Filippo Chiarello

• Master of Engineering
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Pisa

Technological innovation serves as the catalyst for the shift towards circular practices. Technologies not only address technical challenges, facilitating the transition to a more circular economy, but they also enhance business efficiency and profitability. Furthermore, they promote inclusivity and create job opportunities, ultimately yielding pos...

Purpose Uncertainty and complexity have increased in recent decades, posing new challenges to humanitarian organisations. This study investigates whether using standard terminology in Human Resource Management processes can support the Humanitarian supply chain in attracting and maintaining highly skilled operators. Methodology We exploit text min...

analyzing academic data, particularly lesson records, to extract information about educational concepts. The ultimate goal is to construct a comprehensive profile that reflects the user’s accumulated knowledge throughout their learning journey. Two distinct methods are introduced for concept extraction: a gazetteer-based Named Entity Recognition ap...

Despite the rapid advancement of generative Large Language Models (LLMs), there is still limited understanding of their potential impacts on engineering design (ED). This study fills this gap by collecting the tasks LLMs can perform within ED, using a Natural Language Processing analysis of 15,355 ED research papers. The results lead to a framework...

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been extensively applied in design, particularly for analyzing technical documents like patents and scientific papers to identify entities such as functions, technical feature, and problems. However, there has been less focus on understanding semantic relations within literature, and a comprehensive definition...

This Work in Progress paper introduces the design of an innovative educational system that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address challenges in physics education. The primary objective is to create a system that dynamically adapts to the individual needs and preferences of students while maintaining user-friendliness for teachers, allowi...

The novel generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed by OpenAI, i.e., ChatGPT, rised a great interest in both scientific and business contexts. This new wave of technological advancement typically produces deep transformation in the workplace, requiring new skills. However, none of the studies in literature provide quantitative analysis and...

This study delves into the evolving role of generative Large Language Models (LLMs). We develop a data-driven approach to collect and analyse tasks that users are asking to generative LLMs. Thanks to the focus on tasks this paper contributes to give a quantitative and granular understanding of the potential influence of LLMs in different business a...

Call for Papers. Rethinking Skills and Innovation in the Digital Transformation Era The Special Issue seeks to revisit historically relevant themes such as the organisation and management of industrial research, industrial collaborations, inter-firm collaboration, managing creativity, innovation policies, to more recent research areas such as open...

The current ways of coping with uncertainty such as changes during product design or use have been through methods such as easy restructuring (e.g., modularity with buffer in interface definition), by overdesign and so on. The present investments on maintaining products in the economy for “as long as possible” is challenging these strategies from a...

Patents are an invaluable source of data that can be beneficial for Engineering Design (ED). Patenting is one of the main means for disclosing the inventive process. For this reason, the description of the problem solved should also be included in any patents. The ED literature lacks a proper definition of a problem, resulting in a fragmented scena...

Digital media are a means to deliver products and services, but also a channel to interact with consumers and a source of information on users’ preferences. Data shared by customers on the web, the User-Generated Content (UGC), can give entrepreneurs a detailed perspective of the market. This work examines an application of Natural Language Process...

Team composition in Project Based Learning is the first task for the class and has a great impact on the learning experience. Anyway, little space is dedicated in literature about team composition, considering their personal inclinations towards design tasks. For these reasons we propose a tool that aims to map the design skills of students to opti...

Patents are the main means for disclosing an invention. These documents encompass many steps of the inventive process starting with the definition of the problem to be solved and ending with the identification of a solution. In this study we focus on three fundamental concepts of the inventive process: (A) technical problems; (B) solutions; and (C)...

Nearly 20 years ago, industry started engaging with the open innovation paradigm as a new mindset to foster innovation and think about leveraging the opportunities offered outside the company boundaries. Today, the shift from a mostly close to a much more open mindset is almost done, but new opportunities and challenges are still arising. Digital t...

Identifying technologies is a key element for mapping a domain and its evolution. It allows managers and decision makers to anticipate trends for an accurate forecast and effective foresight. Researchers and practitioners are taking advantage of the rapid growth of the publicly accessible sources to map technological domains. Among these sources, p...

We still know little about the role of higher education in the digital transformation. If on one side the labor market is constantly evolving and is asking for an up-skilling process of the workforce, higher education institutions struggle to be agile enough. Therefore, it is necessary to measure and to better understand this gap. In this paper, we...

A series of disruption, technologies, and events characterized the last ten years. To cite a few of them Industry 4.0 paradigm (and related technologies) came out, blockchain and smart contracts affirmed as a potential technology beyond the currency sector, the new hype on Artificial Intelligence created high expectations and interest and, finally,...

