Francesca SpezzanoView profile
Associate Professor
Francesca Spezzano is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Boise State University, part of the College of Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Calabria, Italy (2012), with postdoctoral research at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Her research focuses on social network analysis, misinformation detection, information diffusion, and national security, with emphasis on applying machine learning and graph-based methods to combat online deception. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science Engineering, University of Calabria, Italy (2012) Visiting Scholar, UC Santa Cruz Database Group (2010–2011) Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Maryland (2013–2015) Research Interests: Misinformation detection and mitigation Social network analysis and mining Graph databases and link prediction National security applications Awards & Grants: NSF CAREER Award (2020) for studying misinformation diffusion Funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Army Research Office, and National Security Agency Service & Leadership: General Chair of WSDM 2026, CIKM 2024, and MISDOOM 2022 PC Co-Chair of ASONAM 2019 and FOSINT-SI 2020 Recipient of the Best Paper Award at FOSINT-SI 2018









