2024-2025

The course will deal with time series and spatio-temporal data, in particular mobility. We will illustrate the fundamental characteristics of these two data classes as well as the most common pre-processing and analysis methods. Finally, each lesson will provide examples of use and exercises carried out in Python with the appropriate libraries.

Prerequisites: Data Mining & Machine Learning, Python

Over the past decade, there has been a growing public fascination with the complex “connectedness” of modern society. This connectedness is found in many contexts: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity.

The course introduces the design, implementation and analysis of Information Retrieval systems that are efficient and effective in managing and searching for information stored in the form of collections of texts, possibly unstructured (e.g. Web), and labeled graphs (e.g. Knowledge graph). The theoretical lessons will describe the main components of a modern Information Retrieval system, more exactly of a search engine, such as: crawler, text analyzer, storage and compressed index, query solver, text annotator (based on Knowledge graph and Entity linkers), and rankers.

The formidable advances in computing power, data acquisition, data storage and connectivity have created unprecedented amounts of data. Data mining, i.e., the science of extracting knowledge from these masses of data, has therefore been affirmed as an interdisciplinary branch of computer science. Data mining techniques have been applied to many industrial, scientific, and social problems, and are believed to have an ever deeper impact on society.

The module presents the methodological aspects, technologies and systems for designing, populating and querying Data Warehouses for decision support. The emphasis is placed on the analysis of application problems using examples and case studies, with laboratory exercises.

Prerequisites: knowledge of basic SQL, Excel, Python programming.

The module presents the characteristics and peculiarities of "big data", highlighting through specific use cases the growing importance of the ability to extract significant information and valuable insights from this enormous amount of heterogeneous data (for example data from sensors, purchase data and consumption, data from social media and social networks, open data, etc.). The participatory methods of data collection through crowdsourcing and crowdsensing systems are also discussed, showing popular examples of application of these concepts.

The module is organised in lectures on case studies and real applications showing the use of Big Data analytics and
Social Mining. These lecture describe activities of the SoBigData.eu laboratory, companies and institutions which are
partners of the Master.

The module introduces the ethical and legal notions of privacy, anonymity, transparency and discrimination, even considering the General Data Protection Regulation. It presents technologies for implementing the privacy-by-design principle, for auditing of predictive models, and for the protection of users rights with the goal of enabling the Big Data analysis while guaranteeing personal data protection, transparency and non-discrimination.

This module presents artificial intelligence techniques aimed at defining analytics on text and data from the Web. The course is organized around three main strands: i) text analytics, where text mining methods applied to texts and social media are studied; ii) sorting techniques through the application of "learning to rank" techniques which have the purpose of estimating the relevance of objects with respect to user requirements, iii) web mining techniques aimed at exploiting user usage data to improve quality of services.

The module has the aim to align the students' competences in computer science and in basic analytics, especially in data bases, and Python programming for data science. Starting form a theoretical introduction to the basics of programming and relational database modelling the course will be focused on pratical lectures for learning to query and modelling databases and to solving problems by writing Python programs in both static and dynimic environments. This module is based on hands-on work