The National Research Council is the largest public research facility in Italy. CNR participates to this proposal with two groups institutes: the Ubiquitous Internet Lab of the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica (UI-IIT) and the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab of the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione “A. Faedo” (KDD-ISTI) both located in Pisa. In 2013, together with UNIPI they have co-founded the joint Lab on Big Data Analytics and Social Mining, which has recently generated the national “AI and Data Science Hub”.
UI-IIT research activities are focused on human-centric Future Internet. Mobile and online social networks, distributed human-centric AI, human-centric data management, human behaviour characterisation via BigData analytics are key research topics the group is focusing on. UI-IIT members are actively participating to relevant expert groups at the national and European levels and have participated and coordinated several EU projects since FP6.
KDD-ISTI, founded in 1996, is today a leading research hub on mobility data mining, privacy preserving data mining and social network mining, not only at the international level but also for leading industrial and public operators, such as telecom providers (Orange, Wind, Telecom Italia) and mobility agencies of regional and municipal administrations. KDD-Lab led and participated to a stream of FET-Open projects on big data and social mining.
The University of Pisa is one of the earliest universities in Europe, active since the eleventh century and formally established in 1343. Today, it is a large, research-oriented university, with 1,500_faculities, ranking in the top 100 world universities in physics, math and computer science. U. Pisa had a pioneering role in the international ICT scene since the 1950’s. UNIPI hosts the first Italian Computer Science department, the first CS degree (1969), the first CS PhD program (1983), the first master degree in Data Science (2002), and the first post-graduate program in Data Science and Big Data (2014). The Dipartimento di Informatica (DI-UNIPI) (www.di.unipi.it) has a faculty of 60 permanent scholars, and participates with its Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory – KDD LAB.
KDD is working on the impulse that “big data” and the ICT’s are having on science, and the socio-economic sciences in particular. DI-UNIPI and KDD in particular has a longlasting partnership with CNR, especially the ISTI and IIT Institutes. In 2013 the three institutions have founded to the European Laboratory on Big Data Analytics and Social Mining www.sobigdata.eu, now evolved in the AI and Data Science Hub. This has been the seed to create SoBigData, the research infrastructure on Big Data Analytics and Social Mining, capable of boosting research and innovation in the deployment of big data analytics, social mining, societal artificial intelligence, explainable artificial intelligence, ethical AI and privacy/trust technologies to face global challenges.
Central European University in Vienna is a privately funded and endowed English language institution of higher education focusing on social sciences and the humanities. It is accredited in the US, Hungary, and Austria. CEU has a truly international, high-level faculty, including scholars from many European countries and the Americas. CEU’s excellence in research is demonstrated by an extensive record of successfully managed research schemes including 14 completed, running, or awarded ERC grants, with two ERC Synergy Grants among them. The high s tandard of research support provided by the university ensures the efficient and transparent financial management of the projects as well. Due to a Hungarian legislation some teaching programs had to terminate in Budapest, which resulted in opening the Vienna campus of CEU in form of CEU Private University.
The Department of Network and Data Science (DNDS) at CEU carries out research with focus both on the foundations of network science and on data driven applications. It has an excellent international faculty covering the disciplines of network science, computer science, sociology, and physics. DNDS has the mission of fostering quantitative, data-based research and teaching in the field of social sciences. This mission is carried out in close collaboration with other CEU departments and international partners. The department hosts a PhD program in Network Science, the only program of this kind in Europe and will launch an undergraduate program in Quantitative Social Science (starting Fall 2021) and a master’s program in Computational Social Science is (expected start Fall 2022). The Department has won several major grants, from European Union and US funding agencies, including a Synergy Grant from the ERC. The Department offers a PhD program in network science, the first such program in Europe.
The University of Sheffield offers an ideal combination of research expertise to support the project. The Department of Computer Science (DCS) is a leading research body, being ranked 5th in research excellence out of all UK computer science departments in REF2014, with 92% of its research work rated either world l eading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*) in terms of its originality, significance and rigour. DCS is a leading centre of research in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. The proposed project will be implemented within the NLP group which was established in 1993, and is one of the largest and most successful in the UK with a strong global reputation. It has been recently a warded funding from the EPSRC for the Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies and their Applications. The University of Sheffield itself is a member of the Russell group and in the top-100 worldwide according to the 2021 QS rankings.
IPI PAN is a leading Polish national
centre of research in Computer Science
focused on the fundamental and applied research in the areas of Artificial
Intelligence and Information Systems. The research activities are organized
in two departments: Department of Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science,
and Department of Artificial Intelligence.
The largest group within the AI Department is the Linguistic Engineering Group (LEG)
specializing in Natural Language Processing, Linguistic Tools and Resources. The
traditional areas of LEG’s interest are: syntactic parsing of Polish, automatic
extraction of structured data from domain texts, acquisition of linguistic knowledge
from corpus data, named entity recognition and shallow parsing. Most recent activities
of the Group concentrate around semantic processing of texts, word sense disambiguation,
coreference resolution and sentiment analysis. Within the last 5 years, LEG has been
involved in several European projects and infrastructures (CLARIN, DARIAH, ELRC, MARCELL,
Parthenos, TextLink), as well as several national and bilateral cooperation projects.
Other groups in the Department of Artificial Intelligence (Foundations of Artificial Intelligence,
Statistical Analysis and Modelling and Computational Biology Group) conduct research concerning
various aspects of contemporary AI. They include, among others, big and high-dimensional data
analysis, uplift modelling, probabilistic modelling of natural languages, creation of an atlas
of regulatory regions in human brain transcription regions, knowledge discovery engineering and
analysis of social networks. The research balances development of new data mining methods in these
areas and their formal justification with much needed applications of AI such as building of
semantic search engine for Polish internet resources.
The University of Tartu (UT) is Estonia's leading center of research and training. As Estonia's national university, UT stresses the importance of international co-operation and partnerships with reputable research universities all over the world. The robust research potential of the university is evidenced by the fact that the University of Tartu has been invited to join the Coimbra Group, a prestigious club of renowned research universities. UT includes four faculties. To support and develop the professional competence f its students and academic staff, the university has entered into bilateral co-operation agreements with 79 partner institutions in 31 countries. Institute of Computer Science, located in the University of Tartu Delta Centre which is a unique multidisciplinary centre for digital technology, analytics and economic thought, bringing together more than 2500 students, university teachers, scientists and R&D staff from companies. Delta Centre opened in January 2020 and is one of the most modern centres of digital technology, analytical and economic thought in the Nordic region. The Institute of Computer Science constitutes of various research groups such as Software Engineering and Information Systems to which the team members belong to. It also includes groups related to Bioinformatics, and Natural Language Processing and Distributed systems.
Sofia University (SU)
is the largest university
in Bulgaria and the region and the most successful Bulgarian participant in H2020,
attracting more than 60M Euro funding. In the project
SU will be represented by “Big Data for Smart Society” - GATE Centre of Excellence - its
first dedicated Research Institute. The centre is conducting research in AI, Big Data
Analytics, Data Management and Data Visualization and innovates in the areas of Digital
Health, Future Cities, Intelligent Government and Smart Industry.
The centre research focus areas are: Explainable AI, Semantic interoperability, Digital
Twins. GATE has a strong research expertise in the fields of ML, analysis of text data,
in order to obtain better interpretation of the data and to get new knowledge for prediction
and decision, ML methods combining information from many sources for semi-supervised multi-view
learning for sentiment analysis error minimization in case of multiple views.
