Special Seminar: Davide Vega D’Aurelio "Advances in Data Science and Engineering for Understanding Online Conversations"

Advances in Data Science and Engineering for Understanding Online Conversations

Davide Vega D’Aurelio

Abstract:

One of the key challenges of data science and (software) engineering education is to find effective methodologies to reduce the gap between the academic and the professional perspective we give our students about the subject, so we can (a) foster their motivation and (b) help students to better develop their soft skills. During the first half of this talk I will describe the “impossible project”, a learning framework based on PBL, role playing and gamification principles, that is the core of the “Software Engineering and Project Management” course I run at Uppsala University. The aim of the methodology is to create a learning scenario, as real as possible, where students are forced to take informed decisions that will highly influence the outcome of their project and where “failure” is almost guaranteed. In the second part of the seminar I will describe my current research efforts to understand human-generated information - in particular, the detection of online conversations in social media - and how they are/have influenced my teaching and supervision.

Bio:

Davide Vega is a researcher at the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on design, formalize and test new models and methods in data science, data mining and network analysis to study human social behavior through the lens of human-information networks. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Computer Science (2015) and held postdoctoral positions at Uppsala University (2017-2018) and Bologna University (2016).