News & Events

NeEDS Coordinator Dolores Romero Morales has been elected as a member of the management committee of the COST Action “Fintech and Artificial Intelligence in Finance – Towards a transparent financial industry” (CA19130, https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA19130). Jimmy Martínez-Correa, Associate Professor at the Economics Department, has also been elected as substitute member of this management committee. The COST Action will investigate AI and Fintech from three different angles: transparency in FinTech, transparent decision-making models vs black box in the financial industry, and transparency in the performance of investment products. Similar to NeEDS, the COST Action will also bridge the gap between academia, industry, the general public and governmental organizations working in interdisciplinary groups across Europe and focusing on innovation.

NeEDS Work Package leader Emilio Carrizosa from USE is being recognized for his excellent research trajectory with the FAMA-University of Seville Award for Research Career.

Since 2006, this annual award is given to USE researchers in each of the five major disciplines and thereby contributes to disseminating the merits of the most relevant and long-standing researchers at the University.

Other awarded researchers are Pablo Emilio Pérez-Mallaína in Arts and Humanities; Álvaro Pascual in Health Sciences, Josefina Cruz in Social and Legal Sciences and María Mercedes Valera in Engineering and Architecture.

Emilio has an extensive scientific trajectory in mathematical modeling and algorithm design for data-based decision making. In this field, he has published 130 articles in international journals and has directed multiple transfer contracts in health, logistics and sustainable mobility, energy, research projects and doctoral theses. He has been president of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, as well as editor of the TOP journal. As director of the Institute of Mathematics at USE, his contributions to NeEDS are not only in the form of highly valuable research input, but also by facilitating the great team of NeEDS researchers who work with USE.  Find out more about the USE NeEDS Team here.

Due to the continuous COVID-19 restrictions, the NeEDS consortium had moved its Mid-Term Meeting online, originally planned to take place at USE (BEN2) in Sevilla, July 2020.

Over the course of two days, work package leaders as well as previous secondees have presented their progress, reflected on challenges, and discussed future activities together with the rest of the team. The current unpredictability of travel opportunities and face-to-face exchange requires a fresh and innovative view on how to implement a project such as NeEDS. Members have shown great efforts by holding events online and keeping collaborations afloat over distance.

Long-term solutions regarding the responsible organisation of secondments in COVID-19 times is now the next big challenge on the agenda.

Join us on the upcoming online NeEDS Workshop on Data and Decisions in COVID-19 times and learn more about the work of our NeEDS researchers as well as external participants.

 

 

Colleagues from CARTO, Instituto de Estadística y Cartografía de Andalucía, KU Leuven, Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Danmarks Statistik, Università degli Studi di Milano, Universidad de Chile, and Universidad de Sevilla will present contributions from Data Science, Official Statistics and Mathematical Optimization to enhance Data Driven Decision Making in current COVID19 times.

July 1, 2020, 2pm – 5pm CEST

To register, please click here.

Presentations

Fighting COVID-19 through spatial Data Science and geospatial data

Giulia Carella, from CARTO

Regional official statistics in COVID19 times

Iria Enrique Regueira, from Institute of Statistics and Cartography of Andalusia

Three applications of digital tools for infectious disease control

Klaas Nelissen, from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Innovation during a pandemic: Official statistics in the time of COVID-19

Laust Hvas Mortensen, from Statistics Denmark & University of Copenhagen

Critical Limitations of Digital Epidemiology: Why COVID-19 Apps Are Useless

Jonas Klingwort, from University of Duisburg-Essen

Modeling and analysis of mitigation strategies and their effects for the COVID-19 outbreak in Chile

Hector Ramírez Cabrera, from University of Chile

Modeling provincial Covid-19 epidemic data in Italy using an adjusted time-dependent SIRD model

Alessandra Micheletti, from University of Milan

Short-Term Predictions of the Evolution of COVID-19 based on Sparse Ensemble Methods

Sandra Benítez-Peña, Cristina Molero del Río,  María Remedios Sillero Denamiel , from University of Seville

Our NeEDS Team at IMUS, Universidad de Sevilla, continues to do great work in regards to predicting the Evolution of COVID-19.  As Project Coordinator, Dolores Romero Morales, has recently stated in an interview with CBS WIRE:

“Our contribution to the collaboration is that we’re trying to build an accurate predictor for the different metrics related to Covid-19.”

“This means we’re building an algorithmic calculator that we can feed with the number of people who are in intensive care, how many hospital beds are occupied as well as how many people are carrying the virus at any given time.”

