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DataHub

General Description

The Bocconi DataHub is a new joint initiative of BIDSA and IGIER whose main purpose is to provide students and faculty members with a research unit at the intersection between computer science, statistics and economics.


Mission

The Bocconi DataHub, in conjunction with BIDSA and IGIER, is committed to explore, or rather, to shape, such intersection, whose defining traits and whose borders are ceaselessly remodeled by the academy and industry. Our purpose is to provide a more efficient access to data and the practical  tools necessary to analyze them and understand the hidden insights that they carry. 

 

This purpose embodies two different tracks. The practical research-oriented one will be carried out both by developing “in-house” research projects that make use of the newest advancements in computer science. This implies merging the data gathering and data analysis demand coming from scholars and the supply of coding skills that comes from our trained and talented students. The more theoretical training-oriented track will embody a constant attention towards directly endowing faculty members, PhD students and all the university community, with practical applications, tools, and notions of computer science through the organization of courses and seminars.

 

Despite being the main tool, computer science and, in particular, data science, will never be employed “as such”: our goal is to constantly couple computer science and IT competences with economic sensibility, statistical rigor, and an awareness of the forces moving underneath the data extracted. This is not only meant to make the data analysis process more effective – elaboration and interpretation would otherwise be unproductive – but also to disseminate a culture of interoperability and fecund communication between these two fields.

 

Initiatives

Mirroring the bifurcated nature of our mission, the initiatives that we are going to carry on can be seen as belonging to two separate areas of interest:

  • the exploration of connections between computer science and economics which will be concretely carried out through the development of “in-house” projects that make intense use of advanced algorithms and novel data gathering and analysis techniques.
  • the fostering of an already available and always-growing stock of competences, codes and datasets within the DataHub.

Furthermore, we envision enlarging the actual research capacities of our Departments by establishing permanent facilities that can facilitate research projects that embed new data gathering and analysis techniques. Scholars who wish to be able to take part to the activities of the DataHub and embed its capabilities in their research may:

  • become active members of the unit and contribute to the research carried on and the projects developed in-house;
  • externally submit their projects to the unit, which if selected will be hosted as “Visiting Papers” and receive assistance and input by coders and other scholars within the DataHub.

Members of the unit and projects submitted may benefit from a wide range of competences within the DataHub: from advanced webscraping tools to gather large datasets from the web, to machine learning algorithms applied – among others – to econometrics and natural language processing.
Learn more about how to get involved.