The University of Pisa (www.unipi.it) is one of the earliest in Europe, formally established in 1343. With its 50,000+ students in a city of 100,000, it offers students and scholars a unique learning and research experience. KDD LAB (www-kdd.isti.cnr.it) was founded in 1996 and is aimed at pursuing fundamental research, strategic applications and higher education in the area of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. It is a joint research group between the Department of Computer Science of UNIPI and the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research of the National Research Council. It is today a leading research hub on big data and social mining, becoming a reference also for industrial and public operators, such as telecom providers (Orange, Wind, Telecom Italia) and mobility agencies of regional and municipal administrations.
UNIPI brings the infrastructure SoBigData.eu (www.sobigdata.eu), dedicated to the acquisition and analysis of big data from social media and other sources, aimed at the realization of large scale data analytics and simulation projects on computational social science. It comprises: i) a vast repertoire of accessible big data sets, including twitter data, mobile phone
call records, social networking records, GPS tracks from navigation devices, supermarket transaction records, web search query logs, e-gov data, etc.; ii) a vast repertoire of social sensing and social mining methods articulated on various themes such as analytical crawling, network analytics, text and multimedia mining, web analytics, etc.; iii) a team of skilled data scientists to help run social mining experiments.