Paola Velardi

Paola Velardi is a Full Professor of computer science at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. She is an Italian scientist born in Rome, on April 24, 1955.[1] Her research encompasses natural language processing, machine learning, business intelligence and semantic web, web information extraction in particular.[2] Velardi is one of the hundred female scientists included in the database "100esperte.it[3]" (translated from Italian with "100 female experts"). This online, open database champions the recognition of top-rated female scientists in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) area.

Paola Velardi, in 2017.

Research

Velardi's research aims at using algorithms to analyse natural language on social networks and in general in natural language existing in any written documentation. Her current interest encompasses the study of social media for epidemiological surveillance,[4] for the analysis of the leadership role of women working in enterprise social networks[5][6] and for the design of recommender systems.[7] Velardi also maintains a strong interest in the area of ontology learning and knowledge bases.[8] A well-known example of application of Velardi's research is the extraction of trending topics on social media.[9] The fundamental concepts of her research within the area of natural language are knowledge learning, graph mining and semantics. Velardi and her team developed a suit of web-based tools based on machine learning techniques that classify natural language for several purposes of analysis, whose applications stem from e-health to female leadership. The key purpose of these web-based tools is the extraction of taxonomies,[10] ontologies[11] and semantics[12][13] from a pool of written natural-language data, including human crafted knowledge bases such as Wikipedia and from social, semantic and biological networks.

The web-based tools that Velardi and her team developed are:[14]

  • SSI - a state of art knowledge-based word sense disambiguation algorithm.[15][16]
  • TermExtractor - a web application that helps a web community extract and validate relevant domains established a priori and submitted to the software program through documents in any format.[17]
  • Valido – a tool to help human annotators in the task of semantically tagging texts.[18] It is based on the SSI algorithm.
  • OntoLearn – an algorithm-based tool to acquire a full lexical ontology from scratch.[19]

According to Google Scholar[20] bibliometrics updated until August 2018, Velardi's scientific publications have been cited more than 5472 times. Furthermore, Velardi's h-index was 36. Velardi published more than 150 papers on international journals and conference proceedings. Some of her publications have been published in top rated journals such as Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Knowledge Bases Systems, IEEE Transactions (TDKE, PAMI, TOC, TSE), Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and Journal of Web Semantics.

Education and previous employments

Velardi graduated in electronic engineering at Sapienza University in 1978.[21] From 1978 to 1983, she worked for the Ugo Bordoni Foundation, a research Institution focusing on ICT and working under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. The aim of the foundation is fostering the research transfer from academia to practice in the domains of energy, health and mobility. In the course of 1983, she was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Then, from 1984 to 1986, she came back to her natal city and worked as researcher for IBM. From 1986 to 1996 she was an associate professor in the engineering faculty of Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy. From November 1996, she taught in and did research for the department of computer science at the Sapienza University. Velardi has been the head of Bachelor and Master Programs in Computer Science at Sapienza University from 2010 to 2013 and from 2015 to 2016.

Current employment

Velardi became full professor in November 2001 in the department of computer science ("dipartimento di informatica" in Italian) at the Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. Since 2013, she is the coordinator of the Distance Learning Degree[22] in Computer Science in Sapienza University. Velardi has been employed as full professor at the Sapienza University until today.[23]

Recognition

Velardi is one of the hundred female scientists included in the database "100esperte.it" (translated from Italian with "100 female experts"[24][25]). This database lists Italian female STEM scientists of which. Six out of one hundred scientists in the 100esperte's database are computer scientists like Velardi.

Velardi is in the list of the top Italian scientists. A top scientist appearing in the Top-Italian-Scientists database[26] is a scientist whose h-index is greater than 30.

In March 2017, Velardi obtained an IBM Faculty Award[27] for her research on social recommender systems.

In December 2018, Velardi was included in the list of the 50 most influential Italian women in science and technology by Inspiring Fifty, a non-profit that aims to increase diversity in STEM by making female role models in tech more visible.[28]

In September 2019 Velardi has been local co-organizer and Program Chair of the 6th ACM Celebration of Women in Computing [29].

In November 2019 Velardi received the Standout Woman Award International [30] at the seat of the Italian Parliament in Montecitorio.

Causes

Velardi aims at debunking the myth of computer science as a man-oriented and "inflexible" discipline. She is the founder of the project "NERD? Non e' roba per donne?"[31] (translated from Italian: "NERD? Is it not stuff for women?"). This project results from the partnership championed by Velardi in 2012 between IBM Italy and the department of computer science at the Sapienza University. The goal of the project is two-fold: (1) conveying computer science as creative, interdisciplinary and problem-solving oriented science, and (2) encouraging young female students in studying computer science by, for instance, developing apps for smartphones.

