SoBigData++ Kick-off Meeting

SoBigData++ H2020-INFRAIA-2018-2022, a 3-year H2020-funded project, starts its work with a kick-off meeting held in the CNR "Area della Ricerca" in Pisa on February 19-21, 2020.

The project will expand the scope of, and build upon results from, SoBigData -- a prior project funded by the European Commission in 2015. It strives to deliver a distributed, Pan-European, multi-disciplinary research infrastructure for big social data analytics, and to consolidate a cross-disciplinary research community using social mining and big data to understand the complexity of our contemporary, globally-interconnected societies.

SoBigData++ will strengthen its tools and services to empower researchers and innovators through a platform for the design and execution of large-scale social mining experiments. It will be open to users with diverse backgrounds, accessible on project cloud (aligned with EOSC) and poised to exploit supercomputing facilities. Pursuing the FAIR principles, SoBigData++ will render social mining experiments easier to design, adapt and repeat by domain experts that are not data scientists. Building upon a starting community of pioneers, it will broaden into a wide and diverse scientific movement, capable of empowering a new generation of responsible social data scientists in tackling challenges such as those laid out in the SoBigData++ Exloratories, namely: Societal Debates and Online Misinformation, Sustainable Cities for Citizens, Demography, Economics & Finance 2.0, Migration Studies, Sport Data Science, Social Impact of Artificial Intelligence, and Explainable Machine Learning.

The project will move from an awareness of ethical and legal challenges to concrete tools that operationalise ethics with value-sensitive design, incorporating values and norms for privacy protection, fairness, transparency and pluralism. SoBigData++ will become an accelerator of data-driven innovation, facilitatinbg collaborations with industry and joint pilot projects, and will consolidate an RI ready for the ESFRI Roadmap and sustained by a SoBigData Association.

Kick-off participants will be welcomed by Roberto Scopigno (Director of the ISTI -CNR), Gianluigi Ferrari (Director of the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa), and Fosca Giannoti -- the PI of the Project.