Steering Group

Anna Gottard is associate professor of Statistics at DiSIA, University of Florence and Director of the Florence Center for Data Science. She serves as associate editor for the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society - Series A and for Statistical Methods & Applications. Her current research interest concerns fair/interpretable statistical machine learning, tree-embedded models, graphical models, mixture models under latent uncertainty and multivariate models for angles and directional data.

Alberto Cassese is an RTD-B (Assistant professor with tenure) of Statistics at DiSIA, University of Florence. His academic journey includes roles at institutions such as Rice University and Maastricht University. Alberto is dedicated to innovative statistical methodologies, driven by their practical applications in real-world scenarios. His research expertise encompasses several topics, spanning high-dimensional complex data (including -omics data), behavioral data, flu data and mass-spectrometry data.

Carlotta Giannelli is Associate Professor of Numerical Analysis at DIMAI, University of Florence. Her primary research interests focus on computer aided geometric design, spline methods and related application areas, isogeometric analysis. She is in the scientific committes of the International Conference on Geometric Modeling and Processing and the International Conference on Isogeometric Analysis. She currently serves as Program Director of the SIAM Activity Group on Geometric Design.

Giorgio Ricchiuti is an Associate Professor in Political Economy at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Florence (Italy) where he teaches Macroeconomics and Computational Economics. Since the beginning of 2016, he is also fellow of the Complexity Lab in Economics (CLE) at Catholic University in Milan.His research is focused on both empirical and theoretical analysis in International and Industrial Economics, with a focus on Computational Economics. The empirical research - within NNTT empirical literature - has been regarding on how different modes of internationalization - mainly FDI - affect productivity, sales and firms’ survival probability. While in theoretical analysis, he has been focusing on dynamic models with heterogeneous agents and bounded rationality in financial markets (within the HAMs literature), on the market structure when the demand is unknown, and new sources of heterogeneity (credit/liquidity constraints) among firms with different modes of internationalization.

Paolo Frasconi is a professor of Computer Science at DINFO, Univ. Florence. He previously held academic positions at KU Leuven, Univ. Cagliari, Univ. Wollongong, and MIT. His research interests are in the area of machine learning, in particular on relational learning with neural networks and kernels, hyperparameter optimization, and applications of machine learning to biological data. He chaired MLG 2007, ILP 2010, and ECML-PKDD 2016. He is currently an Action Editor for the Machine Learning Journal and sits in the Steering Committee of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery and in the Advisory Board of the Italian Association for Machine Learning.

Associate Professor of Computer Science. Her research activity includes formal methods for the analysis of algorithms and data structures, analytical combinatorics and symbolic computation. Among her more recent interests, the study of data mining and machine learning algorithms both at a theoretical/methodological level and through applications in specific contexts such as education.

Giacomo Toscano is Assistant Professor (RTD A) of Mathematical Methods for Economics and Finance at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Florence. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematical Finance from Scuola Normale Superiore. His main research interests involve high-frequency Fourier-transform based volatility estimators and self-exciting stochastic volatility models with jumps.

Gianmarco Bet is a researcher in Probability at DIMAI, University of Florence. His primary research focus lies on the probabilistic study of complex networks, as well as models of interacting particle systems inspired by physics.

Nicola Del Sarto is assistant professor at University of Florence. He received a Ph.D in Management of Innovation, sustainability and healthcare from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in 2019. Nicola's research interests focus on small businesses and start-ups and support mechanisms such as incubators, accelerators, corporate accelerator programs and finance for innovation. Moreover, he investigated the processes of business creation under the Open Innovation paradigm. Nicola holds a Master degree in economics from University of Pisa and a post graduate master in Management, innovation and engineering of services from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. Nicola's work has been published in high-quality peer reviewed journals and presented at international conferences.

Biosketch: Paola Cappanera is Associate Professor of Operations Research at DINFO/UNIFI. Herresearch is focused on combinatorial optimization models and algorithms, specificallyemphasizing real applications arising from the health care and transportation settings. She isassociate editor of Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, and Operations Research forHealth Care.

Paolo Nesi is full professor of Computer Science at DINFO/Unifi. His research is focused on large scale distributed systems, data analytics, big data, IoT/IoE, formal methods, predictive models, simulation. The main domains are smart city, industry 4.0. He is the coordinator of Chair of DISIT lab, Snap4City. He is associate editor of a number of international journal and chair of major conferences.

Vincenzo Vespri is Professor of Mathematical Analysis. His research focuses on structural properties of Partial Differential Equations and Industrial Mathematics (applications in Finance, Telecomunications and Blockchain technology). He is currently editor in chief of Open Mathematics, and an associate editor of NonLinear Analysis, Financial Mathematics and Applications, J. Math. Anal. and Mathematical Problems in Engineering. He will be the sherpa for the Italian Government for the meeting of G7-Science about AI that will be held in Paris in June.