Invited Speakers – Emanuela Merelli – abstract and bio

Emanuela Merelli “The Topological Field Theory of Data: a program towards a novel strategy for data mining through data language”

Abstract: We aim to challenge the current thinking in IT for the “Big Data” question, proposing a
program aiming to construct an innovative methodology to perform data analytics in a way that
returns an automaton as a recognizer of the data language: a Field Theory of Data. We suggest to
build, directly out of probing data space, a theoretical framework enabling us to extract the
manifold hidden relations (patterns) that exist among data, as correlations depending on the
semantics generated by the mining context. The program, that is grounded in the recent innovative
ways of integrating data into a topological setting, proposes the realization of a Topological Field
Theory of Data, transferring and generalizing to the space of data notions inspired by physical
(topological) field theories and harnesses the theory of formal languages to define the potential
semantics necessary to understand the emerging patterns.

Bio: Emanuela Merelli is full professor of Computer Science at the University of Camerino. She
founded the BioShape laboratory, a multidisciplinary environment where young researchers and
students work for conceiving new formal and computational methods for “decode” the behavior of
complex biology systems. She has been the coordinator of the TOPDRIM FP7-FET project and the
partner of LITBIO (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Technologies in Bioinformatics) Italian FIRB
project. Currently, she is working for launching a new program on topological field theory of data
with the aim to pave a way for synthesizing automata as recognizers of languages derived from
topological data space and for understanding the complexity of some computing paradigms. She
published many papers in refereed international journals and she is continuously involved in the
organization of events with interdisciplinary character.