The UIS Research Centre stands as a pioneering, student-led think tank, deeply rooted in the principles of academic excellence, innovation, and collaboration. Our primary objective is to harness the potential of bright and dedicated Italian students, providing them with a platform to craft well-researched policy proposals and insightful articles.
Our commitment is not just to produce research, but to shape future leaders and thinkers who can drive change through informed policy-making and thought leadership. Students will be given the possibility to produce their own paper together with Italian PhD students and Professors, which will then be presented to our community and Italian institutions.
By Riccardo Ali, Enrico Fontana and Mattia Jacopo Villani
We present a flexible framework for opinion mining in a highly supervised fashion. We present evidence that opinion can be efficiently represented by the topics it touches upon and its the sentiment in which it is expressed and implement an algorithm for unsupervised opinion clustering. We generalise existing techniques and increase their unsupervised component, as well as lift the need for extensive fine tuning, making this methodology highly flexible and employable in different settings. First, we download a large corpus of tweets based on an hashtag, then we use state of the art deep learning to extract their topics and perform sentiment analysis. Finally, we select a topic and use an unsupervised clustering algorithm to cluster the sentiment of the tweets belonging to that topic, with the resulting clusters representing opinions.
By Giulia Cancellaro, Giulia Brutti and Mattia Jacopo Villani
This paper explores the influence of the Italian community in the UK on the 2019 electoral outcomes, focusing on the circumscription under the Consulate General of Italy in London. It begins with an overview of the Italian community’s demographics, considering factors such as age, gender, education, and employment status, mapped across UK constituencies. The study then examines Italians with UK citizenship, analyzing their demographic trends. Next, it reviews the results of the 2019 general elections, comparing party vote shares across constituencies and reflecting on Brexit’s impact on these outcomes. Combining demographic and electoral data, the paper conducts an exploratory analysis of the Italian community’s influence on election results, situating their behavior within broader European trends. It concludes that Italians represent the European population in their voting patterns, with their presence correlating with a higher likelihood of support for left-wing parties, even when controlling for confounding factors.
Applications for Bachelor and Master students to join our team are now open!
Meet the rest of our incredible students working in our Research Centre here:
