Budgeted Interactive Property Graph Repair with Graph Neural Networks
A. Pachera, A. Bonifati, A. Mauri. Budgeted Interactive Property Graph Repair with Graph Neural Networks. ACM SIGMOD 2027 (to appear).
Curriculum Vitae
I am a PhD candidate working at the intersection of Machine Learning, Graph Neural Networks, and Data Management. My research focuses on intelligent systems that combine machine learning with human expertise to improve graph data quality, causal analysis, and interactive data management — with publications in venues including SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE.
Research interests: Machine Learning · Graph Neural Networks · Graph Representation Learning · Human–AI Collaboration · Interactive Machine Learning · Causal Machine Learning · Data-centric AI · Knowledge Graphs
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 — 2023–Present
- Thesis: Human-Machine Intelligence Integration for Data-Intensive Applications
- Supervisors: Prof. Angela Bonifati, Dr. Andrea Mauri
- M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering, Politecnico di Milano — 2019–2022
- Thesis: KlevR and DeepR — A benchmark for exploring deductive reasoning functionalities of variational autoencoders
- Advisor: Prof. Emanuele Della Valle
- B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Padua — 2015–2019
- Thesis: Sensor Fusion for Android Devices · Advisor: Prof. Stefano Tommasin
Research experience
- Visiting PhD Researcher, University of British Columbia — Jan 2026 – Jun 2026
- Host: Prof. Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Database Research Group
- Graph machine learning · data-driven causal analysis · graph representation learning
- PhD Candidate, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (LIRIS) — Oct 2023 – Present
- Graph Neural Networks for estimating graph repair difficulty
- Optimization algorithms for budget-aware Human–AI collaboration
- Interactive systems for property graph repair and graph-based causal analysis
- Research Fellow, Politecnico di Milano — Jun 2022 – Oct 2023
- Knowledge Engineering within the EU Horizon 2020 PERISCOPE project
- Data extraction & enrichment from heterogeneous textual sources for COVID-19 impact analysis
- Development of the PERSEUS strategic decision-support platform
Industry experience
- Chief Technology Officer, Focal SRL — Jun 2022 – Oct 2023
- Led development of an AI-powered platform connecting professionals with clients using semantic search and vector databases
- Stack: Next.js · Vector Databases · AWS · Semantic Search · Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Publications
WhatIf: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases
A. Pachera, A. Bonifati, A. Mauri. WhatIf: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 2025. DOI: 10.14778/3749646.3749671
User-Centric Property Graph Repairs
A. Pachera, A. Bonifati, A. Mauri. User-Centric Property Graph Repairs. Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (PACMMOD), 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3709735
Grafixer: Enabling User-Centric Repairs for Property Graphs
A. Pachera, A. Bonifati, A. Mauri. Grafixer: Enabling User-Centric Repairs for Property Graphs. PACMMOD Demonstration, SIGMOD 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3722212.3725105
Understanding Students’ Errors in Graph Query Formulation
Understanding Students' Errors in Graph Query Formulation. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (ToCE), 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3743687
Towards User-Centric Graph Repairs
A. Pachera, A. Bonifati and A. Mauri, "Towards User-Centric Graph Repairs," in 2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops (ICDEW), Utrecht, Netherlands, 2024, pp. 375-376, doi: 10.1109/ICDEW61823.2024.00057.
Teaching
Invited talks
Improving Data Quality and Reasoning in Graph Databases: Human-in-the-Loop, Machine Learning, and Causal Approaches
Invited talk at University of British Columbia — Database Research Group, Vancouver, Canada
Professional activities
- ACM SIGMOD Availability & Reproducibility Initiative (ARI), 2024–2025
- Web Chair, International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE) 2026
- Co-organizer, CODATA Workshop on Computational Data Intelligence and AI Design, 2026
- Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
- Program Committee Member, EmpatiCH Workshop
Technical expertise
- Machine Learning & AI: Graph Neural Networks, Graph Representation Learning, Human–AI Collaboration, Interactive ML, Causal ML, Data-centric AI, LLMs, RAG
- ML frameworks: PyTorch, PyTorch Geometric (PyG), DGL, TensorFlow, Hugging Face Transformers, Optuna
- Graph data management: Property Graphs, Graph Databases, Neo4j, Cypher, Knowledge Graphs, RDF, OWL, SPARQL
- Data science & distributed computing: Python, NumPy, Pandas, Apache Spark
- Software engineering: Docker, Git, Next.js, AWS, Java, C++, SQL · LangChain, Vector Databases
Languages
- Italian — Native
- English — C1
- French — B2