Filippo Menczer is an American and Italian professor of

informatics Informatics is the study of computational systems, especially those for data storage and retrieval. According to ACM ''Europe and'' '' Informatics Europe'', informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which t ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

who is the former director at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, a research unit of the Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. He holds courtesy appointments in Cognitive Science and

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...

, is a founding member and advisory council member of the IU Network Science Institute, a senior

research fellow A research fellow is an academic research position at a university or a similar research institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a pr ...

of the

Kinsey Institute The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (often shortened to The Kinsey Institute) is a research institute at Indiana University. Established in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1947 as a nonprofit, the institute merged with Indi ...

, and a fellow of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication, and a former

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

Institute for Scientific Interchange The Institute for Scientific Interchange ( it, Istituto per l'Interscambio Scientifico, ISI Foundation, ISI) is an independent, resident-based research institute known for its work in complexity science, theoretical and mathematical physics. It i ...

Turin Turin ( , Piedmontese language, Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

. In 2013 he was named a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM.

Education, career, service

Menczer holds a

Laurea In Italy, the ''laurea'' is the main post-secondary academic degree. The name originally referred literally to the laurel wreath, since ancient times a sign of honor and now worn by Italian students right after their official graduation ceremony ...

in physics from the

Sapienza University of Rome The Sapienza University of Rome ( it, Sapienza – Università di Roma), also called simply Sapienza or the University of Rome, and formally the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", is a public research university located in Rome, Ita ...

and a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...

and cognitive science from the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is ...

. He used to be an assistant professor of

management science Management science (or managerial science) is a wide and interdisciplinary study of solving complex problems and making strategic decisions as it pertains to institutions, corporations, governments and other types of organizational entities. It is ...

s at the

University of Iowa The University of Iowa (UI, U of I, UIowa, or simply Iowa) is a public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is organized into 12 co ...

, and a fellow-at-large of the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...

. At

Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington, Indiana University, IU, or simply Indiana) is a public research university in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the flagship campus of Indiana University and, with over 40,000 students, its largest c ...

since 2003, he served as division chair in the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing in 2009–2011. Menczer has been the recipient of

Fulbright The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people ...

Rotary Foundation The Rotary Foundation is a non-profit corporation that supports the efforts of Rotary International to achieve world understanding and peace through international humanitarian, educational, and cultural exchange programs. It is supported solely b ...

, and

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two N ...

fellowships, and a Career Award from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

. He holds editorial positions for the journals ''EPJ Data Science'', ''Network Science'', and ''

PeerJ ''PeerJ'' is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt (formerly at Mendeley) and publisher ...

Computer Science''. He has served as program or track chair for various conferences including the

International World Wide Web Conference The ACM Web Conference (formerly known as International World Wide Web Conference, abbreviated as WWW) is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. The first conference of many was hel ...

and the ''International ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media''. He was general chair of the ''ACM Web Science 2014 Conference'' and general co-chair of the '' NetSci 2017 Conference''.

Research

Menczer's research focuses on Web science, social networks, social media, social computation, Web mining, data science, distributed and intelligent Web applications, and modeling of complex information networks. He introduced the idea of topical and adaptive Web crawlers, a specialized and intelligent type of

Web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web s ...

. Menczer is also known for his work on ''social

phishing Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious softwa ...

,'' a type of phishing attacks that leverage friendship information from social networks, yielding over 70% success rate in experiments (with

Markus Jakobsson Markus Jakobsson is a computer security researcher, entrepreneur and writer, whose work is focused on the issue of digital security. Career Markus Jakobsson is currently Chief Scientist at Artema Labs, a company with the mission of disrupting an ...

);

semantic similarity Semantic similarity is a metric defined over a set of documents or terms, where the idea of distance between items is based on the likeness of their meaning or semantic content as opposed to lexicographical similarity. These are mathematical tool ...

measures for information and social networks; models of complex information and

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods fo ...

s (with Alessandro Vespignani and others); search engine censorship; and search engine bias. The group led by Menczer has analyzed and modeled how

meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ...

s, information, and misinformation spread through

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

in domains such as the

Occupy movement The Occupy movement was an international populist socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of "real democracy" around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and econo ...

, the Gezi Park protests, and political elections. Data and tools from Menczer's lab have aided in finding the roots of the

Pizzagate conspiracy theory "Pizzagate" is a conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle. It has been extensively discredited by a wide range of organizations, including the Washington, D.C. police. In March 2016, the pe ...

and the disinformation campaign targeting the White Helmets, and in taking down voter-suppression bots on Twitter. Menczer and colleagues have advanced the understanding of information virality, and in particular the prediction of what memes will go viral based on the structure of early diffusion networks and how competition for finite attention helps explain virality patterns. In a 2018 paper in ''Nature Human Behaviour,'' Menczer and coauthors used a model to show that when agents in a social networks share information under conditions of high information load and/or low attention, the correlation between quality and popularity of information in the system decreases. An erroneous analysis in the paper suggested that this effect alone would be sufficient to explain why fake news are as likely to go viral as legitimate news on Facebook. When the authors discovered the error, they retracted the paper. Following influential publications on the detection of astroturfing and ''

social bot A social bot, or also described as a social AI or social algorithm, is a software agent that communicates autonomously on social media. The messages (e.g. tweets) it distributes can be simple and operate in groups and various configurations wit ...

s'', Menczer and his team have studied the complex interplay between cognitive, social, and algorithmic factors that contribute to the vulnerability of social media platforms and people to manipulation, and focused on developing tools to counter such abuse. Their bot detection tool, Botometer, was used to assess the prevalence of social bots and their sharing activity. Their tool to visualize the spread of low-credibility content, Hoaxy, was used in conjunction with Botometer to reveal the key role played by social bots in spreading low-credibility content during the

2016 United States presidential election The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket ...

Projects

* Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe): A research project, previously known as Truthy, aimed to study and visualize how information spreads online. Includes data and tools to visualize

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

trends, diffusion networks, and maps, to create movies, and a public API. * Botometer: A machine learning tool to detect social bots on

. Previously known as BotOrNot. Includes public APIs and a social bot dataset repository. * Hoaxy: An open-source search engine and network visualization tool to study the spread of articles from low-credibility and fact-checking sources on

. Includes a public API. * Fakey: A mobile game for news literacy. Fakey mimics a social media news feed where you have to tell real news from fake ones. * Scholarometer: A social tool and API to facilitate

citation analysis Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A t ...

and help evaluate the

impact Impact may refer to: * Impact (mechanics), a high force or shock (mechanics) over a short time period * Impact, Texas, a town in Taylor County, Texas, US Science and technology * Impact crater, a meteor crater caused by an impact event * Impac ...

of an author's publications. By crowdsourcing discipline annotations, this browser extension is able to provide a universal metric to compare impact across disciplines. * Kinsey Reporter: A global mobile survey platform to share, explore, and visualize anonymous data about sex and sexual behaviors. Developed in collaboration with the

. Reports are submitted via Web or smartphone, then available for visualization or off-line analysis via a public API. * Other research projects are listed on the Networks & agents Network (NaN) website.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Menczer, Filippo American computer scientists Italian computer scientists Complex systems scientists Indiana University faculty Sapienza University of Rome alumni University of California, San Diego alumni Living people 1965 births Network scientists