on Complex Network Analysis, particularly on the study of network segregation and on how phenomena of simple and complex contagion are affected by the presence of segregated communities. During my PhD I am also having the chance to collaborate on many projects that are not strictly related to my main research topic, both in Academia and in the Industry. Covered topics include, but are not limited to, Natural Language Processing, Deep Neural Networks to detect emotions in texts, analysis of mobile telephony data, analysis of geo-spatial data. My advisor is Prof. Giancarlo Ruffo.

2018 - 2022

University of Turin (IT)

Master's Degree in Physics of Complex Systems

My Master Thesis consisted in an analysis of an internet traffic network, aiming at discovering correlations between the most popular online news media resources of Chile and the political polarization of the Chilean people. It included the development of a learning model that tries to forecast the outcome of the Presidential Elections based on the socio-demographic attributes of the voters.

2015 - 2018

University of Salento (IT)

Bachelor's Degree in Physics

My Bachelor Thesis consisted in an analysis of a theoretical framework for epidemiology studies using cellular automata and compartmental models (SI, SIR, SIS, SIRS etc.).

2010 - 2015

Experience

University of Eastern Piedmont (IT)

Postdoctoral Researcher

Postdoc position at the Department of Science and Technological Innovation, focused on Large Language Models: forgetting mechanisms in LLMs, LLM-based web search engines, and the critical evaluation of model outputs for reliability and factual accuracy. In parallel, I kept applying AI and data science methods to real-world problems in finance and media.

Feb 2024 - Jan 2025

Binghamton University, NY

Visiting Researcher

Short visit at the Complex Adaptive Systems and Computational Intelligence (CASCI) lab of the Binghamton University (SUNY), led by Prof. Luis M. Rocha. Here I delivered a talk, as part of the CoCo Seminar Series. A video of the talk is available at this link.

May 2023

University of Turin (IT)

Postdoctoral Researcher

Postdoc position focused on the application of complex systems theories and machine learning techniques on a variety of fields, ranging from the engagement of social media users with disinformation content to the detection of frauds in very large datasets of economic transactions.

2022 - 2024

University of Turin (IT)

Research Scholarship

During my PhD I am also involved in a project, led by Prof. Viviana Patti, whose goal is to develop a tool for the Italian National TV RAI that automatically detects emotions expressed by the users posting on RAI's social media feed.

2019 - 2020

Universidad del Desarrollo (Santiago de Chile)

Visiting Scholar

Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Data Science of Universidad del Desarrollo (SCL), under the supervision of Prof. Leo Ferres. I was lucky enough to visit twice, in 2019 and 2020.

2019 - 2020

ISI Foundation (IT)

Junior Researcher

Awarded with a Lagrange Scholarship to work as a Junior researcher at ISI Foundation (Turin) on Data-for-Good related topics, under the supervision of Dr. Daniela Paolotti.

2018 - 2019

University of Turin (IT)

Research Scholarship

Research Scholar at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Turin, under the supervision of Prof. Giancarlo Ruffo, in the area of Complex Network Analysis and Computational Social Sciences.

2018

Industrial Projects

During my Ph.D and PostDoc years I had many, interesting chances to collaborate with industrial partners to conduct applied research on real-world data. Many of these project resulted not only in scientific publications on peer-reviewed journals, but also in actionable knowledge. Data analysis and visualization tools were created, enabling the partner Companies to leverage state-of-the-art data analysis pipelines and AI techniques to extract useful insights from their data.
Here follows a brief list of past and ongoing collaborations:

Network Analysis for Anti-Financial Crime

Between September 2022 and the end of my postdoc in Turin I took part in the activities of the Anti Financial Crime (AFC) Digital Hub, a collaboration between Intesa Sanpaolo and a selected number of research partners. Specifically, I explored the potential of network science to detect anomalies and malicious patterns in cross-country financial activities. As an outcome of this project, our research group developed an advanced tool for explainable anomaly detection that leverages the power of complex networks. This tool aids in the identification of potential outliers engaging in suspicious activities, aligning with financial regulations. By utilizing network metrics that provide valuable insights into individual nodes, we track changes in node rankings over time, revealing unexpected shifts in their roles. These subtle transformations often require the attention of AFC officers, as they may indicate emerging risks not easily detected through traditional AFC practices. The very first steps of this project were presented and published at the FinWeb workshop of The ACM WebConference 2023 in Austin, TX.

