Online courses on Data, Policies, and COVID-19


Our lab is participating in the PERISCOPE H2020 project, a partnership of 30+ top European universities and associations of professionals worked together for the last two years to study data, policies, actions, and effects of pandemic management. Besides the high-impact research results, the consortium worked on implementing educational materials and courses.

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Among those, five online courses (MOOCs) that collect technical and policy solutions to pandemic challenges have been published on Coursera:

Ahead of the publication, the courses were tested by health authorities, policymakers, and public bodies. All courses are free to access.

You can access the courses from this list on Coursera.

The VaccinEU dataset of COVID-19 Vaccine Conversations on Twitter in French, German, and Italian

Despite the increasing limitations for unvaccinated people, in many European countries, there is still a non-negligible fraction of individuals who refuse to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, undermining governmental efforts to eradicate the virus.

Within the PERISCOPE project, we studied the role of online social media in influencing individuals’ opinions about getting vaccinated by designing a large-scale collection of Twitter messages in three different languages — French, German, and Italian — and providing public access to the data collected. This work was implemented in collaboration with Observatory on Social Media, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

Focusing on the European context, we devised an open dataset called VaccinEU, that aims to help researchers to better understand the impact of online (mis)information about vaccines and design more accurate communication strategies to maximize vaccination coverage.

The dataset is openly accessible in a Dataverse repository and a GitHub repository.

Furthermore, a description has been published in a paper at ICWSM 2022 (open access), which can be cited as:

Di Giovanni, M., Pierri, F., Torres-Lugo, C., & Brambilla, M. (2022). VaccinEU: COVID-19 Vaccine Conversations on Twitter in French, German and Italian. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media16(1), 1236-1244. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19374

The Final TRIGGER Conference

We will join and contribute to the final TRIGGER conference is scheduled for May 31st, 2022 in Brussels.

The theme is: “Rethinking the EU’s role in global governance”. In this context, the TRIGGER project is going to present the main research outcomes of the H2020 research program that started in 2018, setting the stage for the collaboration among 14 international partners. 

We will present our main contributions, namely PERSEUS and COCTEAU.

A quick intro to PERSEUS is available in this video:

Further details about the event are available here: