Biography

Francesca Spezzano is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Boise State University.

She received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science Engineering from University of Calabria, Italy, in 2012.

From Oct 2010 to Jul 2011 she was Visiting Scholar at the Computer Science Department (Database Group) of University of California - Santa Cruz.

After the Ph.D. degree, she was a postdoc at University of Calabria, Italy.

From Aug 2013 to Aug 2015 she was Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

Current Graduate Students:

• Anu Shrestha
• Nikesh Joshi
• Rachana Acharya

Undergraduate Students:

• Mayson Green

Past Graduate Students:

• Indhumathi Gurunathan
• Laxmi Amulya Gundala
• Akshay Kansal
• Harish Arelli
• Nitish Dhakal (co-advised with Prof. Xu)

• Multilingual Page Protection in Wikipedia

  Feb 9, 2018, Keynote at MIS2: Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web Workshop @WSDM2018

• Bad Actors in Social Media

  Oct 28, 2016, Keynote at the 1st ACM International Workshop on Computational Methods for CyberSafety @CIKM2016

• Identifying Malicious Actors on Social Media

  Aug 18, 2016, Tutorial at 2016 IEEE-ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2016)

• Francesca is Program Committee co-Chair for ASONAM 2019.

• Francesca is Proceedings Chair for WSDM 2020.

• Francesca is a Co-Chair of the Third Women in Web Data Science (WinDS) Workshop, co-located with TheWebConference 2019, San Francisco, May 13th, 2019.

• Francesca won the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Foundations of Open Source Intelligence and Security Informatics (FOSINT-SI 2018) in conjunction with ASONAM 2018. Joint work with Edoardo Serra and Mikel Joaristi on “Inferring Bad Entities through the Panama Papers Network.” Read more.

• Francesca is a Co-Organizer of the Panel on “Broadening Participation in Data Science” at SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 2018, San Diego, CA, Friday May 4th, 2018.

• Francesca is a Co-Chair of the Second Women in Data Science (WinDS) Workshop, co-located with TheWebConference 2018, Lyon, France, Tuesday April 24th, 2018.

• Francesca collaborated with the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) on Nov. 15, 2017 to host a STEM outreach event. An interactive presentation was delivered to help older adults understand, navigate, and prevent malicious acts on the Internet, especially Social Media. Read more.

Courses taught at Boise State University:

• CS 410 / 510 Databases (Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019)
• CS-HU 310 Intro to Database Systems Usage (Spring 2019)
• CS 539 Social Media Mining (Fall 2018)
• CS 321 Data Structures (Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017)
• CS 597 Social Networking Analysis (Spring 2016)

• francescaspezzano@boisestate.edu
• +1-(208)-426-2491
• City Center Plaza (CCP) Room 348, 777 W. Main St., Boise, ID 83702
• Mo-We 15:00 to 16:00 or email for appointment