Lucio La Cava, Ph.D.

University of Calabria 🇮🇹

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Contact me at:

lucio [dot] lacava [at] dimes [dot] unical [dot] it

I am an Assistant Professor (RTD-A) at the Department of Computer Engineering, Modeling, Electronics, and Systems Engineering (DIMES) of the University of Calabria, Italy. Previously, I got a Ph.D. cum laude in Information and Communication Technologies at the DIMES Department of the University of Calabria, with a thesis on “Graph Mining and Multimodal Representation Learning for Decentralized Socio-Economic Domains.”

I graduated magna cum laude in Computer Engineering in 2020 at the University of Calabria. I was visiting student at the IT University of Copenhagen from January to April 2023, working in the NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS) group. I am a member of the Machine Learning, NLP and Network Science Team @Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Lab at DIMES, and junior fellow of the Complex Human Behavior Lab (CHuB) @Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK).

I’m interested in Natural Language Processing (w/ particular focus on Large Language Models), Multimodal Representation Learning (including Graph Representation Learning and Computer Vision) and Graph Mining.

news

Oct 18, 2024 🇪🇸 Flying to Santiago de Compostela for presenting our paper on the detection and attribution of AI-generated text!
Sep 20, 2024 🥳 Paper accepted with EMNLP 2024 Findings!
Sep 16, 2024 📝 New preprint out on safeguarding (decentralized) social media through LLM agents for automatic rule compliance checking 🤖 🔍
Jul 4, 2024 🥳 Paper accepted with ECAI 2024 (acceptance rate 23%)
Jul 3, 2024 📝 New preprint out on hidden swing voters’ vulnerability to propaganda techniques during the 2022 Italian general elections 🗳️ 🇮🇹
Jun 21, 2024 📝 New preprint out on on the limits of LLMs in lexical entailment recognition 🔬
Jun 3, 2024 🇺🇸 Flying to Buffalo for chairing our 1st International Workshop on Decentralizing the Web (DeWeb’24) @ ICWSM!
May 21, 2024 🇩🇪 Off to Stuttgart for presenting a tutorial and two papers on Decentralized Online Social Networks at WebSci’24!
(Update: 🏆 Our paper “Polarization in Decentralized Online Social Networks” got the best short-paper award!)
May 2, 2024 I am so excited to share that my journey with the University of Calabria continues as an Assistant Professor starting today! 👨🏻‍💻 Looking forward to the adventures ahead! ✨
Feb 27, 2024 🎓👨🏻‍💻 Successfully defended (cum laude ✨) my Ph.D. dissertation “Graph Mining and Multimodal Representation Learning for Emerging Decentralized Socio-Economic Domains” 🥳
Jan 15, 2024 🧠 New preprint out on Artificial Agents mirroring human personalities through Open Large Language Models (LLMs)
Dec 7, 2023 🥳 Our paper on the Twitter migration to Mastodon is out now on ScientificReports!
Nov 6, 2023 🔬 Presenting my tutorial on Mastodon at ASONAM 2023 in Kusadasi, Turkey 🇹🇷
(Update: 🏆 the tutorial has been awarded for being inspiring!)
Oct 3, 2023 🔥 The NFT-70M dataset is here!
Aug 28, 2023 📚 Flying to Greece for the Google DeepMind Mediterranean Machine Learning Summer School (M2L) in Thessaloniki 🇬🇷
(Update: 🏆 I won the AEGEAN Scholarship as one of the top students!)
Jul 24, 2023 💻 (Virtually) Presenting our new tool at the ACM SIGIR 2023
Jul 19, 2023 🇩🇰 Flying to Copenhagen for presenting our work on the #TwitterMigration to Mastodon 🐘 at IC2S2 2023
May 2, 2023 🇺🇸 Off to Austin for presenting our work at TheWebConf2023
(Update: 🏆 I won a Student Travel Award sponsored by Zhipu AI!)
Apr 1, 2023 🥳 Paper accepted with ACM SIGIR 2023!
Jan 25, 2023 🥳 Paper accepted with The ACM Web Conference 2023! (acceptance rate 19.2%)
Jan 7, 2023 🚀🇩🇰 I have joined the NERDS team at ITU as a visiting PhD Student, working on the COCOONS project under the supervision of Luca Maria Aiello. It is going to be a fascinating experience! 👨🏻‍💻

selected publications

  1. llm_moderation.jpeg
    Safeguarding Decentralized Social Media: LLM Agents for Automating Community Rule Compliance
    Lucio La Cava, and Andrea Tagarelli
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.08963, 2024
  2. ai-detection.jpeg
    Is Contrasting All You Need? Contrastive Learning for the Detection and Attribution of AI-generated Text
    Lucio La Cava, Davide Costa, and Andrea Tagarelli
    In ECAI 2024 - 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 19-24 October 2024, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2024
  3. voters.jpeg
    Finding Hidden Swing Voters in the 2022 Italian Elections Twitter Discourse
    Alessia Antelmi, Lucio La Cava, and Arianna Pera
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.01279, 2024
  4. entailment.jpeg
    Talking the Talk Does Not Entail Walking the Walk: On the Limits of Large Language Models in Lexical Entailment Recognition
    Greco Candida Maria, Lucio La Cava, and Andrea Tagarelli
    Accepted for publication in EMNLP 2024 Findings, 2024
  5. agents-open.jpeg
    Open Models, Closed Minds? On Agents Capabilities in Mimicking Human Personalities through Open Large Language Models
    Lucio La Cava, and Andrea Tagarelli
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.07115, 2024
  6. scirep.jpeg
    Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon
    Lucio La Cava, Luca Maria Aiello, and Andrea Tagarelli
    Scientific Reports, 2023
  7. dib2023.jpeg
    Unraveling the NFT economy: A comprehensive collection of Non-Fungible Token transactions and metadata
    Davide Costa, Lucio La Cava, and Andrea Tagarelli
    Data in Brief, 2023
  8. thewebconf2023.jpeg
    Show Me Your NFT and I Tell You How It Will Perform: Multimodal Representation Learning for NFT Selling Price Prediction
    Davide Costa, Lucio La Cava, and Andrea Tagarelli
    In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023, 2023
  9. apns2021.jpeg
    Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon
    Lucio La Cava, Sergio Greco, and Andrea Tagarelli
    Applied Network Science, 2021