Antonio Scala
@cnr.it
Research Director at the Institute for Complex Systems
RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS
Multidisciplinary
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Antonio Scala, Camilla Fioravanti, and Gabriele Oliva
Springer Nature Switzerland
Antonio Scala and Marco Delmastro
Elsevier BV
Michele Avalle, Niccolò Di Marco, Gabriele Etta, Emanuele Sangiorgio, Shayan Alipour, Anita Bonetti, Lorenzo Alvisi, Antonio Scala, Andrea Baronchelli, Matteo Cinelli,et al.
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractGrowing concern surrounds the impact of social media platforms on public discourse1–4and their influence on social dynamics5–9, especially in the context of toxicity10–12. Here, to better understand these phenomena, we use a comparative approach to isolate human behavioural patterns across multiple social media platforms. In particular, we analyse conversations in different online communities, focusing on identifying consistent patterns of toxic content. Drawing from an extensive dataset that spans eight platforms over 34 years—from Usenet to contemporary social media—our findings show consistent conversation patterns and user behaviour, irrespective of the platform, topic or time. Notably, although long conversations consistently exhibit higher toxicity, toxic language does not invariably discourage people from participating in a conversation, and toxicity does not necessarily escalate as discussions evolve. Our analysis suggests that debates and contrasting sentiments among users significantly contribute to more intense and hostile discussions. Moreover, the persistence of these patterns across three decades, despite changes in platforms and societal norms, underscores the pivotal role of human behaviour in shaping online discourse.
Gabriele Oliva, Mauro Franceschelli, Andrea Gasparri, and Antonio Scala
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
In this article, we develop a general open multiagent systems (OMAS) framework over undirected graphs where the agents' interaction is, in general, nonlinear, time-varying, and heterogeneous, in that the agents interact with different pairwise interaction rules for each link, possibly nonlinear, which may change over time. In particular, assuming the agents interact by exchanging flows, which modify their states, our framework guarantees that the sum of the states of agents participating in the network is preserved. To this end, agents maintain a state variable for each of their neighbors. Upon the disconnection of a neighbor, such a variable is used to completely eliminate the effect of previous interaction with disconnected agents from the overall system. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed OMAS framework, we provide a case study focused on average consensus, and, specifically, we develop a sufficient condition on the structure of the agents' interaction guaranteeing asymptotic convergence under the assumption that the network becomes fixed. The article is complemented by simulation results that numerically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Stefano Bartolucci, Roberto Setola, Antonio Scala, Stefano Panzieri, and Gabriele Oliva
Springer Nature Switzerland
Antonio Scala and Marco Delmastro
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractNetworks have always played a special role for human beings in shaping social relations, forming public opinion, and driving economic equilibria. Nowadays, online networked platforms dominate digital markets and capitalization leader-boards, while social networks drive public discussion. Despite the importance of networks in many economic and social domains (economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc.), the knowledge about the laws that dominate their dynamics is still scarce and fragmented. Here, we analyse a wide set of online networks (those financed by advertising) by investigating their value dynamics from several perspectives: the type of law they follow, their geographic scope, and the relationship between economic value and financial value. The results show that the networks are dominated by strongly nonlinear dynamics. The existence of non-linearity is often underestimated in social sciences because it involves contexts that are difficult to deal with, such as the presence of multiple equilibria—some of which are unstable. Yet, these dynamics must be fully understood and addressed if we aim to understand the recent evolution in the economic, political and social milieus, which are precisely characterised by corner equilibria (e.g., polarisation, winner-take-all solutions, increasing inequality) and nonlinear patterns.
Antonio Scala and Pierpaolo Cavallo
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
The urgency to develop vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the acceleration of clinical trials. Specifically, a broad spectrum of efficacy levels has been reported for various vaccines based on phase III cohort studies. Our study demonstrates that conducting large cohort phase III clinical trials during the peak of an epidemic leads to a significant underestimation of vaccine efficacy, even in the absence of confounding factors. Furthermore, we find that this underestimation increases with the proportion of infectious individuals in the population during the experiment and the severity of the epidemic, as measured by its basic reproduction number.