References
  1. "Biografia di Velardi, Paola". Uniroma1.it.
  2. "Paola Velardi – Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.it. Retrieved 2018-11-07.
  3. "100Esperte". 100esperte.it (in Italian). Retrieved 2018-11-07.
  4. Velardi, Paola; Stilo, Giovanni; Tozzi, Alberto E.; Gesualdo, Francesco (2014). "Twitter mining for fine-grained syndromic surveillance". Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. 61 (3): 153–163. doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2014.01.002. ISSN 0933-3657. PMID 24613716.
  5. Di Tommaso, Giorgia; Stilo, Giovanni; Vilardi, Paola (2017). "A Gendered Analysis of Leadership in Enterprise Social Networks". Proceedings of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017): 516–519.
  6. Di Tommaso, Giorgia; Stilo, Giovanni; Velardi, Paola (2017). Detecting network leaders in enterprises. 2017 IEEE 21st International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD). IEEE. doi:10.1109/cscwd.2017.8066707. ISBN 978-1-5090-6199-0.
  7. Cucchiarelli, Alessandro; Morbidoni, Christian; Stilo, Giovanni; Velardi, Paola (2018-06-14). "A topic recommender for journalists". Information Retrieval Journal. 22 (1–2): 4–31. doi:10.1007/s10791-018-9333-2. hdl:11573/1112907. ISSN 1386-4564.
  8. Faralli, Stefano; Finocchi, Irene; Ponzetto, Simone Paolo; Velardi, Paola (2018). "CrumbTrail: An efficient methodology to reduce multiple inheritance in knowledge graphs". Knowledge-Based Systems. 151: 180–197. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2018.03.030. ISSN 0950-7051.
  9. Stilo, Giovanni; Velardi, Paola (2017). "Hashtag Sense Clustering Based on Temporal Similarity". Computational Linguistics. 43 (1): 181–200. doi:10.1162/coli_a_00277. ISSN 0891-2017.
  10. Faralli, Stefano; Stilo, Giovanni; Velardi, Paola (2017). "Automatic acquisition of a taxonomy of microblogs users' interests". Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. 45: 23–40. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2017.05.004. ISSN 1570-8268.
  11. Navigli, R.; Velardi, P.; Gangemi, A. (2003). "Ontology learning and its application to automated terminology translation". IEEE Intelligent Systems. 18 (1): 22–31. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.105.2750. doi:10.1109/MIS.2003.1179190. ISSN 1541-1672.
  12. Velardi, Paola; Fasolo, Michela; Pazienza, Maria Teresa (Fall 2018). "How to Encode Semantic Knowledge: A Method for Meaning Representation and Computer-Aided Acquisition". Computational Linguistics. 17: 153–170.
  13. Velardi, P.; Cucchiarelli, A.; Petit, M. (2007). "A Taxonomy Learning Method and Its Application to Characterize a Scientific Web Community". IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. 19 (2): 180–191. doi:10.1109/TKDE.2007.21. ISSN 1041-4347.
  14. "Paola Velardi's Home Page". Uniroma1.it. Retrieved 2018-08-29.
  15. Navigli, R.; Velardi, P. (2005). "Structural semantic interconnections: a knowledge-based approach to word sense disambiguation". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 27 (7): 1075–1086. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.75.8314. doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2005.149. ISSN 0162-8828.
  16. Velardi, Paola; Cucchiarelli, Alessandro (Fall 2018). "A Theoretical Analysis of Context-Based Learning Algorithms for Word Sense Disambiguation". Proceedings of ECAI 2000. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.330.8051.
  17. Sclano, F.; Velardi, P. (2007). Termextractor: a web application to learn the shared terminology of emergent web communities. Enterprise Interoperability. II. pp. 287–290. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.100.6338. doi:10.1007/978-1-84628-858-6_32. ISBN 978-1-84628-857-9.
  18. Cucchiarelli, Alessandro; D’Antonio, Fulvio; Velardi, Paola (2011-06-29). "Semantically interconnected social networks". Social Network Analysis and Mining. 2 (1): 69–95. doi:10.1007/s13278-011-0030-z. ISSN 1869-5450.
  19. Navigli, Roberto; Velardi, Paola (2006). "Learning Domain Ontologies from Document Warehouses and Dedicated Web Sites". Computational Linguistics. 30 (2): 151–179. doi:10.1162/089120104323093276. ISSN 0891-2017.
  20. "Google Scholar Profile of Paola Velardi". Google Scholar. Retrieved 2018-08-29.
  21. "Biography of Paola Velardi". Uniroma1.it. Retrieved 2018-08-28.
  22. "1 Machine Learning Introduction Paola Velardi. 2 Course material Slides (partly) from: 91L/ – ppt download". slideplayer.com. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  23. "Velardi Paola | Dipartimento Informatica – Sapienza – Università di Roma". www.di.uniroma1.it (in Italian). Retrieved 2018-11-10.
  24. "Chiedetelo alle Scienziate" (PDF). Corriere della Sera. 2016-11-02. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  25. Fondazione Bracco (2017-05-05), #100esperte - Intervista a Paola Velardi, retrieved 2018-11-06
  26. "Top Italian Scientists". www.topitalianscientists.org. Archived from the original on 2019-09-24. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  27. "IBM University Research and Collaboration – Faculty Innovation 2016". www.research.ibm.com. 2017-08-15. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  28. "Inspirng Fifty". Inspiring Fifty. 2018-12-04. Retrieved 2018-12-04.
  29. "6th ACM celebration of Women in Computing". Retrieved 2020-02-04.
  30. "Standout Woman Award". Retrieved 2020-02-04.
  31. "Progetto NERD?". IBM. 2015-11-30. Retrieved 2018-08-29.
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