Maria Luisa Damiani

 Professor, Department of Computer Science


University of Milan, Italy

Via Celoria 18,  room 7010

20133, Milan

E-mail: maria.damiani@unimi.it

Research interests

My research interests lie at the intersection of spatial computing, mobility data science and data protection. Current research  focuses primarily on the study of behavior patterns in traces of people and animals. Behavior patterns are of primary interest in a variety of applications, e.g., visitor profiling, computational sociology, security, animal ecology.   Behavior analysis requires the observation of real world mobility phenomena, the development of data models and analytical tools, the investigation of quality metrics and benchmarking.   An additional stream of research aims to bridge spatial computing and cybersecurity, focusing on location-based security for authentication, access control, privacy,  for use in mobile applications.  The deployment of these methods in real application is another major challenge.  In summary, the main contributions and artifacts developed in my research are :

-  animal ecology: MigrO, a plugin for migration analysis from low sampled GPS trajectories

-  museums:   platform for the behavior analysis of visitors from UWB trajectories

- geology:  Etna Lava Flow Model (EFLM), a  simulator of volcanic lava flows


Short bio

M.L.  Damiani graduated in Computer Science from University of Pisa cum laude and earned a Ph.D in Computer Science  from EPFL. Prior to joining academia in 2003,  she held various positions in applied research in public and private  companies (CSELT, Datamont Spa, Elda Ingegneria Spa), working  in several European Research Projects mostly on knowledge representation topics,  first as researcher, then as  Local PI and Project Manager (Esprit  Esteam, Itacha 1,  ADKMS,  Business Class, AIMS). Moreover, she  was  co-founder of a start-up operating in the area of geographical information systems in civil engineering.   In academia,  she has been a visiting researcher at EPFL  (2007) and  at Purdue University (2006, 2016, 2017).  She worked in the European research projects:  FP6 GeoPKDD as  EPFL sub-contractor;  FP7  Modap (Mobility Data Mining and Privacy); and COST Action  Move (Knowledge Discovery from Moving Objects).   She was/is working in national research  projects funded by  Ministry of Research: PRIN Next-generation Ultra-wideband Localization and Communication for the Internet of Things [ 2019-Aug 2023]; and MUR  PNRR Serics - Security and Rights in Cyberspace (Jan 2023-2025). She is associate editor for ACM TSAS and Springer GeoInformatica, and from 2017 to 2022 associate editor for IEEE TDSC. She served as PC Co-Chair in IEEE Mobile Data Management 2023 and  General Co-Chair in ACM SIGSpatial 2023.  Currently, she serves as member of the Executive Committee  @ ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information  (https://www.sigspatial.org/).