The Algorithms, AI and Applications Laboratory (A³ Lab), is a follow-up to the "Advanced Algorithms and Applications Lab" founded in 2003 at the University of Pisa by Paolo Ferragina. It is an internationally renowned hub for cutting-edge algorithmic research. The laboratory, which keeps the same acronym as the original but has slightly updated its name to reflect its latest AI research, specialises in studying, designing, and implementing data- and AI-intensive software platforms to address the core computational challenges of today's data-driven world. Specifically, our algorithmic solutions aim to be space-efficient, time-efficient, and query-effective, while also being sustainable and usable in a private and trustworthy way.

The laboratory's research initiatives focus on three fundamental pillars:

• Data Compression: Developing sophisticated lossless compression methods and learned data structures to significantly reduce storage footprints and improve the sustainability of massive digital infrastructures, potentially leveraging the predictive and modelling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Digital Health: Creating AI-facilitated algorithmic frameworks and applications to process multi-modal medical data effectively, aimed at modernising and transforming healthcare systems. A key pillar of this research is the collaboration with colleagues in the Interdisciplinary Health Science Center and Fondazione Toscana Monasterio.
• Information Retrieval: Designing next-generation search engines, AI-powered natural language processing, vector databases, graph RAGs, and Knowledge Graphs to empower accessibility to global knowledge bases and large-scale archives.

Partnerships and Collaborations

A³ Lab collaborates or has collaborated with several high-profile companies and institutions worldwide. These include AT&T, Bloomberg, CatalogDNA, Cerved, Enel, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Google, Inria (Rennes, Paris), Lucent Technologies, Software Heritage, ST-Microelectronics, Tiscali, and Wikimedia.

A³ Lab research has also originated some patents in the US.

Current Projects

• The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant (2026 -- ongoing): Supported by a prestigious grant, the laboratory is developing next-generation lossless compression and innovative AI-powered code-to-code search engines to boost the sustainability and global accessibility of the Software Heritage Archive (the world's largest public source code archive, safeguarding over 23 billion files).
• European Broadcasting Union (2018 -- ongoing): A collaboration aimed at developing the EuroVOX platform, whose goal is to make content available in the mother tongue of each EU citizen, thus overcoming the fragmentation of the EU public sphere along language boundaries. EBU is the world's leading alliance of public service media with 112 member organisations across 56 countries.
• SADAS (2024 -- ongoing): The laboratory is actively collaborating on two main research and development projects focused on next-generation database architectures and AI-driven knowledge management systems. More specifically,
  • ARGoS (2026–2029): A project titled "Agentic RAG per la Gestione della Conoscenza nei Sistemi Informativi Bancari" (Project No. F/380016/00/X77, funded by the MIMIT "STEP" Programme - Action 1.1.4 Collaborative Research). It focuses on studying, designing, and implementing an advanced knowledge retrieval system based on an Agentic RAG architecture, deploying implicit and explicit knowledge modelling via Graph Databases.
  • Columnar Graph DBMS Engine (2024–2027): A project funded by the Ministero delle Imprese e del Made in Italy (MIMIT, Project Code F/360162/00/X75) under the "Scoperta Imprenditoriale" call. It focuses on designing and testing advanced algorithmic solutions to embed compressed data structures into the SADAS columnar DBMS engine, whilst developing the new SADAS GraphDB and benchmarking its performance against existing solutions.

The list of the Past Projects is available here.

Recognitions and Awards

• P. Ferragina was nominated ACM Fellow (2025)
• P. Ferragina is a co-recipient of the 2022 ACM Paris Kanellakis Award for his FM-index
• “2023 ESA Test of Time award” for a paper co-authored by P. Ferragina and G. Manzini, Procs of European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), 2002
• “2023 ACM CIKM Test of Time award” for a paper co-authored by P. Ferragina and U. Scaiella, Proceedings of ACM CIKM 2010
• Google Cloud Research Innovator grant for the software NETME, 2022
• The paper on PlayeRank was selected among the ”Five Outstanding Papers” of the journal “ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology”, 2022
• P. Ferragina received an EMEA Google Educator grant award, 2018
• System SMAPH, developed with Google and Univ. Munich, won the short-track of the challenge “Entity Recognition and Disambiguation” (ERD), ACM SIGIR 2014
• P. Ferragina was the PI of 3 Google Faculty awards (2010, 2012, 2016)
• P. Ferragina was the PI of a 5-year Yahoo! Faculty award (2006-11)
• P. Ferragina's PhD results got the EATCS Doctoral Dissertation Thesis Award and the Philip Morris Award on Science and Technology, 1997
• Best Land Transportation Paper Award, IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, 1995

Student Awards 

• U. Scaiella : “Working Capital Award” from Telecom Italia (2010), and the  ``2023 ACM CIKM Test of Time award" (co-recipient P. Ferragina) for the paper on TagME appeared in the Procs ACM CIKM 2010.
• R. Venturini: “Best Italian PhD Thesis in Theoretical Computer Science” of the Italian Chapter of EATCS, 2012.
• F. Tosoni: National prize “ConScienze 2020” for the best Master's thesis in Computer Science, 2020.
• G. Vinciguerra: “Best Italian Ph.D. Thesis in Theoretical Computer Science” of the Italian Chapter of EATCS, 2022.
• M. Rotundo: Best Paper award at the 23rd International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT), 2026, for the paper "Oblivious Complex Queries on Variable-Length Strings" (co-authored with G. Persiano and P. Ferragina).