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Archive / INF Seminars / INF_2025_05_08_Francesca_Panero

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	Estimating food security using Bayesian methods on auxiliary data sources

Hosts: Prof. Ernst-Jan Camiel Wit, Prof. Deborah Sulem

Thursday

08.05

USI Lugano East Campus, Room D.0.03

12:15-13:30


	Dr. Francesca Panero Sapienza University, Italy

Abstract:

Food security is commonly monitored through household surveys, which are costly and vary in temporal frequency and spatial resolution. These surveys are increasingly difficult to implement, often disrupted or unable to achieve full geographic coverage. To address this, organizations are exploring machine learning approaches that combine survey data with auxiliary sources to estimate key indicators such as food consumption scores. In this talk, I will introduce the context of food security estimation, highlight currently available ML methodologies, and discuss how we can use Gaussian Processes to quantify food consumption and its uncertainty. For a sneak peak of some of the topics, see Martini et al. (2022) and Ishida and Bergsma (2023).

Biography:

Francesca Panero is an Assistant Professor in Statistics at Sapienza University of Rome (Italy) and Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She mostly works on Bayesian nonparametric models for complex networks and humanitarian applications, but she is also exploring fair machine learning models and algorithms.

Francesca obtained her PhD in 2022 at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Caron and Prof. Rousseau. During her PhD years, she interned at the Dalle Molle Institute for AI (Lugano, Switzerland) and at J.P. Morgan (London). From 2022 to 2024 she was Assistant Professor in Data Science at the London School of Economics. She is the Chair-Elect of the junior section of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for 2025-2027.

You can find more on her website.

Hosts: Prof. Ernst-Jan Camiel Wit, Prof. Deborah Sulem

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If you plan to attend and would like to receive lunch (sandwiches will be provided), please sign up using the form provided on USI INF Events Website by Monday, May 5 at 6PM.