Sofia Ceppi

Sofia Ceppi is a Research Assistant in the CISA institute, within the School of Informatics, at the University of Edinburgh. Her work is part of the Smart Society project and aims to address problems related to adaptive social computation. In particular, she studies scenarios where human diversity plays a crucial role and systems have limited information about human preferences. At the moment, her main interest is in understanding how multiple combinatorial options can be offered to users such that the system and user goals are balanced, diversity is taken into account, and users’ choices lead to feasible solutions.

In general, Sofia’s research activities are in the area of Computational Microeconomics and her work focuses on designing incentives to motivate people and rational agents to behave as desired. In particular, she is interested in studying on-line markets and how service personalisation can be used as an incentive.

Sofia received a Master’s degree in Computer Science Engineering (2008) from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and her thesis addresses problems related to the wholesale electricity market under a game theoretical point of view. She obtained a Ph.D. in Information technology from the same university (2013). In her thesis she focuses on a mechanism design problem where multiple service providers are federated into a unique one (whose aim is to provide personalised services and recommendations). The crucial aspect of this work is that a provider’s utility does not depend only on his services but also on the ones of the other providers. During her Ph.D. she also extended her knowledge on well known problems in game theory, like, bilateral bargaining and equilibria in strategic-form games. In 2012, she was a visiting student at University of Southampton (UK). In Southampton, other than on her thesis, she worked on redistribution problems in on-line markets. From September 2013 to August 2015, she was a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Networks, Economics, and Algorithms group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. During these two years Sofia worked on several topics among which advertising auctions, personalised cloud pricing, and personality profiles of on-line buyers. The main research fields characterized by the techniques used during her research are Game Theory, Mechanism Design, and Data Science.