An Artificial Intelligence Lab at Bocconi

ARTLAB IS DIRECTED BY RICCARDO ZECCHINA AND DOES BASIC RESEARCH FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF RIGOROUS METHODS AND ALGORITHMS FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. WE DON'T KNOW HOW THESE TOOLS WILL INFLUENCE ECONOMIC THEORY, BUT IT'S CLEAR THAT THEY WILL, SAYS PROF. ZECCHINA

A drawing by Tullio Regge welcomes those who type in the web address of Bocconi's Artificial Intelligence Lab (ArtLab). Since the 80's, the great physicist has been bringing together mathematics, computer science and art by adding textures to the curves obtained by solving advanced equations. Similarly, the ArtLab directed by Riccardo Zecchina, a student of Regge, wants to be a meeting point and cross-fertilization between different disciplines, although all of a quantitative nature, such as computer science, applied mathematics, statistical physics, computational statistics and optimization to develop rigorous methods and algorithms for artificial intelligence.
 
«Our research unit does mainly basic research of a multidisciplinary nature», explains Prof. Zecchina. «In recent years, the contribution of STEM disciplines to the economic field has grown and we deal with frontier issues such as automatic learning. It is not entirely clear how these tools will influence economic theory, but it is clear that they will! Applications are now present in all scientific disciplines where data plays a key role».
 
The learning algorithms that the center is developing can be applied, for example, to the identification of important features in massive data. «In addition to methodological studies, we are experimenting with them in the biological field», explains Prof. Zecchina, «because data on protein sequences is particularly clean and allows rigorous validation of our methods».
 
ArtLab, which started its activities a few weeks ago and is hosted by the Bocconi Institute for data Science and Analytics, counts on the participation of about fifteen academics, almost all of them from Bocconi (the exceptions are Luca Trevisan, a theoretical computer scientist who will join Bocconi from UC Berkeley in the next academic year, and Nicolas Brunel, a computational neuroscientist from Duke University) and some ten doctoral and post-doc students dedicated to theoretical research. «But in the coming months we plan to develop a third circle», says Zecchina, «of researchers dedicated to the most innovative applications».

by Fabio Todesco