The 2025 edition of the BRISPO lecture series: Prof. Alina Sîrbu, University of Bologna | Big Data and Cultural Integration (ONLINE)
Alina Sirbu is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Bologna, Italy. After obtaining her PhD from Dublin City University, Ireland, she held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Scientific Interchange, Turin, Italy and at the University of Bologna, and was assistant and associate professor at the University of Pisa, Italy. Her research focuses on applied machine learning and complex systems modelling for a variety of domains, including social (human migration, opinion dynamics), biomedical (diagnosis and prognosis of diseases, analysis of multi-omics and clinical data) and technical (predicting failures in large infrastructures). She has been involved in several EU and National research projects starting from 2011, was local PI in the Hummingbird EU project (big data for human migration, 2019-2024) and Almondo PRIN project (opinion dynamics for climate change, 2023-2025), and was national PI in the Medica PRIN project (data and models for Multiple Sclerosis and Alkaptonuria, 2023-2025).
In her lecture, Prof. Sîrbu will explore how computational methods and big data analytics can provide new insights into cultural integration patterns. Cultural integration can be described using two dimensions: the preservation of links to the origin country and culture, which we call origin attachment, and the creation of new links together with the adoption of cultural traits from the new residence country, which we call destination attachment. Drawing from her expertise in complex systems modelling and data science, she will discuss innovative approaches to analyzing large-scale social data, in particular Twitter data, to understand and measure cultural integration processes in contemporary societies.