Interest in HR Analytics (HRA) has dramatically increased in the past years. Despite the disruptive potential of HRA, however, the literature studying this topic is characterised by great confusion around its conceptualisation and domain boundaries. This paper aims at reporting a comprehensive scoping review of HRA literature, defining its boundari...

Patents are the main means for disclosing an invention. These documents encompass many steps of the inventive process starting with the definition of the problem to be solved and ending with the identification of a solution. In this study we focus on three fundamental concepts of the inventive process: (A) technical problems; (B) solutions; and (C)...

As well as other business functions, human resources are nowadays impacted by new technologies with the aim of facilitating and improving their work. As every new technology, the advantages are unfortunately linked to potential threats of the technology. The biases that influence many HR decisions, with a particular focus on gender biases and race...

ESCO is a multilingual classification of Skills, Competences, Qualifications, and Occupations created by the European Commission to improve the supply of information on skills demand in the labour market. It is designed to assist individuals, employers, universities and training providers by giving them up to date and standardized information on sk...

Gender equality is a major problem that places women at a disadvantage thereby stymieing economic growth and societal advancement. In the last two decades, extensive research has been conducted on gender related issues, studying both their antecedents and consequences. However, existing literature reviews fail to provide a comprehensive and clear p...

Data, information and knowledge are strongly involved in Engineering Design (ED) process. Despite the crucial role played by data in the design process, there is a lack of studies about how different data are used and generated by the various phases of the ED process. This study is a first attempt to fill this gap by mapping which data types are in...

Engineering design (ED) is the process of solving technical problems within requirements and constraints to create new artifacts. Data science (DS) is the inter-disciplinary field that uses computational systems to extract knowledge from structured and unstructured data. The synergies between these two fields have a long story and throughout the pa...

The representation of the product use context is a well established design practice in Engineering Design. Recently, design theory is studying the product interaction involving several cognitive aspects such as the possible conditions in which a wrong interaction occurs. The aim of this paper is to find a quantitative evidence of the causes of thes...

In today's digital world, there is an increasing focus on soft skills. On the one hand, they facilitate innovation at companies, but on the other, they are unlikely to be automated soon. Researchers struggle with accurately approaching quantitatively the study of soft skills due to the lack of data-driven methods to retrieve them. This limits the p...

The process of extracting relevant technical information from patents or technical literature is as valuable as it is challenging. It deals with highly relevant information extraction from a corpus of documents with particular structure, and a mix of technical and legal jargon. Patents are the wider free source of technical information where homoge...

We review some recent works of our research lab that have applied novel text mining techniques to the issue of research impact assessment. The techniques are Semantic Hypergraphs and Lexicon-based Named Entity Recognition. By using these techniques, we address two distinct and open issues in research impact assessment: the epistemological and logic...

One of the first task of an innovative project is delineating the scope of the project itself or of the product/service to be developed. A wrong scope definition can determine (in the worst case) project failure. A good scope definition become even more relevant in technological intensive innovation projects, nowadays characterized by a highly dyna...

Identifying technology convergence is getting harder, especially in fast-evolving and cross-technological fields. On the other side, natural language processing and network analysis researchers is to provide a novel method for mapping technologies and their relations over time, in order to identify dynamic patterns of convergence and to test it on...

The fast growth of social robotics (SR) has not been unidirectional, but rather towards a multidisciplinary scenario, creating a need for collaboration between different fields. This divergent expansion calls for a clear analysis of the field aimed at better orienting the research, thus paving the future of social robotics. This paper aims at under...

When asked to demonstrate the impact of their research, researchers build up statements that have a causal structure. However, as these statements have by nature a historical dimension, their credibility is under question. Historical statements have a genuine causal power only under certain conditions. We derive these conditions from the theory of...

Covid-19 has rapidly redefined the agenda of technological research and development both for academics and practitioners. If the medical scientific publication system has promptly reacted to this new situation, other domains, particularly in new technologies, struggle to map what is happening in their contexts. The pandemic has created the need for...

In today's digital world there is an increasing focus on soft skills. The reasons are many, however the main ones can be traced down to the increased complexity of labor market dynamics and the shift towards digitalisation. Digitalisation has also increased the focus on soft skills, since such competencies are hardly acquired by Artificial Intellig...

