Alessandro Vespignani
Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor of Physics
Research interests
- Characterization and modeling of complex networks
- Modeling the spatial spread of epidemics
- Resilience of complex networks
- Collective behavior of techno-social systems
Education
- PhD in Physics, Sapienza University of Rome — Italy
Biography
Alessandro Vespignani is the Sternberg Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, based in Boston. He holds interdisciplinary appointments in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, College of Science, and Bouvé College of Health Sciences.
Vespignani researches the interdisciplinary application of statistical and numerical simulation methods in the study of biological, social, and technological networks. For several years, he has worked on the characterization and modeling of complex networks. He now focuses on modeling the spatial spread of epidemics, including the realistic and data-driven computational modeling of emerging infectious diseases, the resilience of complex networks, and the collective behavior of techno-social systems.
Prior to joining Northeastern, Vespignani was the J.H. Rudy Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. While there, he also served as the director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and the associate director of the Pervasive Technology Institute. Before that, he worked at the International Center for Theoretical Physics at UNESCO in Trieste, and at the University of Paris-Sud as a member of the National Council for Scientific Research.
Vespignani serves on the editorial board of several journals and is editor-in-chief of EPJ Data Science (SpringerOpen). He has served as president of the Complex Systems Society and sits on the board of the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation. He is also an elected fellow of the American Physical Society, elected member of the Academy of Europe, and fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University.
Recent publications
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Human-AI coevolution
Citation: Dino Pedreschi, Luca Pappalardo, Emanuele Ferragina, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Albert-László Barabási, Frank Dignum, Virginia Dignum, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Fosca Giannotti, János Kertész, Alistair Knott, Yannis E. Ioannidis, Paul Lukowicz, Andrea Passarella, Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, John Shawe-Taylor, Alessandro Vespignani. (2025). Human-AI coevolution Artif. Intell., 339, 104244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2024.104244 -
Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Accelerating Stochastic Simulation
Citation: Dongxia Wu, Ruijia Niu, Matteo Chinazzi, Alessandro Vespignani, Yi-An Ma, Rose Yu. (2023). Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Accelerating Stochastic Simulation KDD, 2559-2569. https://doi.org/10.1145/3580305.3599300 -
Social AI and the Challenges of the Human-AI Ecosystem
Citation: Dino Pedreschi, Luca Pappalardo, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Albert-László Barabási, Frank Dignum, Virginia Dignum, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Fosca Giannotti, János Kertész, Alistair Knott, Yannis E. Ioannidis, Paul Lukowicz, Andrea Passarella, Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, John Shawe-Taylor, Alessandro Vespignani. (2023). Social AI and the Challenges of the Human-AI Ecosystem CoRR, abs/2306.13723. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.13723
