Today Marco Patuano, CEO of Telecom Italia - at the #WCAP offices in Rome - presented awards to the winners of the second edition of the Big Data Challenge, the contest launched on the Internet last April, dedicated to innovative projects and open to “data” enthusiasts from the industrial world, startups and universities.
This edition's topic, “Big Data for competitiveness”, was divided into two tracks: The Academic Track, aimed at researchers and universities, and the Industrial Track, aimed at professionals from the industrial world for ideas to be transferred to the market in the short and medium term.
The two project winners, who were awarded 10 thousand euros each, were able to meet the challenge with highly innovative proposals using different types of data made available to them by the contest.
Specifically, the Academic Track category was won by the UNIMORE team from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, with the project “Interaction Diversity to Measure Social Capital”, developed using an innovative methodology capable of assessing social capital, which is recognized as a significant element for the socio-economic growth of cities.
The winner of the Industrial Track category was IBM Research with the project TogetThere, which shows how – thanks to geo-referenced “data” – it is possible to improve a tourist's experience of visiting a place and customize routes through the city, even avoiding the most crowded areas.
This year too the TIM Big Data Challenge, based on TIM's conviction that data can really make a difference in the competitive growth not only of small and medium enterprises but also of the whole country, saw the participation of hundreds of teams from over forty countries.
The TIM Big Data Challenge is a project created together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Milan Polytechnic, EM Lyon, Unipol, ISTAT, IREN, VIASAT, INFOBLU, and CERVED.
The Big Data package made available for the contest contained different types of anonymous data: from telecommunications to energy consumption, and related to 7 large urban centres in Italy. All the data used for the project was collected in full compliance with privacy and current national and community regulations, provided by the respective licensed users for the purposes of the contest, with full transparency with respect to those who generate said data.
“This initiative confirms Telecom Italia's commitment to testing new research and analysis models” - stated Marco Patuano, CEO of Telecom Italia. “Indeed, the Big Data Challenge represents a very important occasion where the protagonists, university researchers and industry professionals, were asked to look beyond the data and to be visionaries. The responses received lead us to be confident about the innovative solutions that we can build together to make our company more competitive and improve the life of the citizens of our country”.
The winning projects and the 10 finalists can be accessed through the website http://www.telecomitalia.com/bigdatachallenge
The project video can be viewed at the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=36&v=RfCsFVRJZ4o
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TIM is the only Telecom Italia Group brand that is active on the market, offering fixed and mobile telephony services, internet, digital content and cloud services. TIM, enabler of the most innovative information and communication technologies, accompanies Italy towards the target of full digitalisation, thanks to its creation of ultrabroadband network infrastructure, and its dissemination of latest generation services.
Roma, 21 September 2015
