Paolo Ferragina is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, and the University of Pisa, where he leads the Acube Lab, collaborating with companies and organizations such as Bloomberg, European Broadcasting Europe, Google, Software Heritage Archive (INRIA), and Yahoo!.
He earned his PhD from the University of Pisa and completed his postdoctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute fur Informatik (Germany). His research focuses on algorithms and AI tools for compressing, analyzing, and retrieving information from large data sets.
Ferragina has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications in theoretical computer science and information retrieval, as well as some international patents. He has an H-index of 44 and over 12,000 citations (Google Scholar). He co-authored three books, on the themes of Cryptography, Computational Thinking and Algorithm Engineering. The last one has been published by Cambridge University Press.
Ferragina’s work has been recognized through numerous prestigious awards, including the 2022 ACM Paris Kanellakis Award, for co-inventing the FM-index, that is a foundational innovation in compressed data structures with broad impact on data compression and computational biology
Ferragina is a member of the Steering Committee for both the National PhD Program in AI for Society and the Tuscan PhD Program in Computer Science; a member of the Advisory Board for Italy’s first Master’s in Informatics for Digital Health (University of Pisa); an associate Editor of the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications; an area Editor for the Encyclopedia of Algorithms and the Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies (Springer); and a member of the Steering Committee for the SIAM Symposium on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments.
Among the most significant past roles, we recall: vice-rector for ICT of the University of Pisa (2019–2022); panel member of the EU ERC Advanced Grant Committee – PE6: Computer Science and Informatics (2019); president of the PhD Program in Computer Science (Pisa, Florence, Siena, 2017–2020); and vice-rector for Applied Research and Innovation, University of Pisa (2010–2016).