Dino Pedreschi

Università di Pisa | UNIPI · Department of Computer Science

The new wave of ‘foundation models’—general-purpose generative AI models, for production of text (e.g., ChatGPT) or images (e.g., MidJourney)—represent a dramatic advance in the state of the art for AI. But their use also introduces a range of new risks, which has prompted an ongoing conversation about possible regulatory mechanisms. Here we propos...

Explaining AI-based clinical decision support systems is crucial to enhancing clinician trust in those powerful systems. Unfortunately, current explanations provided by eXplainable Artificial Intelligence techniques are not easily understandable by experts outside of AI. As a consequence, the enrichment of explanations with relevant clinical inform...

The growing availability of time series data has increased the usage of classifiers for this data type. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art time series classifiers are black-box models and, therefore, not usable in critical domains such as healthcare or finance, where explainability can be a crucial requirement. This paper presents a framework to expla...

Routing algorithms typically suggest the fastest path or slight variation to reach a user's desired destination. Although this suggestion at the individual level is undoubtedly advantageous for the user, from a collective point of view, the aggregation of all single suggested paths may result in an increasing impact (e.g., in terms of emissions). I...

The rise of large-scale socio-technical systems in which humans interact with artificial intelligence (AI) systems (including assistants and recommenders, in short AIs) multiplies the opportunity for the emergence of collective phenomena and tipping points, with unexpected, possibly unintended, consequences. For example, navigation systems' suggest...

Given the gaps and limitations of traditional data for migration research, social big data have been proposed to fill and complement them. Amongst various types of social media data, user-generated content from Twitter is considered a valuable resource in migration studies. As recent works have shown, Twitter can indeed be used to study various mig...

Artificial Intelligence can both empower individuals to face complex societal challenges and exacerbate problems and vulnerabilities, such as bias, inequalities, and polarization. For scientists, an open challenge is how to shape and regulate human-centered Artificial Intelligence ecosystems that help mitigate harms and foster beneficial outcomes o...

eXplainable AI (XAI) involves two intertwined but separate challenges: the development of techniques to extract explanations from black-box AI models, and the way such explanations are presented to users, i.e., the explanation user interface. Despite its importance, the second aspect has received limited attention so far in the literature. Effectiv...

We consider dense, associative neural-networks trained with no supervision and we investigate their computational capabilities analytically, via a statistical-mechanics approach, and numerically, via Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, we obtain a phase diagram summarizing their performance as a function of the control parameters such as the qu...

We consider dense, associative neural-networks trained by a teacher (i.e., with supervision) and we investigate their computational capabilities analytically, via statistical-mechanics of spin glasses, and numerically, via Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, we obtain a phase diagram summarizing their performance as a function of the control pa...

Recent years have witnessed the rise of accurate but obscure classification models that hide the logic of their internal decision processes. Explaining the decision taken by a black-box classifier on a specific input instance is therefore of striking interest. We propose a local rule-based model-agnostic explanation method providing stable and acti...

Machine learning models are not able to generalize correctly when queried on samples belonging to class distributions that were never seen during training. This is a critical issue, since real world applications might need to quickly adapt without the necessity of re-training. To overcome these limitations, few-shot learning frameworks have been pr...

Many dimensionality reduction methods have been introduced to map a data space into one with fewer features and enhance machine learning models’ capabilities. This reduced space, called latent space, holds properties that allow researchers to understand the data better and produce better models. This work proposes an interpretable latent space that...

Navigation apps use routing algorithms to suggest the best path to reach a user's desired destination. Although undoubtedly useful, navigation apps' impact on the urban environment (e.g., carbon dioxide emissions and population exposure to pollution) is still largely unclear. In this work, we design a simulation framework to assess the impact of ro...

Superdiversity refers to large cultural diversity in a population due to immigration. In this paper, we introduce a superdiversity index based on the changes in the emotional content of words used by a multi-cultural community, compared to the standard language. To compute our index we use Twitter data and we develop an algorithm to extend a dictio...

Background: During Finnmarksløpet (FL, one of the longest distance sleddog races in the world), veterinarians are exposed to extreme environmental conditions and tight working schedules, with little and fragmented sleep. Objective: The aim of this case study was to examine cardiovascular parameters and sleep-wake patterns among veterinarians wor...

Causality is a complex concept, which roots its developments across several fields, such as statistics, economics, epidemiology, computer science, and philosophy. In recent years, the study of causal relationships has become a crucial part of the Artificial Intelligence community, as causality can be a key tool for overcoming some limitations of co...

