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In this paper, we continue describing the project and the experimentation of "Ricerca Operativa Applicazioni Reali" (ROAR; in English, Real Applications of Operations Research), a three-year project for higher secondary schools, introduced. ROAR is composed of three teaching units, addressed to Grades 10, 11, and 12, respectively, having the main aim to improve students' interest, motivation, and skills related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines by integrating mathematics and computer science through operations research. In a previous paper, we reported on the design and implementation of the first unit, started in Spring 2021 at the scientific high school IIS Antonietti in Iseo (Brescia, Italy), in a Grade-10 class. Here, we focus on the second unit, carried out in Winter/Spring 2022 with the same students, now in a Grade-11 class. In particular, we describe objectives, prerequisites, topics and methods, the organization of the lectures, digital technologies used, and a challenging final project. Moreover, we analyze the feedback from students and teachers involved in the experimentation.

We introduce "Ricerca Operativa Applicazioni Reali" (ROAR; in English, "Real Applications of Operations Research"), a three-year project for higher secondary schools. Its main aim is to improve students' interest, motivation, and skills related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines by integrating mathematics and computer science through operations research. ROAR offers examples and problems closely connected with students' everyday life or with the industrial reality, balancing mathematical modeling and algorithmics. The project is composed of three teaching units, addressed to grades 10, 11, and 12. The implementation of the first teaching unit took place in Spring 2021 at the scientific high school IIS Antonietti in Iseo (Brescia, Italy). In particular, in this paper, we provide a full description of this first teaching unit in terms of objectives, prerequisites, topics and methods, organization of the lectures, and digital technologies used. Moreover, we analyze the feedback received from students and teachers involved in the experimentation, and we discuss advantages and disadvantages related to distance learning that we had to adopt because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Italy, teaching coding at primary and secondary levels is emerging as a major educational issue, particularly in light of the recent reforms now being implemented. Consequently, there has been increased research on how to introduce information technology in lower secondary schools. This paper presents an exploratory survey, carried out through an intensive workshop on coding, which was designed to introduce the basic principles of computer science to be included in the future school curriculum. Specifically, the paper examines three key aspects of the coding unit for lower secondary schools: (a) the students' perception of their self-efficacy in carrying out coding; (b) the involvement of students' cognition and perception; (c) the principal obstacles students might encounter while coding. The results are encouraging as they demonstrate that coding turns out to be both highly interesting and motivating for students.

Research evaluation, which is an increasingly pressing issue, invariably relies on citation counts. In this contribution we highlight two concerns that the research community needs to pay attention to. One, in the world of search engine facilitated research, factors such as ease of Web discovery, ease of access, and content relevance, rather than quality, influence what gets read and cited. Two, research evaluation based on citation counts works against many types of high-quality works. We also elaborate on the implications of these points by examining a recent nationwide evaluation of researchers performed in Italy. We focus on our discipline (computer science), but we believe that our observations have relevance for a broad audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of local knowledge specializations from universities in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup creation process. The empirical analysis is grounded in the Knowledge Spillovers Theory of Entrepreneurship. It provides evidence of the interplay between the presence of university knowledge specializations and the creation of AI startups located in Italian NUTS3 regions. More precisely, we analyze the mix of different types of university knowledge specializations able to foster the creation of AI startups, demonstrating that competencies in technological domains, such as computer science, need to be complemented with domains of applications for the emergence of AI technology. The findings indicate that the creation of AI startups is closely tied to the local knowledge present in the region. The article also proposes an empirical approach to identify and classify innovative startups operating in AI domains. Our work offers important implications for regional innovation policies and the management of AI in entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid19 pandemic has significantly impacted on our lives, triggering a strong reaction resulting in vaccines, more effective diagnoses and therapies, policies to contain the pandemic outbreak, to name but a few. A significant contribution to their success comes from the computer science and information technology communities, both in support to other disciplines and as the primary driver of solutions for, e.g., diagnostics, social distancing, and contact tracing. In this work, we surveyed the Italian computer science and engineering community initiatives against the Covid19 pandemic. The 128 responses thus collected document the response of such a community during the first pandemic wave in Italy (February-May 2020), through several initiatives carried out by both single researchers and research groups able to promptly react to Covid19, even remotely. The data obtained by the survey are here reported, discussed and further investigated by Natural Language Processing techniques, to generate semantic clusters based on embedding representations of the surveyed activity descriptions. The resulting clusters have been then used to extend an existing Covid19 taxonomy with the classification of related research activities in computer science and information technology areas, summarizing this work contribution through a reproducible survey-to-taxonomy methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Italy, teaching coding at