EMbeDS 2019 – Nov 26-27, 2019, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

Our world is characterized by globalization, financialization, deepening inequalities and mounting environmental issues. It is also characterized by a growing availability of massive, diverse datasets, and of increasingly sophisticated statistical and computational tools to gather, integrate and analyze them. EMbeDS overarching goal is to bring Economics and Management in the era of Data Science, leveraging data and tools to bridge the gaps that still exist between complex models, their empirical validation, and their use in policy.

The EMbeDS 2019 workshop celebrated the first year of activity of the Department of Excellence with presentations by our new recruits, a variety of national and international scholars, and institutional and private sector stakeholders. 25 speakers tackled diverse topics including climate change and its impacts; sustainability; health care; methodological advances in modeling, computation and statistics; and legal and societal issues linked to the use of massive data and AI.

The event was a great success – both as an occasion to exchange important ideas, and as an occasion to reinforce or establish links among different institutions and research topics. A book of abstracts (in pdf) can be downloaded on the left of this page.

Prof. Bin Yu's keynote public lecture Veridical Data Science is available on the youtube channel of the School at the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLU9lwhlAAY

A detailed program of the event, which was be held in the Aula Magna of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies on Nov 26-27, 2019 below:

Nov 26, 2019

08:45am-09:15am Coffee and registration (Atrio Aula Magna)

Morning: Introduction and presentations by EMbeDS recruits. Aula Magna 

09:15am-09:30am Francesca Chiaromonte, EMbeDS Scientific Coordinator. A few words about EMbeDS.

09:30am-11:00am EMbeDS recruits, Session I

(Chair: Nicola Belle’)

• Caterina Sganga, Dirpolis Institute. Intellectual property and data ownership: balancing exclusivity and access.
• Chiara Seghieri, Institute of Management. Assessing access, quality and equity of care using observational data: current research and future directions.
• Andrea Vandin, Institute of Economics and Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, DTU Technical University of Denmark. Speeding up simulation of large-scale dynamical networks by aggregation (in remote).

11:00am-11:30am Coffee break (Atrio Aula Magna)

11:30am-01:00pm EMbeDS recruits, Session II

(Chair: Alessandro Nuvolari)

• Anna Maria Murante, Institute of Management. Co-producing services and health.
• Francesco Lamperti, Institute of Economics. Climate risks in complex economies: are there opportunities beyond costs?
• Paola Cantarelli, Institute of Management. Behavioral public management: A focus on work motivation in mission-driven jobs.
• Daniele Giachini, Institute of Economics. Market Learning.

01:00pm-2:00pm Light lunch (Atrio del Pozzo)

Afternoon: Scientific sessions organized by young EMbeDS researchers. Aula Magna 

02:00pm-03:30pm New perspectives on climate change economics and big data

(Chairs: Matteo Coronese and Francesco Lamperti)

• Guido Cervone, Department of Geography & Institute for Cyber Science. The Pennsylvania State University. Remote sensing target recognition using image spectroscopy and deep learning.
• Simone Vantini, MOX - Department of Mathematics. Politecnico di Milano. Object-Oriented Data Analysis for Climate Change and Energy Economics.
• Chiara Lo Prete, Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering. The Pennsylvania State University. California’s cap-and-trade program and emission leakage in the electricity sector: an empirical analysis.

(Klaus Keller, Department of Geosciences, the Pennsylvania State University, joined the discussion in remote)

03:30pm-05:00pm The value of big data in healthcare

(Chairs: Daniel Lungu and Milena Vainieri)

• Bin Yu, Departments of Statistics & Computer Science. University of California Berkeley. Iterative Random Forests (iRF) with applications to biomedical problems.
• Francesca Ieva, MOX - Department of Mathematics. Politecnico di Milano. The broken promise of Big Data in Healthcare and the new challenges of Health Analytics.
• Till Bärnighausen, Heidelberg Institute of Global Health. Integrating causal inference -- from correlation to causation in 'big data' in health care and policy. (in remote)

05:00pm-05:30pm Coffee break (Atrio Aula Magna)

05:00pm-07:00pm Prediction, learning and inference: data science from theory to practice

(Chairs: Giorgio Tripodi and Daniele Giachini)

• Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Dipartimento di Informatica e Data Science Research Center, Università degli Studi di Milano. Nonstochastic Bandit Problems on Graphs.
• Michael Lechner, Swiss Institute of Empirical Economic Research, University of St. Gallen. Modified Causal Forests for Estimating Heterogeneous Causal Effects.
• Christian Brownlees, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Community detection in partial correlation networks models.  

Nov 27, 2019

09:45am-10:15am Coffee and registration (Atrio Aula Magna)

Morning: Keynote Public Lecture. Aula Magna 

10:15am-10:30am Introduction – Sabina Nuti, Rector of Sant’Anna.

10:30am-12:30am Bin Yu, Departments of Statistics & Computer Science. University of California Berkeley. Veridical Data Science.

(Chair: Andrea Mina)

12:30pm-2:00pm Light lunch (Atrio del Pozzo) 

Afternoon: Perspectives from institutional and private sector stakeholders. Aula Magna 

02:00pm-04:30pm Perspectives from institutional stakeholders

(Chair: Giovanni Dosi)

• Giovanni Felici, European Research Council Executive Agency and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. The European Research Council Grants: funding opportunities for frontier science.
• Fosca Giannotti, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Italian National Research Council (CNR), Pisa. Explainable Machine Learning for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.
• Denise Amram, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies. Predictive Jurisprudence: an interdisciplinary project.
• Paolo De Rosa, Italian Digital Team. How the digital transformation in the public sector may help to boost growth through digital infrastructures, shared platforms and human centered services.
• Aldo Ravazzi Douvan, Ministero dell’Ambiente - TA Sogesid. Demand driven or offer driven? Data for environment and climate change: public and private needs.

04:30pm-05:00pm Coffee break (Atrio Aula Magna)

05:00pm-07:00pm Perspectives from private stakeholders

(Chair: Fabio Iraldo)

• Piero Altoè - Business Development Manager South-Europe and Middle-East, NVIDIA. When accuracy is critical: the case of deep learning at scale.
• Paolo Carnevale, Executive Director, Fondazione ENI Enrico Mattei. Climate change, decarbonization of energy systems and WEF nexus: the role of Big Data.
• Antonio Pelliccia, Business Development Healthcare & Life Science, IBM Italia. AI in Healthcare & Life Science: examples and challenges.
• Gian Luca Cattani, R&D Director and Member of Board of Directors, MAPS Group. Data Driven Governance: Combining Administrative and Clinical Information for a Better Healthcare.

07:00pm-07:15pm  Francesca Chiaromonte, EMbeDS Scientific Coordinator. Goodbyes.