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are bei...

The digital revolution has brought about many societal changes such as the creation of “smart cities”. The smart city concept has changed the urban ecosystem by embedding digital technologies in the city fabric to enhance the quality of life of its inhabitants. However, it has also led to some pressing issues and challenges related to data, privacy...

The pervasive application of algorithmic decision-making is raising concerns on the risk of unintended bias in AI systems deployed in critical settings such as healthcare. The detection and mitigation of model bias is a very delicate task that should be tackled with care and involving domain experts in the loop. In this paper we introduce FairLens,...

Increased availability of epidemiological data, novel digital data streams, and the rise of powerful machine learning approaches have generated a surge of research activity on real-time epidemic forecast systems. In this paper, we propose the use of a novel data source, namely retail market data to improve seasonal influenza forecasting. Specifical...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-021-00260-6

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-021-00261-5

The last decade has witnessed the rise of a black box society where obscure classification models are adopted by Artificial Intelligence systems (AI). The lack of explanations of how AI systems make decisions is a key ethical issue to their adoption in socially sensitive and safety-critical contexts. Indeed, the problem is not only for lack of tran...

How can big data help to understand the migration phenomenon? In this paper, we try to answer this question through an analysis of various phases of migration, comparing traditional and novel data sources and models at each phase. We concentrate on three phases of migration, at each phase describing the state of the art and recent developments and...

This paper presents a framework for research infrastructures enabling ethically sensitive and legally compliant data science in Europe. Our goal is to describe how to design and implement an open platform for big data social science, including, in particular, personal data. To this end, we discuss a number of infrastructural, organizational and met...

The exponential increase in the availability of large-scale mobility data has fueled the vision of smart cities that will transform our lives. The truth is that we have just scratched the surface of the research challenges that should be tackled in order to make this vision a reality. Consequently, there is an increasing interest among different re...

This paper shows data science’s potential for disruptive innovation in science, industry, policy, and people’s lives. We present how data science impacts science and society at large in the coming years, including ethical problems in managing human behavior data and considering the quantitative expectations of data science economic impact. We intro...

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was among the firsts to recognize the relationship between identity and food consumption. Food adoption choices are much less exposed to external judgment and social pressure than other individual behaviours, and can be observed over a long period. That makes the...

The widespread adoption of black-box models in Artificial Intelligence has enhanced the need for explanation methods to reveal how these obscure models reach specific decisions. Retrieving explanations is fundamental to unveil possible biases and to resolve practical or ethical issues. Nowadays, the literature is full of methods with different expl...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to prominence as one of the major components of our society, with applications in most aspects of our lives. In this field, complex and highly nonlinear machine learning models such as ensemble models, deep neural networks, and Support Vector Machines have consistently shown remarkable accuracy in solving compl...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to prominence as one of the major components of our society, with applications in most aspects of our lives. In this field, complex and highly nonlinear machine learning models such as ensemble models, deep neural networks, and Support Vector Machines have consistently shown remarkable accuracy in solving compl...

Application of ultra-short Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is desirable in order to increase the applicability of HRV features to wrist-worn wearable devices equipped with heart rate sensors that are nowadays becoming more and more popular in people's daily life. This study is focused in particular on the the two most used HRV parameters, i.e., the st...

Increased availability of epidemiological data, novel digital data streams, and the rise of powerful machine learning approaches have generated a surge of research activity on real-time epidemic forecast systems. In this paper, we propose the use of a novel data source, namely retail market data to improve seasonal influenza forecasting. Specifical...

The pervasive application of algorithmic decision-making is raising concerns on the risk of unintended bias in AI systems deployed in critical settings such as healthcare. The detection and mitigation of biased models is a very delicate task which should be tackled with care and involving domain experts in the loop. In this paper we introduce FairL...

This paper presents an analytical platform for evaluation of the performance and anomaly detection of tests for admission to public universities in Italy. Each test is personalized for each student and is composed of a series of questions, classified on different domains (e.g. maths, science, logic, etc.). Since each test is unique for composition,...

We describe in this report our studies to understand the relationship between human mobility and the spreading of COVID-19, as an aid to manage the restart of the social and economic activities after the lockdown and monitor the epidemics in the coming weeks and months. We compare the evolution (from January to May 2020) of the daily mobility flows...