primary and secondary levels is emerging as a major educational issue, particularly in light of the recent reforms now being implemented. Consequently, there has been increased research on how to introduce information technology in lower secondary schools. This paper presents an exploratory survey, carried out through an intensive workshop on coding, which was designed to introduce the basic principles of computer science to be included in the future school curriculum. Specifically, the paper examines three key aspects of the coding unit for lower secondary schools: (a) the students' perception of their self-efficacy in carrying out coding; (b) the involvement of students' cognition and perception; (c) the principal obstacles students might encounter while coding. The results are encouraging as they demonstrate that coding turns out to be both highly interesting and motivating for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital transformation in the public sector provides digital services to the citizens aiming at increasing their quality of life, as well as the transparency and accountability of a public administration. Since adaptation to the citizens changing needs is central for its success, Agile methodologies seem best suited for the software development of digital services in that area. However, as well documented by an attempt to use Scrum for an important Public Administration in Italy, substantial modifications to standard Agile were needed, giving rise to a new proposal called improved Agile (in short, iAgile). Another notable example is the Scrum@IMI method developed by the City of Barcelona for the deployment of its digital services. However, given the importance of digital transformation in the public sector and the scarcity of efforts (documented in the scholarly literature) to effectively bring Agile within it, a strategically important contribution that Computer Science can offer is a general paradigm describing how to tailor Agile methodologies and, in particular, Scrum, for such a specific context. Our proposal, called Scrum@PA, addresses this strategic need. Based on it, a public administration has a technically sound avenue to follow to adopt Scrum rather than a generic set of guidelines as in the current state of the art. We show the validity of our proposal by describing how the quite successful Scrum@IMI approach can be derived from Scrum@PA. Although iAgile can also be derived from our paradigm, we have chosen Scrum@IMI as a pilot example since it is publicly available on GitHub. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, machine learning techniques have assumed an increasingly central role in many areas of research, from computer science to medicine, including finance. In the current study, we applied it to financial literacy to test its accuracy, compared to a standard parametric model, in the estimation of the main determinants of financial knowledge. Using recent data on financial literacy and inclusion among Italian adults, we empirically tested how tree-based machine learning methods, such as decision trees, random, forest and gradient boosting techniques, can be a valuable complement to standard models (generalized linear models) for the identification of the groups in the population in most need of improving their financial knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we provide an overview of the early developments of theoretical computer science research in Italy in the Sixties and early Seventies. In the same years, the community of researchers working in this domain were organizing to gain an identity among the more traditional disciplines and to obtain a recognition for the "new science" that was taking its first steps. This led in Italy to the creation of Group of Researchers in Theoretical Informatics, in parallel to the institution of European Association for Theoretical Computer Science at European level. In this article, we characterize the Italian contribution to theoretical computer science research in those early years by describing the landscape of activities developed in Italian Universities and research centers in the late sixties and early seventies, on the basis of a census run in 1971 by the newly born GRIT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science dedicated to giving machines or computers the ability to perform human-like cognitive functions, such as learning, problem-solving, and decision making. Since it is showing superior performance than well-trained human beings in many areas, such as image classification, object detection, speech recognition, and decision-making, AI is expected to change profoundly every area of science, including healthcare and the clinical application of physics to healthcare, referred to as medical physics. As a result, the Italian Association of Medical Physics (AIFM) has created the "AI for Medical Physics" (AI4MP) group with the aims of coordinating the efforts, facilitating the communication, and sharing of the knowledge on AI of the medical physicists (MPs) in Italy. The purpose of this review is to summarize the main applications of AI in medical physics, describe the skills of the MPs in research and clinical applications of AI, and define the major challenges of AI in healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An improved pattern informatics (PI) method, inspired by the soup-of-groups model, is developed in this study. This improved method reveals its potential in reducing the noise that, when the classical PI is applied, can yield misleading conclusions about the existence of "hotspots" in the vicinity of the epicenter of a strong earthquake. The application of this new method to Italian seismicity from 1985 to 2018 properly reveals "hotspots" around the two strongest earthquakes that occurred in 2009 (L'Aquila earthquake) and 2016 (Norcia earthquake), suggesting its utility in studies devoted to earthquake prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade and a half have seen a renewed interest in the development of the IT industry in Italy and the role of the 1950s pioneers. The aim of the article is to retrace key stages of the first Italian project aimed at creating an electronic calculator, carried out by the University of Pisa in collaboration with Olivetti. The re-evaluation of the documents kept in the University's archives, including the technical projects, has proved fruitful and has shed light on lesser-known aspects of a project that opened the way to the birth of computer science in the country as a business and as a scientific discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]