[Editor's Note: This guest post is from Antonia Bradford, who attended "ICT Days" in Trento Italy, and offered this report.]

Trento, Italy, hosted a technology conference ‘ICT Days 2013’ between 20th and 23rd March. Like all such events it was interesting, dynamic and informative, but it was also quite different from the normal conferences.

It broadcast a very loud message that Semantic Technology, Big Data, and the interconnectivity of things will – without any doubt – affect everything and everyone; that these technologies will change the way everyone interacts with public services, the way in which dwindling natural resources are distributed and managed, the way citizens interact with each other, the way in which public and private bodies cooperate to support the needs of the citizen and the way in which public bodies are monitored and held accountable to the people that elected them.

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Sapienza University of Rome is looking for a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Rome, Italy. The post states, “One position of POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW in Natural Language Processing is open in the Department of Computer Science of the Sapienza University of Rome, with a specific focus on statistical machine translation for Asian languages. The position is part of a 5-year ERC Starting Grant on multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and headed by Prof. Roberto Navigli (see http://lcl.uniroma1.it/multijedi for details). The successful candidate will participate in a frontier research project and will work in the stimulating environment of a leading and highly-active research team comprising 2 faculty members, 2 post-docs and 6 Ph.D. students.” Read more

Velichka Dimitrova of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently discussed the launch of Yourtopia Italia, an open data portal for Italy. She writes, “In countries like Italy stark regional differences have dominated over time. Particularly in times of fiscal austerity when the country attempts to recover from an economic crisis with major social consequences, seeing how and why the South and the North differ is an important step in a consensus-building process to find solutions and realise collaboration with the citizens. The Open Economics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation released YourTopia Italia – an application which gives the users a chance to input their priorities in eight categories of socio-economic progress: Labour Market, Education, Health, Environment and Energy, Science and Research, Household Income and Inequality, Public Safety, and Social Life.” Read more

Last week the OpenSpending platform received its first Italian contribution, OpenSpending Italy: “A step forward was made in accessibility to data. A very important, well maintained, comprehensive dataset on public spending is now accessible through advanced, interactive visualization, easy to compare with analogous international data. Even more interesting, it was published in widget form: anybody can copypaste the embed code anywhere .” Read more

Three positions are open to doctoral students within the Data & Knowledge Management unit of the University of Trento in Italy. The deadline for these positions is fast approaching – March 16, 2011. The available positions regard research on combining ontological and process-based reasoning, mixing logical and statistical reasoning, and structured data indexing and retrieval. These positions “are among the grants of the ICT International Doctoral School at the University of Trento. Click here for more information on each position and its requirements. Read more