This book is a collection of reflections by thought leaders at first-mover organizations in the exploding field of "Data Science for Social Good", meant as the application of knowledge from computer science, complex systems and computational social science to challenges such as humanitarian response, public health, sustainable development. The book provides both an overview of scientific approaches to social impact – identifying a social need, targeting an intervention, measuring impact – and the complementary perspective of funders and philanthropies that are pushing forward this new sector.
This book will appeal to students and researchers in the rapidly growing field of data science for social impact, to data scientists at companies whose data could be used to generate more public value, and to decision makers at nonprofits, foundations, and agencies that are designing their own agenda around data.
Dr. Massimo Lapucci is Managing Director (Secretary General) of CRT Foundation, a philanthropic foundation based in Italy with an endowment of about three billion euro. He is Secretary General of "Development and Growth Foundation”, a CRT subsidiary focused primarily on impact investing, tech and innovation, and he is Managing Director of OGR, a former large industrial space in Turin, Italy, recently converted into an innovative and experimental center for contemporary culture, art, research and start-up in partnership with US accelerators. He was past Chair of the European Foundation Centre in Bruxelles, the network of institutional philanthropy which unites over 300 members from nearly 40 countries, including the USA. Dr. Lapucci has extensive international experience as Investment and Finance Officer and board member for public and private companies in various sectors and nonprofit organizations in the EU and the Americas, including the Rockefeller P.A. Europe, the advisory board ofthe London School of Economics-Marshall Institute, ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy and ISI Global Science Foundation in New York, NY, USA. He is Vice President of the Social Impact Agenda for Italy, and a member of the Global Social Impact Investment Steering Group. Dr. Lapucci also has a consolidated teaching experience at university level, and since 2006 he is a World Fellow at Yale University, USA.
Prof. Ciro Cattuto, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin (Turin, Italy) and a Principal Researcher and Research Area Coordinator at ISI Foundation (Turin, Italy). His interests include data science, complex systems, public health, and the social impact of data. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Perugia, Italy and has carried out interdisciplinary research at the University of Michigan, USA, at the Enrico Fermi Center and Sapienza University in Rome, and at the Frontier Research System of RIKEN, Japan. He is a founder and principal investigator of the SocioPatterns collaboration, an international effort on studying social networks with wearable sensors, with applications to epidemiology. He is an editorial board member of Nature Scientific Data, EPJ Data Science, PeerJ Computer Science, Journal of Computational Social Science, Data & Policy journals. He was an organizer and chair of leading conferences in Computer Science, Data Science, Network Science and Complex Systems. He is a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He was a member of the Covid-19 task force of the Italian Ministry for Technological Innovation and Digitization. His research was featured in the national and international press.
