Mirko Marras

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Mirko Marras

Research Unit Coordinator

Research Interests: user modeling, responsible ai, deep learning, information retrieval

About Me

Mirko Marras was born on April 19, 1992 in Iglesias (Italy). He is an Assistant Professor (RTDa, non-tenure track) at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Cagliari (Italy). He received his PhD Degree in Computer Science in 2020 and his MSc Degree in Computer Science (summa cum laude, 18 months) in 2016 from University of Cagliari. He received the Computer Science Engineering certification from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 2016.

In 2015, he was involved as Researcher within UnitelCagliari (Italy) for the ELIOS project (MIUR, 1ME). In 2017, he spent five months as Visiting Scholar at EURECAT (Spain), collaborating with the Data Science and Big Data Analytics Unit on the DECODE project (EU, 16P, 5ME). In 2018, he spent three months as Visiting Scholar within the University Institute for Intelligent Systems and Digital Applications in Engineering (SIANI) at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). In 2019, he spent two months at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the New York University (U.S.A). He has been involved as Researcher in the ILEARNTV project (MIUR, 6P, 10ME) since 2018. From 2019, he is referral of the University of Cagliari (Italy) for two work packages under the EDUC project (EU, 6P, 5ME). Between 2020 and 2021, he spent 12 months as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Machine Learning for Education Laboratory of EPFL (Switzerland).

Between 2017 and 2020, he has been teaching assistant for the “Computer Networks” course within the Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science at University of Cagliari. In 2021, he has been head teaching assistant for the Master's "Machine Learning for Behavioral Data" course at EPFL (Switzerland). He has been thesis assistant for a wide range of students at University of Cagliari and EPFL and has been co-supervising several PhD Students at EPFL and University of Cagliari, starting from 2020.

In 2014, he was recognized as the best third-year student of the BSc Program in Computer Science of the University of Cagliari (Italy). In 2016, he was recognized as the best MSc student of the Faculty of Science and one of the top 12 MSc students of the same University. In 2018, he got to the podium of the Call for Visionary Ideas - Education Section event organized by Nesta Italia. He has co-authored papers that led to the Best Poster Award at ESWC2017, the Demo Honorable Mention at WWW 2018, the Best Paper Award at DIDAMATICA 2018, and the Best Presentation Award and the Best Student Paper Award at EDM2021. His PhD thesis has been ranked within the Top 10 in Italy by CVPL. He has been awarded two Erasmus+ PlaceDoc scholaships to spend 5 months at EURECAT (Spain) and 3 months at Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). He has been awarded a GlobusDoc scholarship to spend 2 months at New York University (U.S.A).

His research interests focus on Responsible Data Mining and Machine Learning techniques for User Profiling and Personalization, applied to the fields of security, education, media and entertainment, and social good, with a focus on user impact. He has co-authored articles in top-tier international journals, such as Information Processing & Management (Elsevier), Computers in Human Behavior (Elsevier), IEEE Cloud Computing International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED) and User-Modelling and User-Adaptive Interaction (UMUAI). His research activity also brought him to publish papers (e.g., TheWebConf 2018, ECIR 2019, INTERSPEECH 2019, SIGIR 2021, CIKM 2021, EDM 2021), and give tutorials (e.g., UMAP 2020, ICDM 2020, ICDE 2021, WSDM 2021, and ECIR 2021) at several top tier international conferences.

He is part of the program committee of main international conferences in education (AIED, EDM, ICALT, ITICSE, LAK), user modelling (CHI, ECIR, ICWSM, KDD, RECSYS, SIGIR, UMAP, WSDM, WWW), and signal processing and machine learning (ECML-PKDD, IJCAI, INTERSPEECH, ICASSP). He has been also acting as a reviewer for top-tier journals, such as Pattern Recognition Letters and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He has been co-chairing the BIAS workshop at ECIR 2020-2022, the Responsible PR&MI workshop at ICCV 2021, and the L2D workshop at WSDM 2021. He has served as a guest editor for special issues of Information Processing & Management and Future Generation Computer Systems (Elsevier). He has been involved in several national and European projects related to education (e.g., iLearnTV and EDUC).

He is a member of (inter)national associations, including GRIN, CVPL, AIxIA, IEEE, and ACM.

Publications (107)