Fabio Calefato
Fabio Calefato, Ph.D.
Associate professor
CEO & co-founder of PeoplewareAI
academic spin-off

Via E. Orabona, 4
70125 Bari, Italy
Phone: +39 080 544 3261
Fax: +39 080 544 2031
Email: email
GitHub
Twitter

Further Information

Background

  • Current position: Associate Professor at the Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Bari (2022 – )
  • Ph.D. students supervision
    • current: Lugi Quaranta (Collaboration around computational notebooks to build AI-enabled systems)
    • 2017-2020: Giuseppe Iaffaldano (Crowd creativity and success factors in online collaborative communities)
  • Memberships (recent): ICSE SCORE PC (2021), EMSE Review Board Member (2015-18), ICGSE Steering Board Committee
  • Events (recent): CHASE Program co-chair (2023), PROFES Workshops & Tutorials co-chair (2022), ICSE SCORE co-chair (2021)
  • Reviews: A partial list of my recent activity as a reviewer is publicly available on Publons
  • Visiting:
    • STRUDEL, Carnegie Mellon University, USA (Jul. – Oct. 2017)
    • CHISEL, University of Victoria, Canada (Nov. – Dic . 2016)
    • SEGAL, University of Victoria, Canada (Jan. – Apr. 2006)
    • Distributed Systems Group, TU Wien, Austria (May – Jun. 2004)
  • Post-doc at the Dept. of Computer Science (2007-08; 2010-14)
  • Ph.D. (2004-2007) in Computer Science received in May 2007 from the University of Bari. Thesis: “Supporting Synchronous Communication in Distributed Software Teams,” listed on SIGSOFT Selected Ph.D. Dissertations in the Area of Software Engineering and published by VDM Verlag Publishing, ISBN 978-3-639-17562-2
  • MSc in Computer Science received in October 2002 from the University of Bari

Research Interests

  • Collaboration in software development
  • Social software engineering
  • Mining software repositories and technical Q&A sites
  • Computer-mediated communication theories and tools
  • Psychometric and sentiment analyses from communication channels in the social programmer ecosystem
  • Collaboration in online, creative communities
  • Social Media and Social Network Analysis
  • Community-driven knowledge sharing
  • Frameworks

Research Projects

  • The effect of multitasking on actual and perceived productivity and code quality
    Developers today have to work on a multitude of projects and tasks. This condition, which forces them to switch context (i.e., different programming languages, toolchains) multiple times over a day, applies to both OSS and paid developers. Yet, the effects of the mental overload associated with such context switchings have on developers’ productivity and the quality of the code they create during multitasking work sessions.
    — Joint research effort with  Bogdan Vasilescu (CMU).
    An industrial replication of the same investigation is being performed at two large companies from Porto Alegre (Brasil)
    — Joint research effort with Rafael Prikladnicki (PUCRS and TECNOPUC).
  • Establishing the effect of developers’ personality and trust in distributed software development
    Software is the result of the effort of very many developers, each having their own personality. Because personality influences how a developer interacts with others, understanding the effects of personality variations can help explain some of the intricacies of software development that make it so hard. Among personality traits, trust takes the spotlight, being a factor that can determine the performance of teams, especially in distributed settings. To perform this research, we use psychometric analysis tools, in conjunction with the Big 5 personality theory (or Five-Factor Model), to mine personality from written traces left by developers in the various communication channels used in modern distributed software projects.
  • Success factors in online creative communities
    The project aims to identify the fundamental resemblances and differences between the open-source software (OSS) communities and creative arts communities -i.e., seeing software development as a creative activity — and propose solutions to improve both through cross-contamination and ultimately show that deeper cohesion within the community that could lead to better collaboration and artifacts
    — Joint research effort with Igor Steinmacher and Marco Aurelio Gerosa (Northern Arizona University).
  • Information fragmentation and overload for DevOps
    Today, an ever-growing plethora of development tools provide a continual stream of updates and place developers in a situation of information fragmentation and overload. This project defines a hub-and-spoke model for the loosely-coupled integration of development tools, which can help developers cope with these issues while also increasing their overall situational awareness
    — In collaboration with the ReCaS-Bari datacenter.

Theses

  • Available topics for thesis projects are listed on this dedicated page (in Italian).

Ph.D. Students

  • Giuseppe Iaffaldano (graduated in 2020)
    • Thesis: Investigating the Dynamics of Online Collaborative Communities
  • Luigi Quaranta (graduated in 2022)
    • Thesis: Collaboration Around Computational Notebooks To Build AI-enabled Systems

Events

Software

  • All active COLLAB Projects (hosted on GitHub)
    • Under the spotlight
      • Apache-Big5 – A personality profiler for developers working in the ASF ecosystem DOI
      • mini-IPIP test – A Python implementation for taking online the 20-item version of the Big Five personality test DOI
      • EMTk – A generic toolkit for training your own emotion and polarity classifiers on any textual corpus. The toolkit is also available as a Docker image
      • pySOreputation – An API for computing an approximate reputation score of Stack Overflow users at any time (demo) DOI
  • Discontinued projects

Experimental datasets

If you intend to use any of these datasets for your own research, please make sure to cite the related paper:

Group Awards

  • 2011
    • The Microsoft Software Engineering Innovation award (MSEIF)
  • 2008
    • the 2008 IBM Faculty award
  • 2006
    • the 2006 IBM Eclipse Innovation award

Publications


Journals and Magazines

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012-2004


International Conferences and Workshops

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012-2004


Books and Book Chapters


National Conferences and Workshops