AI-generated Deepfakes: Detection and Bias Analysis

DeepFakes, synthetic manipulations of faces produced with generative artificial intelligence, threaten the authenticity of content and expose detectors to the tough task of dealing with a multiplicity of content and great variability, compression levels and deepfake generation pipelines. Against this backdrop, this doctoral thesis investigates how misclassifications in DeepFake detection relate to high-level facial attributes, and how this knowledge can guide more robust and interpretable det...

Analyzing Settlement Agreements: A Data Driven Study of Corporate Financial Dynamics in Crisis

Measuring and Modelling the Spatial Patterns of Firms: Integrating Spatial Statistics and Machine Learning for Firm-Level Analysis

This thesis is developed as a collection of three independent chapters/papers and studies how productivity differences emerge and persist across firms and places, with a focus on industrial clustering and agglomeration. The first paper devel- ops an empirical framework based on bipartite network representations of firms to characterize local productive structures of innovative startups in Lombardy. The second paper develops a deep clustering pipeline to perform bootstrap analysis of high-tech...

AI-Driven Learning Assistants for Reflective, Adaptive, and Inclusive Education