avatar

Alessandro Soccol

Research Fellow and MSc Student in Artificial Intelligence
University of Cagliari
alessandro.soccol@unica.it


About Me

I am a second-year Master’s student in Applied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cagliari and an incoming doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS), where I will work on Foundation Models for Structured Data under the supervision of Prof. Steffen Staab.

I currently serve as a Research Assistant under the supervision of Prof. Ludovico Boratto, Dr. Mirko Marras and Dr. Giacomo Medda, conducting research on Recommender Systems. I have co-authored four research papers, including two published at top-tier international conferences (ACM CIKM ’25 and ACM RecSys ’24), as well as a conference tutorial at ACM UMAP ’26. I have also mentored a Bachelor’s student on his thesis project.

Beyond research, I am part of the Excellence Program, an honors track reserved for only two top-performing MSc students, and I am a Lead the Future (LTF) Mentee, a highly selective mentorship program for outstanding students with an acceptance rate of around 10% among more than 2,500 applicants. I have also been recognized by Forbes as one of the top 100 graduate students in Italy.

Research Interests

Publications

  1. KGGLM A Generative Language Model for Generalizable Knowledge Graph Representation Learning in Recommendation
    Giacomo Balloccu, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, and Alessandro Soccol
    18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys '24), Bari, Italy, 2024.
    PDF Code Late breaking results track (Poster)
  2. hopwise A Python Library for Explainable Recommendation based on Path Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs
    Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
    34th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (ACM CIKM '25), Seoul, South Korea, 2025.
    PDF Code Resource Paper (Poster)
  3. Effective and Transparent Course Recommendation through Causal Reasoning with Language Models
    Afreen Neda, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, and Alessandro Soccol
    15th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR '25), Cagliari, Italy, 2025.
    PDF Short Paper (Oral)
  4. Low-Resource Course Recommendation for Professional Training Associations
    Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Marongiu Nicolò, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
    Workshop on Artificial Intelligence with and for Learning Sciences (WAILS '25), Cagliari, Italy, 2025.
    PDF Short Paper (Oral)
  5. How to Build Explainable Recommender Systems using Path Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs A Tutorial with hopwise
    Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Francesca M. Mallocci, Mirko Marras, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
    34th ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP '26), Gothenburg, Sweden, 2026.
    Code Conference Tutorial (90 minutes, Oral)

News