Gabriele Etta, Emanuele Sangiorgio, Niccolò Di Marco, Michele Avalle, Antonio Scala, Matteo Cinelli, and Walter Quattrociocchi
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Social media platforms heavily changed how users consume and digest information and, thus, how the popularity of topics evolves. In this paper, we explore the interplay between the virality of controversial topics and how they may trigger heated discussions and eventually increase users’ polarization. We perform a quantitative analysis on Facebook by collecting ∼57M posts from ∼2M pages and groups between 2018 and 2022, focusing on engaging topics involving scandals, tragedies, and social and political issues. Using logistic functions, we quantitatively assess the evolution of these topics finding similar patterns in their engagement dynamics. Finally, we show that initial burstiness may predict the rise of users’ future adverse reactions regardless of the discussed topic.
Francesca Santucci, Martina Nobili, Luca Faramondi, Gabriele Oliva, Bianca Mazzà, Antonio Scala, Massimo Ciccozzi, and Roberto Setola
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Italy was the first European country to be significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The lack of similar previous experiences and the initial uncertainty regarding the new virus resulted in an unpredictable health crisis with 243,506 total confirmed cases and 34,997 deaths between February and July 2020. Despite the panorama of precariousness and the impelling calamity, the country successfully managed many aspects of the early stages of the health and socio-economic crisis. Nevertheless, many disparities can be identified at the regional level. The study aims to determine which aspects of regional management were considered more important by the citizens regarding economic and health criteria. A survey was designed to gather responses from the population on the Italian regions’ response and provide a ranking of the regions. The 29-item online survey was provided to 352 individuals, and the collected data were analyzed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process methodology. The results show a general agreement in considering of greater relevance the healthcare policies rather than the economic countermeasures adopted by regional governments. Our analysis associated a weight of 64% to the healthcare criteria compared to the economic criteria with a weight of 36%. In addition to the results obtained from the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the sample’s composition was analyzed to provide an overall assessment of the Italian regions. To do so, we collected objective data for each region and multiplied them by the overall weight obtained for each sub-criteria. Looking at the propensity to vaccination or the belief in a relation between COVID-19 and 5G according to age and educational qualification helps understand how public opinion is structured according to cultural and anthropological differences.
Gabriele Oliva, Martin Schlueter, Masaharu Munetomo, and Antonio Scala
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
COVID-19 has got us to face a new situation where, for the lack of ready-to-use vaccines, it is necessary to support vaccination with complex non-pharmaceutical strategies. In this paper, we provide a novel Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming formulation for fine-grained optimal intervention planning (i.e., at the level of the single day) against newborn epidemics like COVID-19, where a modified SIR model accounting for heterogeneous population classes, social distancing and several types of vaccines (each with its efficacy and delayed effects), allows us to plan an optimal mixed strategy (both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical) that takes into account both the vaccine availability in limited batches at selected time instants and the need for second doses while keeping hospitalizations and intensive care occupancy below a threshold and requiring that new infections die out at the end of the planning horizon. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed formulation, we analyze a case study for Italy with realistic parameters.
F. Frappart, B. Ygorra, S. Riazanoff, E. Salameh, S. Taviani, D. Rossi, A. Mecali, M.M. Azzela, E. Perugini, J. Benveniste,et al.
IEEE
Lakes and reservoirs are considered sentinels of climate and anthropogenic changes. Lakes and reservoirs surface water storage is an essential hydrological variable but poorly known as this information is scarce. Earth Observation data are a reliable source of information to overcome this scarcity. Among these, the combined use of satellite images, to derive water extent, and radar altimetry, which enables to estimate water levels, provides valuable information on water storage changes. Here, we used Synthetic Aperture Radar images from Sentinel-1 and radar altimetry data from Sentinel-3 to monitor the water volume changes of Lake Bracciano from 2016 to 2021. This lake was affected by a water crisis in 2017 and the water supply to the city of Rome (Italy) was interrupted September 2017 to preserve its ecosystem. Hence, we demonstrate how Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-3 data can be useful to monitor water extent and level, which can be profoundly changed by the climate crisis.
Sylvie C. Briand, Matteo Cinelli, Tim Nguyen, Rosamund Lewis, Dimitri Prybylski, Carlo M. Valensise, Vittoria Colizza, Alberto Eugenio Tozzi, Nicola Perra, Andrea Baronchelli,et al.
