Daniele Durante, the Data Scientist Who Loves Playing in Other People's Backyards

THE CHANCE TO INTERACT WITH OTHER SCIENCES IS THE REASON WHY STATISTICS IS SO ATTRACTIVE, ACCORDING TO THE NEW ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF DECISION SCIENCES

When Daniele Durante describes his enthusiasm for Statistics, he likes to cite John Wilder Tukey. The best thing about being a statistician, the American data scientist once claimed, is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard. “Statistics provides the unique opportunity to fruitfully interact with the other Sciences, and to obtain exciting stimuli from many fields of application”, says Durante, 29 years old, incoming Assistant Professor at the Department of Decision Sciences. “I chose Bocconi because I was extremely fascinated by its rapid international growth, and by the teaching and research opportunities associated with the new degrees in Data Science and with BIDSA (Bocconi Institute for Data Science and Analytics)”.
 
Durante, born near Treviso, in Northeastern Italy, entered the field of Statistics thanks to his passion for Mathematics, and because, as he says, he felt the need to apply this fundamental science. His current and past research, which allowed him to gain a PhD in Statistical Science at the University of Padua in 2016, is highly motivated by the attempt to accurately answer cutting-edge scientific questions through the development of innovative statistical methods. “Consider, for example, the Neurosciences. State-of-the-art datasets provided by the recent imaging technologies comprise highly multidimensional information such as complex networks of inter-connections between brain regions, instead of single and unstructured numbers. Only novel statistical models specifically developed for these type of data, such as those I proposed in my PhD dissertation on Bayesian Nonparametric Modeling of Network Data, can help us understand the wiring mechanisms within the brain and how these connectivity architecture changes with cognitive traits or neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer’s”.
 
During his time at Duke University as a Research Scholar, he focused on studying the relation between creative cognition and brain networks. The results, featured in the paper Bayesian Inference and Testing of Group Differences in Brain Networks, appeared in a leading statistical journal and have been discussed in several media outlets, such as the Daily Mail. The success of this scientific contribution also led him to obtain the David P. Byar Award from the Biometrics Section of the American Statistical Association in 2015. “Some of the mathematical concepts underlying the novel statistical methods I developed for studying brain connectivity architectures are inspired by social networks. This interdisciplinary thinking is one of the most fascinating aspects of Statistics: by matching practical intuitions and a careful formalization of the research questions, it is possible to notice promising methodological bridges among several fields of application, including Social Sciences, Epidemiology, but also Business Intelligence and Finance”.
 
“In 2008, Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, said that the Data Scientist would have been the sexiest job in the next 10 years”, says Durante, when speaking about his enthusiasm in communicating the importance of Statistics outside the academia, “and it was definitely an accurate prediction, judging by the best jobs rankings in the 2017, such as the one provided by CareerCast”. Durante is one of the organizers of Start Up Research, a three-day meeting at the Certosa di Pontignano, in Tuscany, where small groups of young scholars develop innovative statistical methods motivated by Neuroscience applications, under the supervision of international senior researchers. “This is a more research-focused version of Stats Under the Stars, which is an all-night long data challenge I designed with a group of colleagues a few years ago. Teams of students from all over Italy gather every year to compete in the analysis of a dataset to answer analytic questions motivated by business intelligence applications”. In the first edition, two Bocconi students, Michele Peruzzi and Amir Khorrami Chokami, won the first prize. “I met them again here at Bocconi. They are two of the several outstanding PhD students I have had the chance to meet at the Department of Decision Sciences since my arrival”.

by Claudio Todesco