Vodafone and Bocconi Together for Machine Learning and Data Science
The Vodafone Chair in Machine Learning and Data Science was inaugurated yesterday at Bocconi with a dialogue between the writer Alessandro Baricco and Riccardo Zecchina, holder of the Chair. In an ideal relay, Baricco recounted the effects of digitization on human culture, while Zecchina illustrated the perspectives opened up by machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The Vodafone Chair in Machine Learning and Data Science is a three-year chair funded by Vodafone, which will combine the use of the most advanced theories and algorithms and their application on a very large scale, for both research and training purposes. This has already happened, in recent weeks, with the first Vodafone Challenge, which saw the students of the course taught by Prof. Zecchina deal, in groups, with anonymous data of two thousand Vodafone customers in order to forecast the possibility they would use certain services. The members of the winning group were awarded an internship at Vodafone.
The creation of the Chair is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration that has already seen Vodafone emerge as one of the top employers of Bocconi graduates.
"The establishment of the Chair and the collaboration with Vodafone", said the rector of Bocconi, Gianmario Verona, "are important not only for the development of quality research. They will also broaden the opportunities we offer our students to acquire the knowledge distinctive of the digital century, which is destined to soon become an indispensable prerequisite for quality jobs, as happens today with English and international experiences".
"Data are the backbone of digitization, the fourth industrial revolution," said Aldo Bisio, CEO of Vodafone Italy. "The new technologies, 5G in particular, accelerate the full implementation of the Internet of things, deeply redesigning all industrial and service industries, enabling social innovation through smart cities. Billions of new lines of code, thousands of new digital skills, and data driven organizations will be needed. With the Vodafone Chair in Machine Learning and Data Science, we want students from one of the most prestigious universities in Europe to acquire innovative tools that will allow them to participate as protagonists in the new phase of the digital revolution that Italy is facing".
The area of research of the Chair concerns the use of data science and machine learning to analyze large quantities of data and extract information from them. These methods can usefully be used in all fields of quantitative knowledge, from the natural sciences to social sciences and economics. The development of learning algorithms for deep artificial neural networks, the so-called "Deep Neural Networks" (structures that imitate the functioning of the human visual system), is one of the most advanced in this field.
Riccardo Zecchina, full professor at the Department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi, is a theoretical physicist by training. In 2016 he received the Lars-Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society for his theoretical contribution to the development of new algorithms for optimization problems. His most recent research interests, at the crossroads of computer science, information theory, statistical physics, and computational biology, aim to give a solid theoretical foundation and to design algorithms for automatic learning.