Elsevier BV
Alessandro Galeazzi, Matteo Cinelli, Giovanni Bonaccorsi, Francesco Pierri, Ana Lucia Schmidt, Antonio Scala, Fabio Pammolli, and Walter Quattrociocchi
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic is one of the defining events of our time. National Governments responded to the global crisis by implementing mobility restrictions to slow down the spread of the virus. To assess the impact of those policies on human mobility, we perform a massive comparative analysis on geolocalized data from 13 M Facebook users in France, Italy, and the UK. We find that lockdown generally affects national mobility efficiency and smallworldness—i.e., a substantial reduction of long-range connections in favor of local paths. The impact, however, differs among nations according to their mobility infrastructure. We find that mobility is more concentrated in France and UK and more distributed in Italy. In this paper we provide a framework to quantify the substantial impact of the mobility restrictions. We introduce a percolation model mimicking mobility network disruption and find that node persistence in the percolation process is significantly correlated with the economic and demographic characteristics of countries: areas showing higher resilience to mobility disruptions are those where Value Added per Capita and Population Density are high. Our methods and findings provide important insights to enhance preparedness for global critical events and to incorporate resilience as a relevant dimension to estimate the socio-economic consequences of mobility restriction policies.
Antonio Scala
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractWhile vaccination is the optimal response to an epidemic, recent events have obliged us to explore new strategies for containing worldwide epidemics, like lockdown strategies, where the contacts among the population are strongly reduced in order to slow down the propagation of the infection. By analyzing a classical epidemic model, we explore the impact of lockdown strategies on the evolution of an epidemic. We show that repeated lockdowns have a beneficial effect, reducing the final size of the infection, and that they represent a possible support strategy to vaccination policies.
Emanuele Brugnoli, Matteo Cinelli, Walter Quattrociocchi, and Antonio Scala
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Carlo Giudicianni, Manuel Herrera, Armando Di Nardo, Gabriele Oliva, and Antonio Scala
Elsevier BV
C. Giudicianni, A. Di Nardo, R. Greco, and A. Scala
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractMost real-world networks, from the World-Wide-Web to biological systems, are known to have common structural properties. A remarkable point is fractality, which suggests the self-similarity across scales of the network structure of these complex systems. Managing the computational complexity for detecting the self-similarity of big-sized systems represents a crucial problem. In this paper, a novel algorithm for revealing the fractality, that exploits the community structure principle, is proposed and then applied to several water distribution systems (WDSs) of different size, unveiling a self-similar feature of their layouts. A scaling-law relationship, linking the number of clusters necessary for covering the network and their average size is defined, the exponent of which represents the fractal dimension. The self-similarity is then investigated as a proxy of recurrent and specific response to multiple random pipe failures – like during natural disasters – pointing out a specific global vulnerability for each WDS. A novel vulnerability index, called Cut-Vulnerability is introduced as the ratio between the fractal dimension and the average node degree, and its relationships with the number of randomly removed pipes necessary to disconnect the network and with some topological metrics are investigated. The analysis shows the effectiveness of the novel index in describing the global vulnerability of WDSs.
Angelo Facchini and Antonio Scala
Elsevier
Francesco Surmonte, Umberto Perna, Antonio Scala, Alessandro Rubino, and Angelo Facchini
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT A correlation analysis based on Markowitz Portfolio Theory and data from meteorological station are used to develop a decision-making tool for the optimal spatial installation of renewable energy sources from Wind turbines and PV panels. A case study involving power generation plants and weather stations in the region of Tuscany in Italy is developed. The results show that temporal correlations of solar and wind generation profiles are characterized by correlation and anticorrelation. This feature is used for supporting decision-making on investments in renewable energy at the territorial level.
Ana L. Schmidt, Antonio Peruzzi, Antonio Scala, Matteo Cinelli, Peter Pomerantsev, Anne Applebaum, Sophia Gaston, Nicole Fusi, Zachary Peterson, Giuseppe Severgnini,et al.
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractRecent studies have shown that online users tend to select information that adheres to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups that share a common narrative. This information environment can elicit tribalism instead of informed debate, especially when issues are controversial. Algorithmic solutions, fact-checking initiatives, and many other approaches have shown limitations in dealing with this phenomenon, and heated debate and polarization still play a pivotal role in online social dynamics (e.g. traditional vs. anti-establishment polarization). To understand the effect of different communication strategies able to smooth polarization, in this paper, together with Corriere della Sera, a major Italian news outlet, we measure the social response of users to different types of news framing. We analyse users’ reactions to 113 ad-hoc articles published on the newspaper’s Facebook page and the corresponding news articles on the topic of migration, published from March to December 2018. We examine different journalistic techniques and content types by analyzing their impact on user comments in terms of toxicity, criticism of the newspaper, and stance concerning migration. We find that visual pieces and factual news reports elicit the highest level of trust in the media source, while opinion pieces and editorials are more likely to be criticized. We also notice that data-driven pieces elicit an extremely low level of trust in the news source. Furthermore, coherently with the echo chambers behaviour, we find social conformity strongly affecting the commenting behaviour of users on Facebook.
