NRRP intervention area: Mission 4 – Education and Research
Component: 2 - From research to business
Investment: 3.1 - Fund for the creation of an integrated system of research and innovation infrastructures
Duration: the project will end on 31/10/2025
Total project funding: €19,998,550
Proposer: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council)
Understanding the complexity of our globally connected society
The project has been set up to bring together multidisciplinary expertise on the use of Big Data, Social Mining and Artificial Intelligence. It specifically aims to strengthen the Italian coordinated SoBigData research infrastructure, with the objective of promoting and facilitating interdisciplinary and innovative research on the multiple aspects of social complexity by combining data and model-driven approaches.
Social mining is a new data science that can measure and predict economic crises, epidemics and pandemics, the spread of opinions, the distribution of economic or energy resources, and mobility needs.
The improvements will involve:
- the technological aspect, developing and creating new Italian computing nodes distributed throughout the country with centralised and networked technologies
- the scientific aspect, developing and creating new virtual laboratories where specific aspects of society can be studied through data science
- the ethical aspect, promoting a new generation of 'responsible data scientists’ collaborating with the academic and industrial sectors (providing ethical-legal advice and technology transfer)
- the creation of DIGIT services for multidisciplinary communities by exploiting research produced in the virtual laboratories and new computational and technological resources
Project structure and participation
Consortium members
- Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council)
- Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
- Università di Pisa
- Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
- Scuola Normale Superiore
- Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca
- Università degli studi dell'Aquila
- Università di Roma "La Sapienza"
- Università di Genova
- Università degli studi di Palermo
- Università di Catania
Areas of action
The activities are organised in WorkPackages as follows:
- WP1 - Empowering the Digital Backbone
- WP2 - Virtual Research Laboratories
- WP3 - Access Provision
- WP4 - Communication and Sustainability
- WP5 - Responsible Data Science and Training
- WP6 - Infrastructure Services
- WP7 - Management
Project team
University of Bologna participants
Scientific coordinator
Professor Paolo Bellavista
Staff hired with project funds
Researchers
Riccardo Venanzi
Departments involved
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering - DISI
- Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering "Guglielmo Marconi" - DEI
The University of Bologna’s role
The activities carried out by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering will cover several fields, such as distributed machine learning, federated unlearning, radio link management, and optimised management of virtualised resources on 5G infrastructures, across different application domains in the Industrial Internet of Things.
For instance, researchers of the University of Bologna will develop and implement algorithms in the O-RAN software to improve the performance of 5G networks, save energy and proactively manage the mobility of users/devices while meeting ultra-low latency requirements. These activities, which are also carried out in collaboration with Northeastern University in Boston, are aimed at the design and experimentation of the next generation of mobile networks (6G) and will involve AI-oriented synthesis of techniques drawn from scientific research in the fields of computer science and telecommunications.