Detection of Emotions in Social Media feeds of RAI Italian Television

In partnership with the main Italian National Television (RAI) we developed an AI algorithm based on Transformers Neural Networks to detect emotions in the social media posts and comments of the users about RAI's tv programs. Social media feeds are indeed a powerful - yet somehow under-exploited - source of information on the quality of a product and, maybe even more interestingly, on the users' satisfaction and appreciation. Hundreds of thousands of posts and replies per day were analyzed, to reveal positive (e.g. joy, anticipation, love) and negative (e.g. sadness, fear, anger) emotions expressed by the users towards RAI's programs, actors and hosts.
The AI algorithm was finally embedded in a dataviz tool and delivered to RAI as an internal tool, used to probe the reactions of the users on a daily basis, going far beyond a simple sentiment analysis. I also authored the data-annotation guidelines followed by the labelling team, and led the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the model outputs.
Here is a University press release on the project, while here you can see the media coverage on La Stampa, one of the main Italian media outlets. Both are Italian only.

Study on the mobile consumption patterns of news media from different areas of a city

In partnership with Universidad del Desarrollo and Telefonica Chile, we used heavily anonymized mobile phone data to check the inequalities in the consumption patterns of news media from different areas of the city of Santiago de Chile, uncovering how strong is the correlation between socio-demgraphic features and consumption of different kinds of media outlets. A scientific publication on a peer-reviewed top-tier journal is available here.

Teaching

Adjunct Professor

Foundations of Algorithms and Data Structures, Department of Science and Technological Innovation, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale - Academic Year 2022/2023
Industry 4.0 @ COREP Master in Industrial Operations, University Of Turin - Academic Year 2021/2022
Complex Network Analysis @ MADAB (Master in Data Science for Business Intelligence), University of Turin - Academic Year 2018/2019

Assistant Lecturer

Basi di dati (Relational Databases and SQL) @ SUISS - LM in Scienze Strategiche e Militari (Master's Degree in Strategical and Military Sciences), University of Turin - Academic years 2020/2021, 2021/2022
Web Development, Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, University of Turin - from 2019 to 2022
Applications of AI to Social Networks, Master di II livello in Alto Apprendistato in Intelligenza Artificiale (Master in Artificial Intelligence), University of Turin - Academic years 2018/2019, 2019/2020

Overall, between 2018 and 2025 I taught 2 to 4 courses per year at Bachelor's, Master's and professional Master's level, in Italian and in English, to classes ranging from 5 to 100 students. Besides lecturing, I designed course materials and assessed student work against detailed rubrics.

Publications

17 peer-reviewed publications · 371 citations · h-index 9. The complete and up-to-date record is on Google Scholar and ORCID. A selection follows.

Click on the paperclip icon to download the bibtex citation!

Vilella, Salvatore and Capozzi Lupi, Arthur Thomas Edward and Ruffo, Giancarlo and Fornasiero, Marco and Moncalvo, Dario and Ricci, Valeria and Ronchiadin, Silvia (2023)
Exploiting graph metrics to detect anomalies in cross-country money transfer temporal networks
Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023, pp. 1245-1248, 2023.
Semeraro Alfonso, Vilella Salvatore, Ruffo Giancarlo and Stella, Massimo (2022)
Emotional profiling and cognitive networks unravel how mainstream and alternative press framed AstraZeneca, Pfizer and COVID-19 vaccination campaigns
Nature Scientific Reports volume 12, Article number: 14445 (2022)
Alessandra, Urbinati and Enrico, Burdisso and Claudio, Mattutino and Salvatore, Vilella and Alfonso, Semeraro and Giancarlo, Ruffo and Carlo, Corti and DE MARTINO, Stefano and Elena, Devecchi and Scarpa, Erica (2022)
Bridging Representation and Visualization in Prosopographic Research: A Case Study
CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, pp. 80-92, 2022.
Vilella Salvatore, Semeraro Alfonso, Paolotti Daniela and Ruffo Giancarlo (2022)
Measuring user engagement with low credibility media sources in a controversial online debate
EPJ Data Science, (2022) 11: 29
Semeraro Alfonso, Vilella Salvatore, Ruffo Giancarlo (2021)
PyPlutchik: Visualising and comparing emotion-annotated corpora
Plos One 2021, Volume 16, Number 9
Vilella Salvatore, Lai Mirko, Paolotti Daniela, Ruffo Giancarlo (2020)
Immigration as a Divisive Topic: Clusters and Content Diffusion in the Italian Twitter Debate
Future Internet 2020, 12(10), 173
Vilella Salvatore, Paolotti Daniela, Ruffo Giancarlo, Ferres Leo (2020)
News and the city: understanding online press consumption patterns through mobile data
EPJ Data Science volume 9, Article number: 10 (2020)

Interests

Beside my research interests, I love music. I love everything that has an engine and can be driven, ridden or flown: I am a motorsport enthusiast and I fly light airplanes when I can. If we take engines out of the equation, then I enjoy Scuba Diving. But even there, have you ever tried Diver Propulsion Vehicles?! :) I like trekking, swimming, being in the countryside, dystopic novels, travel novels and many other things you probably don't care about knowing :)