Research Scientist

Complex Networks Lagrange Lab

Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) 

Torino (Italy)

                               

 Recent papers
                                

  • How do users navigate on the Web? In the paper Ranking Web sites with real user traffic (Proc. WSDM 2008, Stanford, CA, USA) we study the traffic patterns of Web users, finding strong regularities. The data about traffic are also used to validate the PageRank model, whose underlying hypotheses turn out to be  violated.
  • Do voters behave like particles?  In the paper Scaling and universality in proportional elections (Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 138701, 2007), we show that the distribution of the number of votes among candidates is the same in different  countries and years. Here you can see the universal election curve!
  • Resolution limit in community detection   (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104, 36-41, 2007). Modularity optimization is the most popular method to detect communities in networks, but the modularity maximum  may fail to identify small modules 
  • Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias                         (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 12684-12689, 2006).  Does Google give more visibility to popular Web sites? Is there a Googlearchy? No! On the contrary,  search engines make Web users discover little popular sites, due to the wide variety of their interests