Inaugural lecture by Prof. Deborah Sulem - Data Science: the good, the bad and the wild

On Monday, 2 March 2026, at 6 pm, Prof. Deborah Sulem, new Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, will give her inaugural lecture at the West Campus Lugano Auditorium. The lecture "Data Science: the good, the bad and the wild," will offer a critical and articulate look at the evolution of data science, its growing impact on everyday life, and the responsibilities that come with it.

Prof. Deborah Sulem will begin by reflecting on the remarkable pace of development in data science and predictive algorithms. She will discuss how these tools are transforming not only the work of data scientists but also a variety of other scientific fields and aspects of everyday life. In a landscape characterised by continuous innovation, data science is an inherently interdisciplinary field that integrates mathematics, computer science, and engineering. It is continually evolving as new models and concepts emerge.

During the lecture, some fundamental concepts and models will be discussed to understand the versatility of machine learning algorithms, showing how they can be applied to very different contexts. Alongside the opportunities, however, ample space will also be given to critical issues.

A key focus of the lecture will be the real-world applications of predictive algorithms, where notable methodological weaknesses often arise, particularly when models are applied to individual data. Learning from data that contains social biases can cause algorithms to reproduce-and sometimes even amplify-these distortions in their predictions.

Understanding how these biases originate, how they manifest, and, above all, how they can be prevented is one of Prof. Sulem's main areas of research and will be a main topic of the lecture. It is therefore an invitation to view data science not only as a powerful driver of innovation, but also as a field that requires awareness, methodological rigour, and ethical responsibility.

The lecture will last approximately one hour and will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience and refreshments. The event is open to the entire university community and the interested parties. To register, click here.

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Deborah Sulem is an assistant professor (tenure-track) of Data Science at the Faculty of Informatics of Università della Svizzera italiana. She directs the Statistical Science Laboratory of the Institute of Computing (CI). Her research interests include graphs and networks, point processes, Bayesian inference, high-dimensional and non-parametric statistics, as well as issues of explainability and fairness in machine learning. She obtained her PhD in Statistics from the University of Oxford in 2023, under the supervision of Judith Rousseau, Mihai Cucuringu, Xiaowen Dong and Vincent Rivoirard. She then served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona School of Economics and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she collaborated with David Rossell and Gábor Lugosi. She joined USI in 2024.