Alessandro Soccol

Starting in September, I will join the Ph.D. program at the Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems, where I will work on foundation models for structured data under the supervision of Prof. Steffen Staab.

Previously, I obtained my B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cagliari, where I also worked as a research assistant in recommender systems.

Conformal Prediction for Statistically Reliable LLM-as-a-Judge in Recommender Systems
Maddalena Amendola, Giacomo Medda, Alessandro Soccol, Ludovico Boratto, Mirko Marras and Raffaele Perego
CIKM 2026

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
CIKM 2025
article | code

Effective and Transparent Course Recommendation through Causal Reasoning with Language Models
Afreen Neda, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, and Alessandro Soccol
IIR 2025
article

Low-Resource Course Recommendation for Professional Training Associations
Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Nicolò Marongiu, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
WAILS 2025
article

KGGLM A Generative Language Model for Generalizable Knowledge Graph Representation Learning in Recommendation
Giacomo Balloccu, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, and Alessandro Soccol
RecSys 2024
article | code

How to Build Explainable Recommender Systems using Path Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs: A Tutorial with hopwise
Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Francesca M. Malloci, Mirko Marras, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
UMAP 2026
article | tutorial page

Path-based Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs for Explainable Recommender Systems
Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Francesca M. Malloci, Mirko Marras, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
CIKM 2026

Doctoral Researcher, Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems
Advised by Prof. Steffen Staab
09/2026 – Present

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Doctoral Researcher, University of Stuttgart
Advised by Prof. Steffen Staab
09/2026 – Present

Research Assistant, University of Cagliari
Recommender Systems on Knowledge Graphs; Semantic IDs; Conformal Risk Control
08/2024 – 07/2026

Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence, University of Cagliari
Grade: 110/110, with honours
10/2024 – 07/2026

Excellence Program, University of Cagliari
An honours program comprising 132 ECTS (rather than the standard 120), with dedicated funding.
10/2024 – 07/2026

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, University of Cagliari
Grade: 110/110, with honours
10/2021 – 07/2024