Keynote speakers
4th February 2019 - University of Milano - Bicocca
Enrica Amaturo
Enrica Amaturo is Director of the Department of Social Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, where she teaches Methodology of the Social Sciences and New data and new methods for analysis of communication. From 2002 to 2006 she has been Dean of the Faculty of Sociology and from 1990 to 1996 has been Head of the Department of Sociology of the same University. She is since 2016 President of the National Executive Board of the Associazione Italiana di Sociologia (Italian Sociological Association, AIS). Her scientific interests are mostly oriented to the methodological problems of the human and social sciences. After a start in which she has been particularly interested in communication, advertising and leisure, her main scientific interests focused on welfare, social exclusion process, inequality and social stratification. In the most recent period she has resumed the studies on communication from a methodological point of view, focusing her reflections and scientific production on the analysis of the digital environment, big data and big corpora, data science and data literacy.
Retired. Formerly, full professor in Social Statistics at the Statistics Department, the University of Padua. He has been consultant or research director at several national and international institutions and companies for the analysis and forecast of social and economic phenomena. He authored, or co-authored, more than 380 scientific publications, among which 65 volumes, on the following topics: (i) sample survey methods, computer-assisted data collection techniques, and data quality analysis methods; (ii) multivariate analysis; (iii) conception of scales for ranking or scoring sets of interrelated items and for composite indicators; (iv) social uneasiness of families; (v) chronic and extreme poverty measurement; (vi) social conditions of working women and of the elderly; (vii) social, epidemiological, environmental and agricultural surveys; (viii) relationships between competencies, jobs, and higher education; (ix) evaluation of higher education effectiveness; (x) social integration through sports; (xi) conception and implementation of systems of indicators and of statistical observatories.
Dirk Hovy is associate professor of Computer Science in the department of marketing at Bocconi University. He did his PhD at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, working as research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute. He works in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence. His research focuses on computational social science. He is interested in integrating sociolinguistic knowledge into NLP models, and conversely, in using large-scale statistics to model the interaction between people’s socio-demographic profile and their language use.
Stefano M. Iacus, PhD, is full professor of statistics at the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods, University of Milan. He has been a member of the R Core Team (1999-2014) for the development of the R statistical environment and now member of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. He is also a co-founder of VOICES from the Blogs, a spinoff company of the University of Milan, specialised in Social Media and Big Data Analysis. Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Tokyo; member of the SMAPP Global Network, New York University (USA); member of the Institute of Social Media Data, Waseda University; member of the Big Data Committee of the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). His research interests include inference for stochastic processes, simulation, quantitative finance, computational statistics, causal inference, text mining, and sentiment analysis.
Graduated Faculty of Mathematics, St.Petersburg State University, in 1976. PhD on applied probability in 1981. Professor of statistics at the St.Petersburg State University during 1989-1997. Since 1997 Professor, Chair in Statistics at Cardiff University. Author or co-author of 10 monographs on the topics of stochastic global optimization, time series analysis, optimal experimental design and dynamical systems; editor/co-editor of 9 books on various topics, author of about 200 research papers in refereed journals, organizer of several major conferences on applied statistics, time series analysis, experimental design and global optimization. Member of the editorial board of two journals: Journal of Global Optimization and Statistics and Its Interface. During more than thirty years is involved with applied projects on marketing research and consumer behaviour; the list of companies he worked with includes Procter & Gamble, AcNielsen and GlaxoSmithKline.
5th February 2019 - IULM University
Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Chair of the BSc and MSc in Communication Design from 2012 to 2018, Paolo has been member of the Design PhD board and co-editor at “Big Data and Society” journal (SAGE). Founder and scientific director of DensityDesign Research Lab, he participated to several applied research projects funded by private and public organizations where Communication Design and Data Visualization competences have been used to face a vast range of complex issues, from mapping the evolution of techno-scientific controversies on the web to supporting the peculiar inquiry process of Digital Humanities scholars. Paolo has been visiting lecturer at several universities and research centers, including ENSCI Les Ateliers, Glasgow School of Art, British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow, Stanford Humanities Centre, China Central Academy for Fine Arts and Georgia Tech. The activity of the DensityDesign Research Lab focuses on the visual representation of complex phenomena and the development of interfaces, tools and methods for Data and Information Visualization.
professor emeritus in Statistics at the University of Naples Federico II, he was full professor in Statistics at the Department of Economics and Statistics at the University of Naples Federico II from 1986 up to 2016. From 1988 up to 2014, he was Chair and professor of the PhD course on Computational Statistics. From 2008 up to 2014, he was President at Nova Universitas Consortium. His main interests and competence fields are: data science, multivariate analysis, structural equation modeling, computational statistics, categorical data analysis, quantification methods, non symmetrical data analysis, symbolic data analysis, data mining, composite indicators.