Vilius Stančiauskas is Director for Research & Policy Advice at PPMI. He holds a MSc in Economics from the University of Bristol. Vilius has been primarily involved in the evaluation and impact assessment of the EU’s research and innovation policy, and has carried out multiple evaluations and studies in the areas of health research, researcher careers and mobility, as well as cross-cutting economic analyses and assessments of EU Added Value in FP7 and H2020. Currently Vilius leads three projects involving big data techniques which look into the performance of the EU’s research and innovation system, including the Data4Impact project which is developing novel indicators for the improved monitoring of research activities in the health domain. Another project is a large-scale study launched by DG RTD which aims to track the medium and long-term results and impacts of the FP7 Cooperation programme. Methodologically, Vilius is interested in the use of unstructured data for social science research and the related techniques such as machine learning, neural networks, topic modelling and entity recognition in text data.

Presentation
Big data as a use case for open text and data mining
The presentation will focus on the application of big data techniques in research and R&I policy evaluation. What is the state-of-the-art in this field, and what are the new possibilities that open data sources bring bout? What is the potential data derived from text data and what can it tell about the results and impact of research? Finally, are decission makers willing to embrace the new methods and what does it tell about the usefulness of open TDM?