Hi there!

I am a computational criminologist interested in the study of urban crime, violence, and organized crime through the lenses of causal inference, artificial intelligence, and network science. I am drawn to how these methods can contribute both to theory and to the design of public policies.

My research also explores what happens when machines themselves start to behave socially — and sometimes anti-socially — in multi-agent AI systems.

My work has appeared (or will appear) in major outlets such as Nature and Science, the Annual Review of Criminology, Criminology, and the Journal of Public Economics, and my findings have been covered nationally and internationally by leading news outlets including The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Guardian.

computational-criminologymulti-agent-AIcausal-inferencepublic-policy

recent news

2026.11Speaking on the ASC Presidential Panel Criminology and Justice Policy in the Age of AI at the American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting, Chicago.talk
2026.10Ambient Population and Crime: The Fragility of Causal Links in Urban Spaces is accepted at Justice Quarterly.paper
2026.10Guest Editor of a Special Issue on Generative AI and Crime at the Journal of Quantitative Criminology — call for papers.role
2026.09Artificial Intelligence and Criminology is published in the Annual Review of Criminology.paper
2026.07Computational Approaches and the Future of Urban Crime Research is published in Nature.paper
2026.04A Criminology of Machines is published in Theory and Society.paper
2026.04Invited talk at Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs.talk
2026.03CrisiText, a dataset of warning messages for LLM training in emergency communication, is published in Findings of EACL 2026.paper
2026.03Co-awarded the ONLIVES project by the Horizon Program of the European Commission, with UCL as the leader.grant
2026Invited talks at the University of Oxford and the University of Padua.talk
2025I Want to Break Free! — persuasion and anti-social behavior of LLMs in multi-agent settings with social hierarchy — published in TMLR.paper
2025Spoke at TEDx Geneva on organized crime and machine prediction.talk
2025Began a tenure-track Assistant Professorship at the University of Trento, and a Fellowship at FBK.role
2024Received the Early Career Award of the European Society of Criminology.award