Understanding collective mobility patterns is crucial to plan the restart of production and economic activities, which are currently put in stand-by to fight the diffusion of the epidemics. In this report, we use mobile phone data to infer the movements of people between Italian provinces and municipalities, and we analyze the incoming, outcoming a...

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the phase 2 of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being...

We present an approach to explain the decisions of black box image classifiers through synthetic exemplar and counter-exemplar learnt in the latent feature space. Our explanation method exploits the latent representations learned through an adversarial autoencoder for generating a synthetic neighborhood of the image for which an explanation is requ...

The discovery of discriminatory bias in human or automated decision making is a task of increasing importance and difficulty, exacerbated by the pervasive use of machine learning and data mining. Currently, discrimination discovery largely relies upon correlation analysis of decisions records, disregarding the impact of confounding biases. We prese...

We present an approach to explain the decisions of black box models for image classification. While using the black box to label images, our explanation method exploits the latent feature space learned through an adversarial autoencoder. The proposed method first generates exemplar images in the latent feature space and learns a decision tree class...

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are bei...

We present an approach to explain the decisions of black box models for image classification. While using the black box to label images, our explanation method exploits the latent feature space learned through an adversarial autoencoder. The proposed method first generates exemplar images in the latent feature space and learns a decision tree class...

Today the state-of-the-art performance in classification is achieved by the so-called “black boxes”, i.e. decision-making systems whose internal logic is obscure. Such models could revolutionize the health-care system, however their deployment in real-world diagnosis decision support systems is subject to several risks and limitations due to the la...

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2020, held in Pisa, Italy, in October 2020. The 30 full and 3 short papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 submissions. The papers presented in this volume cover a broad range of topics, ranging fro...

The rise of sophisticated machine learning models has brought accurate but obscure decision systems, which hide their logic, thus undermining transparency, trust, and the adoption of AI in socially sensitive and safety-critical contexts. We introduce a local rule-based explanation method providing faithful explanations of the decision made by a bla...

Background Diets among the young often do not meet recommendations thus increasing the risk of developing chronic condition in adulthood. The present study aims at evaluate dynamics of eating habits among university students using data automatically recorded by cashier transactions at canteen. Methods The study population consisted of 8,338 studen...

Nowadays, a hot challenge for supermarket chains is to offer personalized services to their customers. Market basket prediction, i.e., supplying the customer a shopping list for the next purchase according to her current needs, is one of these services. Current approaches are not capable of capturing at the same time the different factors influenci...

Soccer analytics is attracting increasing interest in academia and industry, thanks to the availability of sensing technologies that provide high-fidelity data streams for every match. Unfortunately, these detailed data are owned by specialized companies and hence are rarely publicly available for scientific research. To fill this gap, this paper d...

Creating ranking of players through data-driven evaluations of performance is becoming more and more central in the soccer industry. However, measuring performance of players via data-driven tools means computing proper scores that quantify the quality of a player’s performance in a specific match or a series of matches. This is a complex task sinc...

The problem of evaluating the performance of soccer players is attracting the interest of many companies and the scientific community, thanks to the availability of massive data capturing all the events generated during a match (e.g., tackles, passes, shots, etc.). Unfortunately, there is no consolidated and widely accepted metric for measuring per...

We explore various means of quantifying integration using two of the D4R Challenge datasets. We propose various integration indices and discuss their output. We combine the data from the D4R Challenge with data from the GDELT Project and with data on transactions on the housing market in Turkey. We also describe research directions to be undertaken...

Black box AI systems for automated decision making, often based on machine learning over (big) data, map a user’s features into a class or a score without exposing the reasons why. This is problematic not only for lack of transparency, but also for possible biases inherited by the algorithms from human prejudices and collection artifacts hidden in...

Docker is on the rise in today’s enterprise IT. It permits shipping applications inside portable containers, which run from so-called Docker images. Docker images are distributed in public registries, which also monitor their popularity. The popularity of an image impacts on its actual usage, and hence on the potential revenues for its developers....

In this paper we investigate the regularities characterizing the temporal purchasing behavior of the customers of a retail market chain. Most of the literature studying purchasing behavior focuses on what customers buy while giving few importance to the temporal dimension. As a consequence, the state of the art does not allow capturing which are th...

Most people have become “big data” producers in their daily life. Our desires, opinions, sentiments, social links as well as our mobile phone calls and GPS track leave traces of our behaviours. To transform these data into knowledge, value is a complex task of data science. This paper shows how the SoBigData Research Infrastructure supports data sc...