Dino Pedreschi is a full professor in Computer Science at the University of Pisa and is a pioneer of big data analytics, that is, analysing the footprints of human activity online in order to understand the complexities of society.
With Fosca Giannotti he runs the KDD LAB – Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory a joint research centre for the University of Pisa and the CNR Institute for Science and Technologies of Computer Science, which was one of the first to focus on “data mining”. The main focus of Dino’s work is “social mining” and the impact big data has on societies: smart cities, travel, social and economic networks, ethics and privacy, democracy. Dino founded the 3-year degree in Business Informatics at the University of Pisa, an international course of studies intending to create interdisciplinary “data scientists” and the European Laboratory on Big Data Analytics and Social Mining. Dino has been a visiting professor at the Centre for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston (2009-2010) as well as at the University of Texas in Austin (1989-90), at the CWI Amsterdam (1993) and UCLA (1995). In 2009 Dino received a Google Research Award for his research into “privacy-preserving data mining”.