News

  • Position Glad to be the new director of Unimib Master in BI and Big Data Analytics, the call for application for the 12nd edition is going to be published soon! stay tuned
  • Publication Tool New paper “FFTree: A Flexible Tree to Handle Multiple Fairness Criteria” accepted on IPM journal - special issue on XAI
  • Publication New paper “A Survey on XAI and Natural Language Explanations” accepted on IPM journal - special issue on XAI
  • Publication Tool New paper “ConvXAI: A System for Multimodal Interaction with Any Black-box Explainer” accepted on Cognitive Computation
  • Publication Tool ContrXT presented at IJCAI-22. Check it out
  • Publication Tool ContrXT, a model agnostic, global, time contrastive explainer for any text classifier. Published on Information Fusion and available on GitHub
  • Publication Tool Check-out our 2022 publications on Knowledge Based Systems, Cognitive Computation, and Computers in Industry about XAI and word-embedding!
  • Teaching Students can book a live appointment here

Relevant 2022-23 Events I’m involved in

About

I am Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of Milan-Bicocca, and deputy director of the CRISP Research Centre, Italy.

Current Positions

Past Positions

  • [2016-Nov2021] Assistant Professor at University of Milan-Bicocca
  • [2011-2016] PostDoc at University of Milan-Bicocca
  • [2017-2018] Partner at TabulaeX Ltd (formerly spin-out company of Unimib) working on BI and Big Data Analytics. TabulaeX is now LightCast
  • [2015-2016] Visiting Researcher at King’s College London, AI Planning Group, UK

My research interests include

  • Artificial Intelligence: eXplainable AI, interpretable models, local and global interpretation, explanation through symbolic approaches
  • Data Science: data quality and data cleaning, vector-space models, word-embeddings, ontology learning, Graph-database algorithms
  • AI Planning [formerly]: domain-independent planning, temporal continuous planning, planning in mixed discrete-continuous domains, planning in hybrid domain

Research team AI@CRISP-UNIMIB

“If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far go together”. Proud to work with brilliant phd students and researchers of our team

  • Lorenzo Malandri, Reseacher in AI and Computational Linguistics, Dept of Statistics and Quantitative Methods
  • Francesco Trentini, PostDoc in Economics at Unimib
  • Navid Nobani, Industrial PhD Student in XAI (Digital Attitude), Dept of Informatics at Unimib
  • Andrea Seveso, PhD Student, Dept of Informatics at Unimib
  • Anna Giabelli, PhD Student, Dept of Informatics at Unimib
  • Alessandro Castelnovo, Industrial PhD Student in XAI for Finance (Intesa San Paolo), Dept of Informatics at Unimib
  • Filippo Pallucchini, PhD Student in Big Data Analytics for Business
  • Simone D’Amico, PhD Student in Big Data Analytics for Business
  • Alessia De Santo, PhD Student in Big Data Analytics for Business

(Co)-Developed Tools for Researchers

  • ContrXT is a model agnostic, global, time contrastive explainer for any text classifier. It is available as a python tool on Github. Related papers: [Information-Fusion-22]
  • TaxoRef is a methodology for Taxonomy Refinement via word embeddings. It allows evaluating the best embedding on the basis of their ability to represent taxonomic similarity relations. Related papers: [ECML-PKDD-21]
  • GraphDBLP is a tool that models (and enriches) DBLP as a graph database for performing graph-based queries and social network analyses. Related papers: [ECML-PKDD-19], [MTAP-18]
  • UPMurphi is a tool for planning with linear and nonlinear continuous PDDL+ models with processes and events. It also handles huge state spaces through a disk-based algorithm. Related papers: [ICAPS-09], [Applied Intelligence 2012]
  • DiNo A Planner built on top of UPMurphi that employs graph-based heuristics to speed-up the plan synthesis (leaded by “Planning Group” at King’s College London). Related papers: [IJCAI-16]

Granted Ongoing Research Projects

I have been working on the following granted reserch projects, that allow me putting my research on AI and XAI into practice. (see Project)

Education

  • [2012] PhD in Computer Science and Applications Dept of Computer Science, University of L’Aquila, Italy. Advisors: prof. Giuseppe Della Penna (University of L’Aquila, Italy) and prof. Daniele Magazzeni (King’s College London, UK). Topics: AI Planning, Model Checking and Data Quality.
  • [2008] Master Degree in Computer Science and Application University of L’Aquila, Italy. Advisor: prof. Giuseppe Della Penna and prof. Daniele Magazzeni. Topics: AI Planning Control Theory and Model Checking. Maximum score/summa cum laude.

Teaching

  • [2010-present] Lecturer at University of Milano-Bicocca. Topics: Python, SQL, NoSQL Data Stores, Business Intelligence, eXplainable AI, Text Mining
  • [2010-present] Teaching Assistant at University of Milano-Bicocca. Topics: Python, Database, SQL

Please visit my Teaching page for further details

Awards

  • [2021] ASN - Full Professor in Computer Engineering National Scientific Qualification for the position of Full Professor in Computer Science, ANVUR
  • [2019] Research Talent Award I’ve received the first prize at the YoungTalentAward 2019 in collaboration with Accademia Nazionale Lincei in the Computer Science, Engineering & Mathematics area. “for his contribution on applying AI to labour market for describing and predicting labour market phenomena”
  • [2018] ASN - Associate Professor in Computer Science National Scientific Qualification for the position of Associate Professor in Computer Science, ANVUR
  • [2017] FFABR Research Grant for research productivity provided by Italian Ministry of research “Finanziamento annuale individuale delle attività base di ricerca” [Grants provided on a competitive basis aimed at funding research activities]
  • [2014] Best Paper Award at the Third International Conference on Data Technologies and Applications, Vienna, Austria, 29-31, 2014
  • [2013] Best Paper Award at the Third International Workshop, Human Computer Interaction – Knowledge Discovery 1-3 Luglio, Maribor, Slovenia, 2013

Service in International Journals (Selection)

  • (AICom) Associate Editor of AI Communications
    Reviewer for:
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Applied Soft Computing
  • Applied Intelligence
  • Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing
  • Future Generation Computer System
  • Knowledge-Based Systems
  • Computers in Industry
  • Expert Systems with Applications

Program committee membership (Selection)

  • (AAAI) AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (since 2016)
  • (IJCAI) International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (since 2016)
  • (ICAPS) International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (since 2016)
  • (ECML-PKDD) European Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining (since 2020)
  • ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (since 2018)
  • Data Technology and Application Conference (since 2014)

Contact

Email (preferred): fabio.mercorio@unimib.it
Office Hours: by appointment

Fabio Mercorio
Room 2043 - U7 Building - Department of Statistics and Quantitative Methods / CRISP Research Centre, University of Milan-Bicocca Viale dell’Innovazione 10 - Milan - Italy Office: (+39) 02 644 82170