Matteo Cinelli, Walter Quattrociocchi, Alessandro Galeazzi, Carlo Michele Valensise, Emanuele Brugnoli, Ana Lucia Schmidt, Paola Zola, Fabiana Zollo, and Antonio Scala
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractWe address the diffusion of information about the COVID-19 with a massive data analysis on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab. We analyze engagement and interest in the COVID-19 topic and provide a differential assessment on the evolution of the discourse on a global scale for each platform and their users. We fit information spreading with epidemic models characterizing the basic reproduction number $$R_0$$ R 0 for each social media platform. Moreover, we identify information spreading from questionable sources, finding different volumes of misinformation in each platform. However, information from both reliable and questionable sources do not present different spreading patterns. Finally, we provide platform-dependent numerical estimates of rumors’ amplification.
Antonio Scala, Andrea Flori, Alessandro Spelta, Emanuele Brugnoli, Matteo Cinelli, Walter Quattrociocchi, and Fabio Pammolli
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractWe develop a minimalist compartmental model to study the impact of mobility restrictions in Italy during the Covid-19 outbreak. We show that, while an early lockdown shifts the contagion in time, beyond a critical value of lockdown strength the epidemic tends to restart after lifting the restrictions. We characterize the relative importance of different lockdown lifting schemes by accounting for two fundamental sources of heterogeneity, i.e. geography and demography. First, we consider Italian Regions as separate administrative entities, in which social interactions between age classes occur. We show that, due to the sparsity of the inter-Regional mobility matrix, once started, the epidemic spreading tends to develop independently across areas, justifying the adoption of mobility restrictions targeted to individual Regions or clusters of Regions. Second, we show that social contacts between members of different age classes play a fundamental role and that interventions which target local behaviours and take into account the age structure of the population can provide a significant contribution to mitigate the epidemic spreading. Our model aims to provide a general framework, and it highlights the relevance of some key parameters on non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain the contagion.
Ana L. Schmidt, Antonio Peruzzi, Antonio Scala, Matteo Cinelli, Peter Pomerantsev, Anne Applebaum, Sophia Gaston, Nicole Fusi, Zachary Peterson, Giuseppe Severgnini,et al.
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Giovanni Bonaccorsi, Francesco Pierri, Matteo Cinelli, Andrea Flori, Alessandro Galeazzi, Francesco Porcelli, Ana Lucia Schmidt, Carlo Michele Valensise, Antonio Scala, Walter Quattrociocchi,et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Significance This paper presents a large-scale analysis of the impact of lockdown measures introduced in response to the spread of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on socioeconomic conditions of Italian citizens. We leverage a massive near–real-time dataset of human mobility and we model mobility restrictions as an exogenous shock to the economy, similar to a natural disaster. We find that lockdown measures have a twofold effect: First, their impact on mobility is stronger in municipalities with higher fiscal capacity; second, they induce a segregation effect: mobility contraction is stronger in municipalities where inequality is higher and income per capita is lower. We highlight the necessity of fiscal measures that account for these effects, targeting poverty and inequality mitigation.
RECENT SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS
A Scala
arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14378 , 2026
2026
F Collu, A Scala, E La Nave
arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04088 , 2026
2026
A Scala
Paradox, and the Algorithmic Construction of Reality (January 01, 2026) , 2026
2026
Citations: 1
A Scala, A Monaco
Available at SSRN 5731289 , 2025
2025
A Scala
Available at SSRN 5658730 , 2025
2025
Citations: 1
M Falkenberg, M Cinelli, A Galeazzi, CA Bail, RM Benito, A Bruns, ...
arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.11090 , 2025
2025
Citations: 7
B Pasa, A Bernes, A Gaggioli, E Tuccari, F Zollo, G Vulpiani, L Pignolo, ...
Journal of Medical Extended Reality 2 (1), jmedxr. 2024.0028 , 2025
2025
Citations: 6
A Scala, C Fioravanti, G Oliva
International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security … , 2024
2024
M Avalle, N Di Marco, G Etta, E Sangiorgio, S Alipour, A Bonetti, L Alvisi, ...