As technology progresses, organizations must understand where to direct their value-creating efforts to achieve or sustain competitive advantage. This is even more true in the case of emerging technologies, where innovative activities often focus on achieving a technology promise, while overlooking a set of technological, operational, organizationa...

Covid-19 has rapidly redefined the agenda of technological research and development both for academics and practitioners. If the medical scientific publication system has promptly reacted to this new situation, other domains, particularly in new technologies, struggle to map what is happening in their contexts. The pandemic has created the need for...

We contribute to the debate on societal impact of SSH by developing a methodology that allows a fine-grained observation of social groups that make use, directly or indirectly, of the results of research. We develop a lexicon of users with 76,857 entries, which saturates the semantic field of social groups of users and allows normalization. We use...

The paper contributes to the literature on sentiment analysis by introducing a new knowledge-based lexicon. The lexicon, based on fundamental research and systematic practice in Engineering Design, describes the Advantages or Drawbacks (Disadvantages) of products as an effect of the interaction between artifacts and users. The paper extracts data f...

The European R Users Meeting 2020 (e-Rum2020) was a conference that was held virtually in June 2020. Originally, e-Rum2020 had been planned as a physical event to be held in Milano. However, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the declaration of a nationwide lockdown induced the Organizing Committee to fully rethink the event, and to turn it in...

Tenders or technical terms contain a large quantity of both technical, legal, managerial information mixed in a nested and complex net of relationships. Extracting technical and design information from a document whose aim is both legal and technical, and that is written using several specific jargons, is not a trivial task: the purpose of the rese...

Among emerging technologies large attention has been devoted to the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, which is also a case study of a major industrial policy initiative, led by Germany. In the field of methodologies to profile and monitor emerging technologies the role of Wikipedia has been recently explored. In this paper we...

Scientific discoveries and technologies played a significant role in the digital revolution that occurred over the last years. But what is their role in the turmoil brought by the current pandemic? The aim of this paper is to show how digital technologies are operating during this first phase of the spreading of COVID-19. The study analyses and deb...

With the rise of the impact assessment revolution, governments and public opinion have started to ask researchers to give evidence of their impact outside the traditional audiences, i.e. students and researchers. There is a mismatch between the request to demonstrate the impact and the current methodologies for impact assessment. This mismatch is p...

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian...

The Engineering Design field is growing fast and so is growing the number of sub-fields that are bringing value to researchers that are working in this context. From psychology to neurosciences, from mathematics to machine learning, everyday scholars and practitioners produce new knowledge of potential interest for designers. This leads to complica...

The importance of affordance in Engineering design is well established. Artifacts that are able to activate spontaneous and immediate users’ reactions are considered the outcome of good design practice. A huge effort has been made by researchers for understanding affordances: yet these efforts have been somewhat elusive. In particular, they have be...

Purpose Circumstances that are have a significant impact on it. In particular, environmental sustainability related to the increase of worldwide population, and market demand for agricultural products (with consumers more and more aware about cultivation and breeding techniques and interested in healthy and high-quality products) represent two of...

The number of scientific papers in the field of Sustainable Manufacturing (SM) shows a strong growth of interest in this topic in the last 20 years. Despite this huge number of publications, a clear statement of the profound meaning of Sustainable Manufacturing, or at least a strong theoretical support, is still missing. The 6R framework seems to b...

The explosion of the interest in the industry 4.0 generated a hype on both academia and business: the former is attracted for the opportunities given by the emergence of such a new field, the latter is pulled by incentives and national investment plans. The Industry 4.0 technological field is not new but it is highly heterogeneous (actually it is t...

Patents contain a large quantity of information which is usually neglected. This information is hidden beneath technical and juridical jargon and therefore so many potential readers cannot take advantage of it. State of the art natural language processing tools and in particular named entity recognition tools, could be used to detect valuable conce...

In recent years, social media have become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. Moreover, the content generated by these websites remains largely untapped. Some researchers proved that social media have been a valuable source to predict the future outcomes of some events such as box-office movie revenues or political e...

The advent of Industry 4.0 paradigm is shifting the attention more and more towards what the future of work will be. Researchers are currently working on which will be the strategic skills to succeed in the labour market and the professional profiles more required by companies. The “macro-world” of skills 4.0 could be divided in two classes: Hard S...

Il settore agricolo sta vivendo negli ultimi anni un grande processo di cambiamento per far fronte a una serie di circostanze che hanno su di esso un impatto non trascurabile sia a livello di sostenibilità ambientale, correlata all'incremento della popolazione e la diminuzione delle superfici coltivabili, sia a livello di domanda di mercato dei pro...