Salvatore Scellato

Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
William Gates Building 15 JJ Thomson Avenue
CB3 0FD - United Kingdom

E-mail: ss824 at cam dot ac dot uk

Profile

I am a PhD student in the Network and Operating Systems group at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. My supervisor is Dr. Cecilia Mascolo and I am working on spatial and geographic aspects of online social networks within the Spatio-Temporal Network Analysis project. I am also involved in the International Technology Alliance (ITA) project and in the Wildsensing project.

I am a collaborator of the University of Catania ATP group, a research group for the interdisciplinary practical applications of theoretical physics created by prof. Vito Latora. I am also an associate of the Human Space Lab at Politecnico di Milano, a consultancy and research unit which focuses on space analysis and urban design with network-based approaches.

I received a Laurea in Ingegneria Informatica (comparable to BSc in Computer Engineering) in 2006 and a Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica (comparable to a MSc in Computer Science) in 2008, both in the University of Catania, Italy.

News

• 08 May 2012
  I have submitted my thesis "Spatial properties of online social services: measurement, analysis and applications".
• 22 April 2012
  Our papers "The Importance of Being Placefriends: Discovering Location-focused Online Communities" and "Far from the eyes, close on the Web: impact of geographic distance on online social interactions" have been accepted in the main program of the WOSN 2012 SIGCOMM workshop.
• 18 April 2012
  Our paper "A tale of many cities: universal patterns in human urban mobility" has been accepted in PLoS ONE.
• 16 April 2012
  I am attending the 21st International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2012) in Lyon, France.
• 26 March 2012
  Our paper "Track Globally, Deliver Locally: Improving Content Delivery Networks by Tracking Geographic Social Cascades" has been awarded by the Cambridge Computer Lab Ring as "Most notable publication" in 2012.
• 29 February 2012
  The poster paper "Where Online Friends Meet: Social Communities in Location-based Networks" and the full paper "The length of bridge ties: structural and geographic properties of online social interactions" have been accepted in the main program of the ICWSM 2012 conference.
• 28 January 2012
  The paper "YouTube Around the World: Geographic Popularity of Videos", written during my summer internship at Google Zurich, has been accepted in the main program of the WWW 2012 conference.

Supervisions

In the Academic Year 2010/2011, I am supervising the following courses:

• Computer Systems Modelling (Part II; Lent Term)
• Mobile and Sensor Systems (Part II; Lent Term)
• Principles of Communications (Part II; Michaelmas Term)

In the Academic Year 2009/2010, I supervised the following courses:

• Advanced Systems Topics (Part II; Lent Term)
• Distributed Systems (Part II; Easter Term)

Short bio

I was born in Nicosia, a little and beautiful town in the middle of Sicily mountains. In 2003 I completed my secondary school and I was accepted by Scuola Superiore di Catania, an Italian university institution for higher education, where I won a 5-year scholarship to fund my studies.

In 2006 I was involved in some research programs with Agencia de Ecologia Urbana de Barcelona and Politecnico di Milano, both as a scientific consultant on complex networks algorithms and as developer. I received my Laurea in Ingegneria Informatica (comparable to BSc in Computer Engineering) in July 2006 with the thesis "Design and development of a health-care information system based on webservices" and I discussed my first Diploma Thesis "Video stabilization based on Scale Invariant Feature Transform" at Scuola Superiore in March 2007.

From July to September 2007 I worked as Intern Research Student at University College of London.

I received my Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica (comparable to MSc in Computer Science) in July 2008 with the thesis "A self-organizing traffic model for urban networks".

In addition, I also received my Diploma Magistrale from Scuola Superiore di Catania in February 2009, with the thesis "Temporal Dynamics of Connectivity Traces: Chaos and Predictability in Human Behaviour". This work was done as Research Associate within the Computer Laboratory in the University of Cambridge, where Dr. Cecilia Mascolo was my Diploma thesis supervisor.

During 2011 I spent four months as Software Engineering Intern at Google Zurich, working with the YouTube Analytics team.