Big Data Talk

From left: Faculty of Creative Industries Dean Dr David Tneh Cheng Eng presenting the token of appreciation to Prof Guisseppe

Tun Tan Cheng Lock Centre for Social and Policy Studies organised a talk featuring Prof Dr Guisseppe Alassandro Veltri on 7 November 2017 at Sungai Long Campus.

Titled “Big Data and Social Science Research”, the talk focused on the contribution of Big Data to social science which was not limited to data availability but included the introduction of analytical approaches that have been developed in computer science, particularly in machine learning. It brought a new ‘culture’ of statistical modelling that carried considerable potential for the social scientist. Prof Guisseppe illustrated a model-based recursive partitioning which bridged the theory and data-driven approach. The new approach was able to help revise models that work for the full dataset and it can be used for evaluating different models.

He spoke about the first area of application known as the “Public understanding of Science”. The research group was led by Gorge Gaskell and Martin Bauer at London School of Economics (LSE), UK. The research programme focused on the triangulation between three ‘fields’ of the public sphere, which were public opinion studied via surveys and qualitative methods, mass media using content analysis of mainly press content and policymakers which are studies using policy documents.

Prof Giuseppe added, “Collectively the society is assembling data on massive amounts of its behaviours. We can label these data as ‘organic’ a now-natural feature of this ecosystem where information is produced from data by the users. The ‘designed’ data are collected when a person design experiment or a questionnaire or a focus group.”

He also shared some insights on the three ‘V’s of Big Data which were Volume, Velocity and Variety. The term ‘Volume’ refers to the amount of data while ‘Velocity’ refers to the speed of data processing and ‘Variety’ talks about to the types of data such as structured, unstructured, text or multimedia.

Prof Giuseppe has taught extensively in the fields of methodology of social research and social psychology. His research interest focused on public opinion research and new media, social representations, behavioural economics and social psychology of economic life, social networks, and public understanding of science. He has also published journals such as Nature Materials, Public Understanding of Science, Big Data and Society and PLOS ONE, to name a few. Prof Giuseppe holds a Bachelor of Social Science in Psychology of Communication from the University of Siena and Master of Science in Social Research Methods from Methodology Institute of London School of Economics (LSE) and a PhD in Social Psychology from LSE. He is currently a Professor at the University of Trento.

Prof Giuseppe delivering his talk