University of Pisa

The University of Pisa (www.unipi.it) is one of the earliest HEI in Europe, formally established in 1343 but active since the eleventh century. Today, it is a large, research-oriented university, with more than 1,500 permanent scientists covering all disciplines and ranking in the top 100 world universities in physics, math and computer science. With its 50,000+ students in a city of 100,000, it offers students and scholars a unique learning and research experience. UNIPI had a pioneering role in the international ICT scene since the 1950’s. In fact, following the intuition of Enrico Fermi, one of the first computers was developed in Pisa, in the frame of a Unipi- National Research Council (CNR) and Olivetti common project.

The Computer Science Department (www.di.unipi.it), has a faculty of 60 permanent scholars, with pioneers and influential scientists in most traditional and novel areas of the computer and information sciences.

The Computer Science Department, and the university as a whole, are pursuing many interdisciplinary research initiatives connected to the impulse that “big data” and the ICT’s are having on science, and the socio-economic sciences in particular. Our  researchers are involved in many projects at a global scale, and the department of computer science maintains strong liaisons with the international ICT research arena at the highest levels, including the research centers of the major ICT, Web and telecom corporations. UNIPI has a long lasting partnership with CNR, the Italian National Research Council, with special refer to the ICT institutes ISTI (Information Science and Technologies Institute) and IIT (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica) located in Pisa, with many common projects and laboratories.

In 1994, UNIPI and CNR founded the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory – KDD LAB, one of the earliest data mining laboratory. Main research lines include: Mobility Data Mining; Pattern Discovery; Privacy- and Discrimination-by-design in data mining; Social Network Analysis and Mining; Predictive models for Fraud Detection and Business Intelligence.

KDD LAB led and participated to a stream of European projects on big data, social mining, XAI and ethics in  AI and data analysis.