Indiana University School of Informatics
Research
Faculty Research Profiles

Filippo Menczer

Faculty Title

Associate Professor of Informatics and Computer Science

Research Statement

Between 1988 and 1991 Filippo was affiliated with Domenico Parisi’s ALife Group at the Italian National Research Council in Rome. There he worked on the statistical mechanics of evolutionary models simulating ecological environments.

Between 1991 and 1998 Filippo worked with Rik Belew in the AI Lab at the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation focused on interactions between individual reinforcement learning and evolutionary computation based on local selection schemes. He applied these adaptive algorithms to study cognitive models of distributed agents in complex environments, including both ecological simulations and Web crawling applications. At UCSD Filippo wrote the LEE open source artificial life simulation tool, distributed with Linux and used in experimental and instructional settings.

Between 1998 and 2003 Filippo was an assistant professor in the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Iowa, and in 2002 he was appointed to the faculty of the interdisciplinary graduate program in Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences. At Iowa Filippo’s research focused on scalable applications of text, data, and Web mining, particularly adaptive crawling and searching algorithms. He developed the MySpiders system, which allows users to launch personal adaptive agents who crawl the Web on their behalf. His work on the connection between the Web’s content and link structure was featured on the BBC World Service.

Filippo has been the recipient of Fulbright, Rotary Foundation, and NATO fellowships, and is a fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute. In 2002 he received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Filippo joined Indiana University in 2003 as an associate professor of informatics and computer science.

Research Interests

  • scalable Web, text, and data mining applications
  • Web intelligence, Web IR, distributed information systems
  • adaptive intelligent agents
  • e-commerce
  • internet security
  • evolutionary computation, machine learning, neural networks
  • complex systems, social networks, artificial life, and agent based computational economics

More Information

Filippo Menczer

Our faculty research profiles highlight the research interests and accomplishments of a select faculty member from the IU School of Informatics. View all