On November 30, 2017 in Ispra (Italy) the European Commission’s Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography (KCMD) and the IOM's Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC) organised the workshop on Big Data and alternative data sources on migration: from case studies to policy support.

Researchers, data holders/providers, policymakers and practitioners gathered to:

A successful datathon was held in Tartu (Estonia) the second weekend of November 2017.

The topic of the datathon was the analysis of the impact of public investment subsidies on enterprise performance and their network structure in Estonia during 2011–2016.

There have been 220 participants, 12 teams and 18 mentors from all around Europe!

SoBigData participated in the Lucca Nerd festival with a talk by Roberto Trasarti titled Big Data and Human Mobility. Roberto talked about how Big Data and social mining can be a tool that enables innovative services for end users or public administrations to improve the lives of citizens: Carpooling, Elettrificability, Demography (City of Citizens context), indicators of well-being (Wellbeing context) and collection of opinions and needs (Societal-debate context).

On October 11 2017 at the Data Clinic - European University Institute, a study day has been hold in the SoBigData research project. Current topics have been tackled on the one hand social aspects linked to the definition of health and quality education indexes, on the other hand, the study of social and political debates on social networks. It is clear how these two themes are linked and mutually affected. The goal of the day was to give a careful look at new studies related to the issues related to the use of big data by fostering an exchange of ideas and promoting a creative boost.

On November the 10th, at 3 pm, Professors Paolo Ferragina and Fabrizio Luccio will present the book "The Computational Thinking: from algorithms to coding" at the Pisa Book Festival.

A very interesting conference has been organized by SoBigData member, Professor Paolo Ferragina, within the Festival of Robotics that took place in Pisa in Sept 8 2017. The conference has been attended by two speakers:

Massimiliano Ciaramita, Google, and

Michael May, Siemens,

who talked about new frontiers of study on the Search Engines and on Industry 4.0.

The workshop was divided into 4 sessions:

By Kiran Garimella and Michael Mathioudakis

This article has been originally published on northernbytes.co

Big Data can be useful also in navigation.

We interviewed Alessandro Dedominicis, Big Data Director at Navionics.

Navionics one of the biggest italian telematics and marine cartography companies and collaborates with the University of Pisa and the SoBigData Master. “A couple of years ago, almost accidentally, we realized that we had collected millions of data describing the behavior of our users” says Dedominicis. Dedominicis tells the history of Navionics in the last two years, since the Big Data adventure began, and today.

Mining a large number of datasets recording human activities for making sense of individual data is the key enabler of a new wave of personalized knowledge-based services. The video above is a promotional video for a paper that will be presented at KDD2017 in Halifax. In this paper we focus on the problem of clustering individual transactional data for a large mass of users. The authors of the paper are Riccardo Guidotti, Anna Monreale, Mirco Nanni, Fosca Giannotti, Dino Pedreschi.