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

• 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.
• 16 November 2011
  I joined the Programme Committee of the "Social Networks" track of the WWW 2012 conference and of the ICWSM 2012 conference.
• 10 November 2011
  Our journal paper "Evaluating Temporal Robustness of Mobile Networks" has been accepted in the Transactions on Mobile Computing.
• 08 November 2011
  I am attending the seminar Analysis of Dynamic Social and Technological Networks in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, where I will present my research on Spatial Social Networks.
• 14 October 2011
  My letter "Beyond the Social Web: The Geo-Social Revolution" has been published in the Autumn 2011 issue of the SIGWEB newsletter.
• 10 October 2011
  I am attending the Second conference on the Analysis of Mobile Phone Datasets and Networks (NetMob 2011) in Boston, USA.
• 08 August 2011
  Our KDD paper "Exploiting Place Features in Link Prediction on Location-based Social Networks" has been featured on the Huffington Post UK, on Engadget, on Reuters and on many other media sources.

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.