Paolo Ferragina is a full algorithms professor and vice rector for applied research and innovation at the University of Pisa. His promotion to full professor was sponsored by Yahoo! Research (2007).
He coordinates the Advanced Algorithms and Applications (Acube Lab, http://acube.di.unipi.it) research laboratory, which carries out research in the area of algorithmics for big data, with particular reference to large collections of data in the form of text coming particularly from the Web or social networks. He is the author of more than 120 publications in international magazines and conference reports, 6 US patents (3 owned by Yahoo! and 1 by NYU, still under evaluation), and chapters in books edited by CRC press, Springer, Mondadori and Boringhieri.
He has been an invited speaker and co-chair at major post-graduate schools and international conferences on the subjects of algorithmics and Web Search. He is on the editorial board of the Journal on Graph Algorithms and Applications. His research has been given various forms of scientific recognition, the most recent of which are 2 Google Faculty Awards (2010 and 2013) in the area of semantic research.