“And based on all these types of data, we’re developing a predictor using state-of-the-art machine learning methodology.”

Our NeEDS researchers – Remedios Sillero Denamiel, Cristina Molero del Río and Sandra Benítez-Peña – elaborate further on their approach to Short-Term Predictions of the Evolution of COVID-19 in this presentation:

 

 

As for so many others at the moment, our travel activities have come to a halt due to COVID-19.  While we are keeping the project going from our home desks, have a look at our NeEDS Secondment Videos from 2019 and listen to what our secondees have worked on and continue to work on.

There will be more to come in the next years.

Jeanette Walldorf from Copenhagen Business School talks about her secondment at DUKE University

Marcela Galvis Restrepo from Copenhagen Business School talks about her secondment at Geographica

Yu Zhang from Oxford University talks about his secondment at Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek

Remedios Sillero Denamiel from Universidad de Sevilla talks about her secondment at Danmark Statistik

Sandra Benítez-Peña from Universidad de Sevilla talks about her secondment at Danmark Statistik

Thomas Ashley from Universidad de Sevilla talks about his secondment at Danmark Statistik

Cristina Molero del Río from Universidad de Sevilla talks about her secondment at Danmark Statistik

Jonas Klingwort from Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek talks about his secondment at Universidad de Sevilla

Luis Aburto from Universidad de Chile talks about his secondment at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Faruk Hasic from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven talks about his secondment at Universidad de Chile.

 

 

Last week, February 11th, we celebrated the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Our partners at IMUS, Universidad de Sevilla, even opened their doors for the local News team from CSN2 Sevilla for some exclusive interviews with our female Maths-enthusiasts.

Amongst them, our NeEDS Secondee Cristina Molero del Río who talked about a real life problem that she has worked on together with other colleagues at IMUS during the 2019 NeEDS Modelling Week. The problem she addressed regarded the fountains of the city of Seville and the prevention of contamination of their water. In order to do so, a mathematical model was developed to predict the chlorine level of a fountain, that is the basis to regulate its pH level and thus control the contamination of the water. Watch the full News Section here (in Spanish, start minute 04:45).

As the UN points out, only 30 per cent of researchers worldwide are women. These are numbers that need to change and we are proud to be contributing to equal opportunities for women and girls in science. The NeEDS consortium has a very balanced gender ratio and continuously works to foster and sustain gender balance and equal opportunities. In 2019, 9 of our 19 secondees were female, and we look forward to facilitate even more secondments for female scientists over the next years.

For more insights into the contributions of our female participants, check out our slides on STEM NeEDS Women.

2020 starts with exciting news:

Together with her colleague Antonio Alonso Ayuso from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid, our NeEDS Project Coordinator, Dolores Romero Morales, has been appointed new Editor-in-Chief of TOP, the Operations Research Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research.

With theory and methodology of Operations Research, and the practice of Data Driven Decision Making through innovative applications as its focus, TOP is a highly relevant journal for all NeEDS members and enthusiasts and we congratulate Dolores to her appointment!

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO COVID-19 

UPDATES ON NEW DATES WILL FOLLOW

EURO PHD SCHOOL ON DATA DRIVEN DECISION MAKING AND OPTIMIZATION

10-19 July 2020, at the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Seville

Register here.

The EURO PhD School (EPS) will focus on giving participants advanced training on Data Driven Decision Making.

The EURO PhD School (EPS) will be focused on giving participants advanced training on the use of Data Science to aid Data Driven Decision Making. There will be two main components in this EPS. First, methodological training on the role of Mathematical Optimization in Data Science will be given in the format of lectures and computer workshops. The lectures will highlight the mathematical modelling and numerical optimization behind data analysis and data visualization tools. The computer workshops will put this knowledge in action. Second, applications of the acquired knowledge to the modeling of specific industrial problems will be presented by professionals from industry and worked out by the PhD students. Mathematical models and numerical solution approaches will be developed and communicated, following a collaborative approach, in which the PhD students will work in small groups under the guidance of the instructors.

 

Chairs of the Scientific Committee

Prof. Emilio Carrizosa

IMUS-Institute of Mathematics of the University of Seville, Spain

&

Prof. Dolores Romero Morales

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

On November 1st, NeEDS member Statistics Netherlands is organising a 1-day workshop to share knowledge and gathered expertise, methodological challenges in the area of Privacy Preserved Data Sharing, and to jointly look at the most implementable solutions.

A total of 5 cases will be presented on topics such as synthetic data generation, machine learning via SMPC and pseudonomisation.