Francesco Ficarola is the founder of the website FrancescoFicarola.com, which was at the beginning a personal space to store notes and tips about his work, then a publicly available platform to share knowledge with the community.
He was born in 1984 and currently lives in a little town near Rome, Italy. He received a Bachelor of Computer Engineering and a Master of Computer Engineering (with specialization in Computer Networking) from Sapienza, University of Rome, in 2008 and 2010, respectively. A month after his Master’s Degree he started working at the University as Research Collaborator on Wireless Sensor Networks.
In April 2011 he was hired as tutor of the course “Project of Networks and Information Systems” in Rieti and in the same month he started working at WLAB company on EU research projects using RFID and WSN technologies. In 2012 he was tutor of the course “Cryptography and Network Security”.
He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Sapienza, University of Rome on October 2015. During his Ph.D. he has been a visiting research scholar at North Carolina State University (USA) for a period of 6 months. He has been also author of several open source projects, among which the most famous is the gexf4j library.
After the PhD, he has worked as Research Fellow at the University for around 1 year and his main research topics were about analysis of social phenomena, such as Collective Intelligence, and computation on huge complex networks.
At the beginning of 2016 he was hired by DI.GI. International S.p.A. as Security expert and Project Manager. From 2017 to 2021 he was a Cyber Security Officer at Sapienza, University of Rome, while at present he is a Cyber Security Expert at IVASS.