Nature 628 (8008), 582-589 , 2024
2024
Citations: 188
A Pinto, A Scala
arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.05372 , 2024
2024
Citations: 1
M Delmastro, A Monaco, A Perrotta, A Scala
2023
A Scala, M Delmastro
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4638939 , 2023
2023
Citations: 1
G Oliva, M Franceschelli, A Gasparri, A Scala
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 69 (3), 1991-1998 , 2023
2023
Citations: 26
A Scala, P Cavallo
Plos One 18 (9), e0290652 , 2023
2023
Citations: 5
S Bartolucci, R Setola, A Scala, S Panzieri, G Oliva
International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security, 23-40 , 2023
2023
G Etta, E Sangiorgio, N Di Marco, M Avalle, A Scala, M Cinelli, ...
Plos one 18 (6), e0286150 , 2023
2023
Citations: 36
F Santucci, M Nobili, L Faramondi, G Oliva, B Mazzà, A Scala, M Ciccozzi, ...
PloS one 18 (5), e0285452 , 2023
2023
Citations: 3
A Scala
Azimuth: philosophical coordinates in modern and contemporary age: 22, 2 … , 2023
2023
Citations: 1
F Pisano, A Scala
InSchibboleth , 2023
2023
G Oliva, S Bonfigli, P Cavallo, A Scala
Qeios , 2023
2023
Citations: 1
MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS
LAN Amaral, A Scala, M Barthélémy, HE Stanley
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (21), 11149 , 2000
2000
Citations: 4363
M Del Vicario, A Bessi, F Zollo, F Petroni, A Scala, G Caldarelli, ...
Proceedings of the national academy of Sciences 113 (3), 554-559 , 2016
2016
Citations: 3669
AS M Cinelli, W Quattrociocchi, A Galeazzi, CM Valensise, E Brugnoli, AL ...
Scientific Reports 10, 16598 , 2020
2020
Citations: 3299
G Bonaccorsi, F Pierri, M Cinelli, A Flori, A Galeazzi, F Porcelli, ...
Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 117 (27), 15530-15535 , 2020
2020
Citations: 1332
A Bessi, M Coletto, GA Davidescu, A Scala, G Caldarelli, W Quattrociocchi
PloS one 10 (2), e0118093 , 2015
2015
Citations: 1008
M Del Vicario, G Vivaldo, A Bessi, F Zollo, A Scala, G Caldarelli, ...
Scientific reports 6 (1), 37825 , 2016
2016
Citations: 952
W Quattrociocchi, A Scala, CR Sunstein
Available at SSRN 2795110 , 2016
2016
Citations: 717
AL Schmidt, F Zollo, A Scala, C Betsch, W Quattrociocchi
Vaccine 36 (25), 3606-3612 , 2018
2018
Citations: 586
F Zollo, A Bessi, M Del Vicario, A Scala, G Caldarelli, L Shekhtman, ...
PloS one 12 (7), e0181821 , 2017
2017
Citations: 537
AL Schmidt, F Zollo, M Del Vicario, A Bessi, A Scala, G Caldarelli, ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (12), 3035-3039 , 2017
2017
Citations: 508
MD Vicario, W Quattrociocchi, A Scala, F Zollo
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB) 13 (2), 1-22 , 2019
2019
Citations: 498
A Bessi, F Zollo, M Del Vicario, M Puliga, A Scala, G Caldarelli, B Uzzi, ...
PloS one 11 (8), e0159641 , 2016
2016
Citations: 472
G D'AGostino, A Scala
Springer Berlin Heidelberg , 2014
2014
Citations: 453
F Zollo, PK Novak, M Del Vicario, A Bessi, I Mozetič, A Scala, G Caldarelli, ...
PloS one 10 (9), e0138740 , 2015
2015
Citations: 417
M Del Vicario, A Scala, G Caldarelli, HE Stanley, W Quattrociocchi
Scientific reports 7 (1), 40391 , 2017
2017
Citations: 407
A Scala, FW Starr, E La Nave, F Sciortino, HE Stanley
Nature 406 (6792), 166-169 , 2000
2000
Citations: 399
M Del Vicario, F Zollo, G Caldarelli, A Scala, W Quattrociocchi
Social Networks 50, 6-16 , 2017
2017
Citations: 357
L Angelani, R Di Leonardo, G Ruocco, A Scala, F Sciortino
Physical review letters 85 (25), 5356 , 2000
2000
Citations: 325
W Quattrociocchi, G Caldarelli, A Scala
Scientific Reports 4, 4938 , 2014
2014
Citations: 320
G Caldarelli, M Cristelli, A Gabrielli, L Pietronero, A Scala, A Tacchella
Public Library of Science 7 (10), e47278 , 2012
2012
Citations: 266