Hi all,
here is a first short overview of the only private beneficiary of the INSIGHTS ITN: Pangea Formazione, a SME with base in Rome (PangeaF in the following).
| Pangea Formazione S.r.l.(Rome, Italy) |
| founded in 2009 |
innovative SME  |
research institute recognized by  |
| certified UNI EN ISO 9001:2015 (development of informatic tools for predictive models) |
| team formed by around 15 persons, mostly with a background and a Ph.D. in quantitative sciences (Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, etc.) |
PangeaF was created in 2009, on initiative of Paolo Agnoli and Francesco Piccolo, its charter members, to the purpose of promoting and spreading the importance of exploiting available data as a support to business decision making.
At the beginning, training courses were PangeaF’s main trademark, to encourage the use of appropriate statistical tools to deal with the uncertainties that are naturally embedded in business decisions. To this aim, PangeaF created a network of connections and collaborations with several researchers at universities in Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples and Pavia. During this period, managers from private companies and public institutions who attended such courses asked PangeaF for a practical application to their own real business problems of the techniques that were presented. Those studies shortly evolved in activities of modeling algorithms and software development which nowadays constitutes the core business of the company.
As of 2019, PangeaF has several active projects of software development and management consulting with different companies such as TIM, Poste Italiane, DHL, MBDA, ENEL, etc., while retaining important training activities on both data-driven decision making (higher level courses for top and middle managers) and machine learning techniques through open source languages like R, Python and Scala (technical courses for data scientists and IT personnel). Helping other companies to use their own data, as well as open data sources, to improve their decision making processes is still our main mission and both software development and training activity are the means to reach it effectively.
A third way to accomplish our mission is devoting efforts to develop brand new algorithmic and software solutions for problems which we believe will be soon relevant for business processes. This led our company to spend time and resources on advanced R&D activities, including development of optimal control strategies for swarms of drones with a common objective and of deep learning techniques to analyze video data sources to detect and classify objects of interest. While performing such researches, we created new connections with researchers from the academic world where similar problems are studied and we realized there were plenty of opportunities for training young researchers, with an interest in applied data analysis techniques, on such topics. This was the link that brought PangeaF in the orbit of INSIGHTS, while it was still a preliminary proposal for an EC training network, and made our company the natural choice as responsible for the work package on “Statistics for Society”.
Of course, we are very happy for the opportunity to join the ITN: thanks to INSIGHTS ITN, we now have a new member of our team, Daria Morozova. Our ESR has moved from Moscow to Rome on September 2018 to work on her INSIGHTS project: developing a common framework to integrate video and sound data analysis techniques towards different goals. We foresee that such a framework will be useful for applications like smart mobility and coordinated drone control, but there is plenty of other fields that could benefit of a similar tool. Once all the building blocks will be in place, and it will become easier to stack together pre-trained deep learning networks with customized ones and with Bayesian networks, we will be able to start playing with it in different contexts and see how everything plays out.
Daria Morozova
| Fabio S. Priuli
| Sara Borroni
|
For the moment, that’s all.
More posts will follow soon presenting some of the exciting machine learning applications we developed for industry process management, and some of the latest statistical techniques that we experienced as very useful in such context.
Insights ITN 