A lecture by Prof. Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri from University of Trento, as part of a mentoring visit

10 09 2024

The Digital Economy Lab (DELab) of the UW is pleased to announce a lecture by Prof. Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri of the University of Trento as part of a mentoring visit.

The lecture in English entitled “Seeds and Soil: Combining Experiments and new causal inference methods”, will be held at the DELab UW on 18.09.2024 at 10:00 am.

In this lecture, we will discuss the Computational Social Science approaches that are increasingly focusing on causal inference and mechanistic models. This presentation explores two main approaches: causal machine learning (CML), which is applied to experiments, and randomised controlled trials, as well as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), for analysing observational data. The discussion emphasises the importance of addressing heterogeneous treatment effects and combining observational and experimental methods. These advanced techniques aim to improve the robustness and validity of causal inferences in social science research.

Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri holds an MSc in Social Research Methods (Statistics) from the Methodology Institute of the London School of Economics (LSE) and a PhD in Social Psychology from the LSE. He is a full professor of computational social science and behavioural data science at the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. He was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leicester. He has been a scientific fellow at the European Commission JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS). Before joining the IPTS, he was a research associate at the Institut Jean Nicod (Ecole Normale Supérieure) in Paris. He has published in scientific journals such as Nature, Science Advances, Nature Scientific Reports, PLOS One, Computers in Human Behavior, Public Understanding of Science, Big Data & Society, Behavioural Public Policy and others.