CV

A concise overview of my academic profile. A complete and regularly updated curriculum vitae is available as a PDF via the icon on the right.

Contact Information

Name Giacomo Frisoni
Professional Title Postdoctoral Researcher in Natural Language Processing
Email giacomo.frisoni@unibo.it
Website https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/giacomo.frisoni/en

Professional Summary

Giacomo Frisoni, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna. His research interests lie in Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models, and Graph Neural Networks, particularly for medical applications. He has co-authored over 30 papers in prestigious conferences and journals, including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and AAAI, receiving best paper and reviewer awards. He has actively contributed to the research community by serving in various scientific roles, including editorial board member, program committee member, area chair, and workshop organizer for many international venues. He has collaborated with esteemed academic and industrial institutions, including the University of Glasgow, IBM Research, EURECOM, and the University of Edinburgh. He served as an adjunct professor and tutor for multiple AI courses at the University of Bologna, co-supervising over 55 theses.

Experience

  • 2024 - 2027

    Cesena, Italy

    Postdoctoral Research Fellow
    University of Bologna, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
    Research on representational and generative AI—including language models and graph neural networks—for clinical and biomedical applications, within the DARE project (National Plan for Complementary Investments to the PNRR; total budget €124M). Supervisor: Claudio Sartori. Research group: UniboNLP.
  • 2022 - 2022

    Glasgow, Scotland

    Postgraduate Visiting Researcher
    University of Glasgow, School of Computing Science (TerrierTeam)
    Combining language models and structured knowledge for natural language processing and understanding in biomedical domains. Supervisor: Zaiqiao Meng.
  • 2019 - Present

    Italy

    Member of the Board of Directors
    AMAE Onlus, Italian Nonprofit Association for Esophageal Achalasia Patients (Rare Disease)
    As both a researcher and a patient, I contribute to the association by applying NLP and IT expertise to patient-centered initiatives, supporting research advancement and the development of AI-based tools for rare disease communities.
  • 2022 - 2023
    Student Ambassador
    Streamlit
    Selected among fewer than 50 students worldwide for the inaugural cohort of Streamlit’s Student Ambassador Education Program.
  • 2022 - 2022
    Student Ambassador
    Hugging Face
    Selected among fewer than 100 students worldwide for the inaugural cohort of Hugging Face’s Student Ambassador Program.

Education

  • 2020 - 2024

    Cesena, Italy

    Ph.D.
    University of Bologna
    Computer Science and Engineering
    • Ministerial scholarship; ranked first out of 132 candidates in the competitive call.
    • Supervisor: Gianluca Moro; tutors: Antonella Carbonaro and Ilaria Bartolini.
    • Thesis: Knowledge-Enhanced Natural Language Processing. Graduation score: 5/5 (Excellent).
    • Areas of study: large language models, graph neural networks, retrieval-augmented generation, information extraction, semantic parsing.
  • 2017 - 2020

    Cesena, Italy

    M.S.
    University of Bologna
    Computer Science and Engineering
    • Graduation score: 110/110 cum Laude; cumulative GPA: 4.0.
    • Thesis: A New Unsupervised Methodology of Descriptive Text Mining for Knowledge Graph Learning (supervisor: Gianluca Moro).
  • 2014 - 2017

    Cesena, Italy

    B.S.
    University of Bologna
    Computer Science and Engineering
    • Graduation score: 110/110 cum Laude; cumulative GPA: 4.0.
    • Thesis: Design and development of a software system for studying and researching rare diseases (supervisor: Dario Maio).

Research Projects

  • AI Analysis for Risk Assessment of Empty Lymph Nodes in Endometrial Cancer Surgery (2024–2026) — Co-Principal Investigator (scientific responsibility). Funded by Fondazione CARISBO (“Ricerca Scientifica e Alta Tecnologia 2024”, €20K), with the University Hospital of Bologna IRCCS, Sant’Orsola Polyclinic.
  • Artificial Intelligence for Public Administrations Connected (2023–2026) — Development of training and test-before-invest services focused on retrieval-augmented chatbots in low-resource regimes. Funded by the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (NextGenerationEU, Seal of Excellence; ~€5.8M) with SDA Bocconi, Maggioli Group, University of Milano-Bicocca, IFEL, and Tempo S.r.l.
  • DARE — Digital Lifelong Prevention (2022–2026) — Research on language models and graph neural networks for health promotion and lifelong prevention. Funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the National Plan for Complementary Investments to the PNRR (€124M).

Research Collaborations

  • UniboNLP, University of Bologna (2020–today) — primary research group, coordinated by Gianluca Moro; main expert on medical NLP and graph neural networks; co-management of the SLURM cluster infrastructure.
  • TerrierTeam, University of Glasgow (2022–today) — knowledge injection into language models for biomedical question answering, with Zaiqiao Meng; co-organization of the KEIR workshop series at ECIR.
  • IBM Research Europe, Dublin (2023–today) — zero-shot information extraction and multimodal fact checking, with Marcos Martínez Galindo, Alessandra Pascale, Javier Carnerero Cano, and James Barry.
  • EURECOM, Data Science Department (2023–today) — multimodal fact checking, large language models, and databases, with Paolo Papotti.
  • Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile (2024–today) — representation learning and natural language processing, with Ricardo Ñanculef.
  • University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics (2026–today) — large language model reasoning, knowledge distillation, and board games, with Pasquale Minervini.

Scientific Service

  • Guest Editor, Sensors (Q1) — Special Issue Role and Challenges of Healthcare Cognitive Computing: From Extraction to Data Analysis Techniques (2025–2026).
  • Workshop Co-Chair, 2nd Workshop on Knowledge-Enhanced Information Retrieval (KEIR-25) @ ECIR-25, Lucca, Italy — proceedings published by Springer in LNCS, vol. 16086.
  • Workshop Publicity Chair, 1st Workshop on Knowledge-Enhanced Information Retrieval (KEIR-24) @ ECIR-24, Glasgow, Scotland.
  • Session Chair at AAAI-26 (Singapore, NLP 15), ECAI-25 (Bologna, NLP 7), and DATA-22 (Lisbon, Neural Network Applications).
  • Area Chair / Action Editor, ACL Rolling Review (Oct 2025, Jan 2026, May 2026) — 21 meta-reviews.
  • Reviewer for international conferences (79 reviews), including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, ACL ARR, EACL, AAMAS, ECAI, ECIR, ISWC, and ESWC.
  • Reviewer for international journals (7 reviews), including Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Web Journal, and Expert Systems.

Awards

  • 2026
    Gold Reviewer Award
    The 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-26)

    Awarded to 4,439 reviewers out of 17,749 (top 25%) for review quality as assessed by area chairs.

  • 2025
    Outstanding Reviewer Award
    The 30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-25)

    Awarded to 51 reviewers out of 13,048 (top ~0.4%) for analytical depth, constructiveness, and timeliness.

  • 2022
    Best Student Paper Award
    The 11th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications (DATA-22)

    For “Enhancing Biomedical Scientific Reviews Summarization with Graph-Based Factual Evidence Extracted from Papers”, selected out of 62 accepted submissions.

  • 2020
    Best Paper Award
    The 9th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications (DATA-20)

    For “Learning Interpretable and Statistically Significant Knowledge from Unlabeled Corpora of Social Text Messages” (first authored publication), selected out of 35 accepted submissions.

  • 2020
    Best Master's Thesis Award (Con.Scienze Prize)
    National Conference of Presidents and Directors of University Structures in Sciences and Technologies (Con.Scienze), Italy

    National prize awarded to the 10 best Master’s research theses in scientific disciplines.

Invited Talks

  • LLM Evaluation: From Best Practices to Legal Domain Benchmarks — ALMA-AI Workshop Series, Alma Mater Research Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (2026).
  • LLM Training and Evaluation — FutureData4EU, international doctoral programme funded under the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND (2026).
  • NLP Methods Based on Small and Large Language Models in Low-Resource Regimes — ALMA-AI Workshop Series (2025).
  • Knowledge-Enhanced NLP: From Retrieval Augmentation to Generative Augmentation in Medical Domains — EURECOM, France (2024).
  • Retrieval-Enhanced Language Models and Semantic-Driven Summarization for Biomedical Domains — TerrierTeam, University of Glasgow, Scotland (2022).

Languages

Italian : Mother language
English : C1 level

Certificates

  • AI Agents Fundamentals - Hugging Face (2025)
  • Generative AI with Large Language Models - Coursera (2023)
  • Natural Language Processing Specialization - Coursera (2020)