Jacopo Urbani
Short biography
I was born in Italy in 1984 and grew up in a small village right before the Alps (here).
In 2004, I started to study Computer Science (CS) at the University of Venice. During this period, I’ve studied for six months at the University of Vienna and worked for a few months as a developer for a big Italian bank.
In 2007, I moved to the Netherlands to follow a Master program in Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. Then, I started a PhD project in Computer Science at the same university under the supevision of professors Henri Bal and Frank van Harmelen. In 2010, I visited for a few months the Yahoo! Research Labs In Barcelona. In 2013, I defended my PhD thesis graduating cum laude. My PhD thesis is about performing reasoning over large amounts of structured data on the Web using distributed algorithms.
After I defended my thesis, I received a personal grant by the Dutch National Research Council (VENI), to continue my research for three more years. In 2014, I moved to California to be a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and more precisely in the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. Then, I spent some time as researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany under the supervision of Gerhard Weikum. I've also been a guest researcher in the database group of CWI until the end of 2022. Currently, I'm an associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam.