:: Curriculum Vitae


Personal Data

:: Maria Elena Renda
Class 1973. Married and mother of 3 children (born on 2004, 2006 and 2012, respectively).
:: Work Address
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica del CNR, Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124, Pisa, ITALY. (Permanent)
JTL Urban Mobility Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT, Cambridge - MA, US. (Temporary)

Education

:: Ph.D. in Industrial and Information System Engineering, Dept. of Information Engineering, Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy. May 2009.
Ph.D. Thesis: "P I S A - A Personalized Information Search Assistant".

:: MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, with full marks. Dec. 2000.
Master Thesis: "Design and Development of a Meta-Search Engine", Dept. of Computer Science, University of Pisa. In Italian.

Current Research Areas

Shared Mobility Algorithms and Performance; Socio-psychological, Environmental and Economic Aspects of Mobility; Privacy Issues; Fleet Dispatching; Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Research Positions

:: Since August 15th, 2016
Visiting Research Scientist at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA.

:: Since December 16th, 2016
Researcher (Ricercatore III Livello - Tempo Indeterminato) at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - IIT), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.

:: July 19th, 2015 - September 13th, 2015
Visiting Researcher at the Senseable City Laboratory, Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, led by Carlo Ratti.

:: July 1st, 2013 - June 30th, 2014
Visiting Scholar at the BarabásiLab - Center for Complex Networks Research, Northeastern University - Boston, Massachusetts, USA, led by Albert-László Barabási.

:: From September 2nd, 2009 - December 15th, 2016
Researcher Associate (Ricercatore III Livello - Tempo Determinato) at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - IIT), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.

:: July 1st, 2005 - September 1st, 2009
Research Associate at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - IIT), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.

:: February 5th, 2001 - June 30th, 2005
Research Associate at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione "A. Faedo" - ISTI), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.

:: 2003, May 12st - December 19st
Visiting Ph.D. Student at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, Pittsburgh, PA) under the supervision of Prof. Jamie Callan, in the Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) group of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) - School of Computer Science (SCS).

Projects & Collaborations

Click here for a detailed list.

Invited Talks

:: "Environmental and Social Benefits of Shared Mobility", March 28 2019, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University, Boston, MA-US.
:: "Casual arpooling @MIT", March 8 2019, T&P Carpool Subcommittee, MIT Investment Management Company, Cambridge, MA-US.
:: "Rethinking "The RIDE" - Analyzing Efficiency Improvements of MBTA Paratransit Services", September 4 2018, MBTA Transportation Management and Planning, Boston, MA-US.
:: "Liquid Mobility", January 19 2018, Transportation Research Design, MIT DUSP, Cambridge, MA-US.
:: "Social Shared Mobility", March 21 2017, Senseable City Lab, MIT DUSP, Cambridge, MA-US.
:: "Shared Mobility and Social Networks", September 30 2016, JTL Mobility Lab, MIT DUSP, Cambridge, MA-US.
:: "Future Mobility: Sharing is Possible", December 16 2015, Smart and sustainable mobility: new paradigms for future urban transportation, DIDA, University of Florence, Florence, Italy.
:: C"ommunity-based communications in individual mobile networks", June 18 2009, ERCIM Workshop on Social Media Analysis "Networked Data Analysis for Social Media", University College Dublin, Ireland.

Awards

:: 2018
Recipient of the CNR Short Term Mobility 2018 with the project "Tiered Information Design to Encourage a Sustainable Commuting".
:: 2015
Recipient of the CNR Short Term Mobility 2015 with the project "Modelling shared mobility through shareability networks".
:: 2006
Recipient of the SIGAPP "Student Travel Award" for the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC06).
:: 2004
Recipient of the "Distinguished Hyperion Student Travel Award" of the ACM CIKM 2004 - 13th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.
:: 2001
Recipient of the "Roberto Del Moretto" 2001 Memorial Fund Grant for Ph.D. students, Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant'Anna, Pisa.

Developed Tools

:: PisaPOOL - Web Application and Installation to analyze/show carbon footprint
:: MobiPool - Carpooling Web Service
:: DriveWave - Interactive Installation for Intelligent Intersections
:: TReaDS - Tandem Repeats Discovery Service
:: AMIC@ - All MIcroarrays Clusterings @once

Recent Classes

:: Transportation Research Design (MIT 11.250), Fall 2019, MIT-DUSP, Cambridge - MA, USA. Professor: Jinhua Zhao

:: "China's Urbanization,Technology, and Innovation Market" (MIT 11.S951 / Sloan 15.S21), Spring 2019, MIT-DUSP, Cambridge - MA, USA.
Instructor: Zhengzhen Tan (MIT-DUSP), John Grant (MIT-Sloan), Yasheng Huang (MIT-Sloan).

:: "Behavior and Policy: Connections in Transportation" (MIT 11.478), Spring 2018, MIT-DUSP, Cambridge - MA, USA.
Professor: Jinhua Zhao.

:: Transportation Research Design (MIT 11.250), Fall 2017, MIT-DUSP, Cambridge - MA, USA. Professor: Jinhua Zhao

Specific Knowledges

:: Programming Languages
MySQL, Java, HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Bash scripting, Latex, C++(beginner), R (beginner)

:: Operative Systems
Mac OSX, Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows

:: Development Tools
Eclipse, NetBeans, XCode, JDK, Java SE, Java Swing, Java Servlet, JSP, MySQL, Tomcat, WildFly, JBoss

:: Specific Softwares
R-Studio, Gephi, Open Office, Microsoft Office, Gimp, Adobe, Latex

:: Network Simulation Environments
GTNetS - Georgia Tech Network Simulator
Javasim, an object-oriented simulation package

Professional Activities

:: 2002, May 1st - June 30th
Professional collaboration for the study and software development of the "Filtering and Recommendation Service", in the context of the European Project CYCLADES.
Employer: Institute of Information Elaboration (Istituto di Elaborazione dell'Informazione - IEI), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.

:: 2003, January 15th - March 15th
Professional collaboration for the software enhancement of the "Filtering and Recommendation Service", in the context of the European Project CYCLADES.
Employer: Institute of Information Science and Technologies (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione "A. Faedo" - ISTI), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.

:: 2004, February 1st - March 1st
Professional collaboration for the study and application of distributed search mechanisms in the context of peer to peer networks.
Employer: Institute of Information Science and Technologies (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione "A. Faedo" - ISTI), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.

:: 2004, May 15th - June 15th
Professional collaboration for the study and the application of schema matching algorithms in the context of peer to peer networks.
Employer: Institute of Information Science and Technologies (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione "A. Faedo" - ISTI), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.

Languages

:: Italian - Native speaking

:: English - Writing, speaking (Proficient)

:: French - Writing, speaking (basics)

:: Spanish - Speaking (basics)

:: Portuguese - Speaking (basics)

Publications

Click here for a detailed list.

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