Professor of Computer Science - University of Palermo

Member of the Academic Senate at the University of Palermo for the three-year period 2022-2024
Director of the Research Unit of CINI (Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l’Informatica) at the University of Palermo
Member of the Editorial board of Theoretical Computer Science, Elsevier (TCS-A)
Member of the Scientific Committee of GRIN (Group of Italian Professors of Computer Science) (Nov 2020 - today)
PC member of the conferences: SPIRE 2022, ICTCS 2021, DLT 2021, CPM 2021, SOFSEM 2021 (Track FACB), SPIRE 2020, DCFS 2020, AutoMathA 2020 , iABC 2020, SOFSEM 2020 (Track FACB), CiE 2020 (also, co-chair of CiE 2020 Special Session on Combinatorial String Matching) SPIRE 2019, IWOCA 2019, DLT 2019, BBC 2019, PWA 2018, SPIRE 2017 (co-chair), CIAA 2017, DLT 2016, DCFS 2016, AAIM 2016, SPIRE 2015, MFCS 2015, DLT 2015, ICTCS 2014, DLT 2014, ICTCS 2013 (co-chair), CPM 2012, CPM 2008.
Invited speaker at the conferences: Women in Computability 2020 , IWOCA 2019 , DLT 2018, AutoMathA 2015 , WORDS 2013, DATA STREAMS AND COMPRESSION - CiE 2013 Special Session, CCI III 2006.
Member of the Steering Committee of the International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2018, 2019, 2020)
PC co-chair of the 24th Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science - ICTCS 2023, that will take place in Palermo from 13 to 15 September 2023.

Research

Main research lines: Combinatorics on Words, Algorithms on Strings, Automata Theory and Formal Languages, Symbolic Dynamics, Data Compression, Data Structures and Algorithms for the analysis of biological sequences. Some of the most cited publications are related to the extension of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform to a collection of sequences (Theoretical Computer Science 2007), the study of mathematical properties and the combinatorial analysis of the BWT (Information Processing Letters 2003) and the boosting of the BWT-based compression of sequences (Journal of the ACM 2005).
Tutor of several project research grants and a MIUR research fellow. Currently, supervisor of the PhD student Giuseppe Romana.

17611 - Laboratorio di Algoritmi (Degree in Computer Science).
17392 - Teoria dell'Informazione e Compressione Dati (Master Degree in Computer Science).