معرفی
Fabio Calefato is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bari "A. Moro" since 2022, holding national habilitation as Full Professor in academic disciplines 01/B1 (since Dec. 2023) and 09/H1 (since Mar. 2025). He serves as CEO & co-founder of PeoplewareAI academic spin-off (2021-present), Rector's delegate of GARR network (2023-present), and Director's delegate for student traineeships (2023-present). Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science (2019-22) and at the Jonian Department, Taranto (2015-19), and conducted post-doctoral research at the Department of Computer Science (2007-08; 2010-14).
Dr. Calefato received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in May 2007 from the University of Bari with a thesis titled "Supporting Synchronous Communication in Distributed Software Teams," which was listed on SIGSOFT Selected Ph.D. Dissertations in Software Engineering and published by VDM Publishing. He also holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Bari (2002).
His research focuses on collaborative and social software engineering, mining software repositories and technical Q&A sites, SE4AI, psychometric and sentiment analyses from communication channels in the social programmer ecosystem, collaboration in online creative communities, community-driven knowledge sharing, and computer-mediated communication theories and tools. His work bridges software engineering with social psychology and AI, particularly examining how developers interact, collaborate, and express emotions in online platforms.
Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong trajectory toward AI integration in software engineering practices, with increasing focus on AutoML applications, sentiment analysis in developer communities, and the impact of generative AI on open-source development. His research spans both theoretical foundations and practical tools, with several software implementations including EMTk (Emotion Mining Toolkit), Apache-Big5 (developer personality profiler), and Pynblint (Jupyter notebook quality assurance).
- Best Paper Award at ICGSE'18
- SIGSOFT Selected Ph.D. Dissertations in Software Engineering
Dr. Calefato actively advises doctoral students, with Kelly Azevedo Borges Leal (current, researching AutoML for Software Engineering), Luigi Quaranta (graduated 2022, thesis on collaboration around computational notebooks), and Giuseppe Iaffaldano (graduated 2020, thesis on dynamics of online collaborative communities). His research has been supported through various grants enabling international collaborations with institutions including Carnegie Mellon University, University of Victoria, and TU Wien.
He leads the COLLAB research group at the University of Bari, which develops tools and conducts empirical studies on collaborative software development. The group maintains several active GitHub projects including Apache-Big5, mini-IPIP test, EMTk, and pySOreputation, alongside experimental datasets used in multiple published studies. His academic spin-off PeoplewareAI focuses on applying AI to human aspects of software development.
