I am an associate professor of computer science at Amherst College, where I lead the Data* Mammoths, a research&learning group of brilliant undergraduate students, and I serve as the inaugural director of the Data Science Initiative. I also have an appointment as visiting faculty in Computer Science at Brown University, where I advise PhD students. Previously, I spent some fantastic years as a research scientist in the Labs group at Two Sigma.
My research focuses on algorithms for knowledge discovery, data mining, and machine learning. I develop theory and methods to extract the most information from large datasets, as fast as possible and in a statistically sound way. The problems I study include pattern extraction, graph mining, and time series analysis. My algorithms often use concepts from statistical learning theory and sampling. My research is supported, in part, by NSF CAREER Award #2238693 and by NSF Award #2006765.
My Erdős number is 3 (Erdős → Suen → Upfal → Matteo), and I am a mathematical descendant of Eli Upfal, Eli Shamir (2nd generation), Jacques Hadamard (5th), Siméon Denis Poisson (9th), and Pierre-Simon Laplace (10th).
News
- SDM/IBM Early Career Award: I am extremely humbled to receive the 2025 SDM/IBM Early Career Data Mining Research Award, as previous winners are individuals I admire as people and researchers. I must thank all my mentors, collaborators, and students throughout the years for their support!
- WSDM'25: with Giulia, Gianmarco, and Aris, we published Polaris, a new null model for multigraphs with prescribed color assortativity. It was selected for plenary oral presentation, but I'm mostly excited about the fact that I finally published with Aris!
- CRA: the CRA has a great interview with Maryam, who is doing their CS PhD at Brown under Eli Upfal's and mine supervision.
- SDM'25: I'm the general chair of the 2025 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, together with Vagelis.
- News archive