Tiziano Piccardi

About Me

Hey visitor, got lost on the Internet? Good, I’ll take this opportunity to introduce myself!

I am Tiziano Piccardi, postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in the HCI group advised by prof. Michael Bernstein. I am interested in data science with a focus on Web research, HCI, user modeling, computational social science. I am a proud collaborator of Wikimedia Research. With them, I study how to improve Wikipedia.

I got my master’s degree from the University of Trento and the Ph.D. from EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) working with prof. Robert West. During my studies, I had the opportunity to work at HP Labs and Xerox Research.

In the past, I founded a startup (Widerun) about virtual reality for fitness.

Publications - See all

AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphism
Myra Cheng, Kristina Gligoric, Tiziano Piccardi, Dan Jurafsky
EACL ‘24 Proc. of European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02056
Curious Rhythms: Temporal Regularities of Wikipedia Consumption
Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Gerlach, Robert West.
ICWSM ‘24 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09497
CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulations
Myra Cheng, Tiziano Piccardi, Diyi Yang.
EMNLP 2023 Proc. of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11501
Embedding Societal Values into Social Media Algorithms
Michael Bernstein, Angèle Christin, Jeffrey Hancock, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Chenyan Jia, Michelle Lam, Nicole Meister, Nathaniel Persily, Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Jeanne Tsai, Johan Ugander, Chunchen Xu.
Journal of Online Trust and Safety - Vol. 2, No. 1 (2023)
https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v2i1.148
How We Use Wikipedia: Studying Readers’ Behavior with Navigation Traces
Tiziano Piccardi.
EPFL - Thesis
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/294559 - PDF - Slides
A Large-Scale Characterization of How Readers Browse Wikipedia
Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Gerlach, Akhil Arora, Robert West.
TWEB 2022
(IC2S2 ‘23 Conference on Computational Social Science)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11848 - Poster
Going down the Rabbit Hole: Characterizing the Long Tail of Wikipedia Reading Sessions
Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Gerlach, Robert West.
WikiWorkshop ‘22 @ Proc. of The World Wide Web Conference (Companion)
(IC2S2 ‘23 Conference on Computational Social Science)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.06932 - Slides - Poster
Homepage2Vec: Language-Agnostic Website Embedding and Classification
Sylvain Lugeon*, Tiziano Piccardi*, Robert West. * Equal contribution
ICWSM ‘22 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03677.pdf - Talk - Poster - Github
Wikipedia Reader Navigation: When Synthetic Data Is Enough
Akhil Arora, Martin Gerlach, Tiziano Piccardi, Alberto García Durán, Robert West.
WSDM ‘22 Proc. of Conference on Web Search and Data Mining https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.00812 - Talk
A Large Scale Study of Reader Interactions with Images on Wikipedia
Daniele Rama, Tiziano Piccardi, Miriam Redi, Rossano Schifanella.
EPJ Data Science
(IC2S2 ‘21 Conference on Computational Social Science) https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01868
On the Value of Wikipedia as a Gateway to the Web
Tiziano Piccardi, Miriam Redi, Giovanni Colavizza, Robert West.
WWW ‘21 Proc. of The World Wide Web Conference
(IC2S2 ‘21 Conference on Computational Social Science) https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07385 - Talk
Crosslingual Topic Modeling with WikiPDA
Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West.
WWW ‘21 Proc. of The World Wide Web Conference
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11207 - Blog post - Talk - Github
Reader Engagement with Wikipedia’s Medical Content
Lauren A. Maggio, Ryan M. Steinberg, Tiziano Piccardi, John M. Willinsky.
eLife 2020
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52426
Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia
Tiziano Piccardi, Miriam Redi, Giovanni Colavizza, Robert West.
WWW ‘20 Proc. of The World Wide Web Conference
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08614 - Talk
WikiHist.html: English Wikipedia’s Full Revision History in HTML Format
Blagoj Mitrevski*, Tiziano Piccardi*, Robert West. * Equal contribution
ICWSM ‘20 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10256 - Talk
Structuring Wikipedia Articles with Section Recommendations
Tiziano Piccardi, Michele Catasta, Leila Zia, Robert West.
SIGIR ‘18 Proc. of Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05995 - Slides - Poster
Quootstrap: Scalable Unsupervised Extraction of Quotation-Speaker Pairs from Large News Corpora via Bootstrapping.
Dario Pavllo, Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West.
ICWSM ‘18 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02525
Toward a mixed-initiative QA system: from studying predictors in Stack Exchange to building a mixed-initiative tool
Gregorio Convertino, Massimo Zancanaro, Tiziano Piccardi, Felipe Ortega.
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 99
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.10.008
Towards crowd-based customer service: a mixed-initiative tool for managing Q&A sites
Tiziano Piccardi, Gregorio Convertino, Massimo Zancanaro, Ji Wang, Cedric Archambeau.
CHI ‘14 Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2557202- Pitch

Preprints

In-class Data Analysis Replications: Teaching Students while Testing Science * Kristina Gligoric*, Tiziano Piccardi*, Jake Hofman, Robert West. * Equal contribution
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16491 - Slides
Characterizing Image Accessibility on Wikipedia across Languages
Elisa Kreiss, Krishna Srinivasan, Tiziano Piccardi, Jesus Adolfo Hermosillo, Cynthia Bennett, Michael S Bernstein, Meredith Ringel Morris, Christopher Potts.
https://wikiworkshop.org/2023/papers/WikiWorkshop2023_paper_25.pdf
Assessing the performance of question-and-answer communities using survival analysis
Felipe Ortega, Gregorio Convertino, Massimo Zancanaro, Tiziano Piccardi.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.5903

Workshop co-organization

Wiki-M3L: Wikipedia and Multi-Modal & Multi-Lingual Research @ ICLR 2022 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki-M3L

Ethical Tensions, Norms, and Directions in the Extraction of Online Volunteer Work @ CSCW 2022 https://sites.google.com/u.northwestern.edu/ethicsandonlinevolunteerwork

Service

ICWSM (2022, SPC 2023-2024), CHI (2024), CSCW (2023),TheWebConf (2019-2023), WSDM (2023), EPJ Data Science, IC2S2 (2021, 2023), CIKM (2020, 2021), ECML-PKDD (2020), WikiWorkshop (2018-2023), WebSci (2020, 2024), EMNLP (2020), HT (2023), Interacting with Computers, Quantitative Science Studies