Computational perspectives and organized crime: a seminar on two studies in Italy and Mexico

Abstract: This seminar presents two projects focusing on the study of Italian mafias and Mexican cartels through two different computational perspectives. In the first part of the talk, I will describe a work that emerged in the context of the Horizon2020 project PROTON and aimed at evaluating policy scenarios for reducing recruitment into mafias through agent-based models. In the second part of the talk, I will instead introduce the results of an ongoing project that seeks to exploit a complex systems approach to estimate the size of the cartel population in Mexico and evaluate the long-term effects of four violence-reduction scenarios in the country. Finally, the seminar will also briefly reflect on the challenges and advantages of transdisciplinary collaborations between social and computational scientists. 

Bio: Gian Maria Campedelli is a postdoctoral research fellow in computational sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, Italy. In 2020, he earned his Ph.D. in Criminology from Università Cattolica, Milan. From 2016 to 2019, he worked as a researcher at Transcrime, the Joint Research Center on Transnational Crime of Università Cattolica, the University of Bologna, and the University of Perugia. In 2018, he held a visiting research scholar position in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Gian Maria's primary research interests encompass the study of organized crime, terrorism, and homicide through the development and application of diverse computational and statistical approaches. In 2022, he published his first book, "Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads", with Routledge.