Luigi Cerulo

I started doing research as a job around the beginning of the new millennium, focusing on Software Engineering, particularly in software maintenance and evolution. I approached research and teaching at RCOST, a highly intellectually stimulating Research Centre on Software Technology at University of Sannio under the supervision of Gerardo Canfora. From 2003 to 2009, during my PhD and postdoc, I worked mainly on Mining Software Repositories, which was an emerging and very exciting topic in empirical software engineering. Large data repositories on software changes and bug fixes allowed quantitative studies and let researchers to induce new hypothesis and theories or to support/refute existing hypothesis from data. As a main contribution I proposed approaches, still cited in the literature, able to suggest which part of a software system needs to be fixed and who is the best candidate developer to achieve such a task. In 2017, a study on clone evolution, conducted ten years before, received the most influential award.

Around 2008, when the human genome had just been almost  completely sequenced and made available, I joined Michele Ceccarelli which was approaching bioinformatics and was determined to introduce quantitative methods in a traditional department of biology. We created the conditions to let grow a research group in bioinformatics at University of Sannio. Since than I focused mainly on the problem of reconstructing gene regulatory networks from transcriptional data applied to molecular cancer research. Many of our students got relevant positions in both accademia and industry.

Currently I co-lead the computational biology research group of University of Sannio and manage research fundings of over 1M Euro. I’m interested to unveil the potential of recent machine learning algorithms, especially deep learning architectures, to address relevant biological problems and propose novel biological research hypotheses in cancer bioinformatics and computational genomics. At University of Sannio I teach courses on computational biology and genomics, computer programming, and machine learning in biology.

I authored over 80 papers appeared in referred international journals, conferences and workshops and I’m member of the Editorial boards of BMC Bioinformatics and Journal of Translational Medicine.

Premi ricevuti

• Most Influetial Paper SANER 2017 ricevuto per l'articolo "How clones are maintained: An empirical study" pubblicato nel 2007 nei proceddings della European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, CSMR, 2007
• Best paper award ricevuto per l’articolo “Using multivariate time series and association rules to detect logical change coupling: An empirical study” presentato alla conferenza ICSM 2007. 
• Best paper award ricevuto per l’articolo “Identifying Changed Source Code Lines from Version Repositories” presentato alla conferenza MSR 2007.