02.05.2023
Last month there was Invited lecture of PhD student Mihaela Angelova for the MSc program “AI for Business and Finance” regarding challenges of working with SHARE data.
Mihaela Angelova has a master’s in urban planning from the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy (UACEG), Sofia. After 8 years working in the spheres of strategic planning and regional development, she decided to pursue the MSc program “Modeling of Big Data in Business and Finance” in FEBA, Sofia university. Mihaela is currently a PHD Student in Data Science in FEBA. She is one of the researchers working on the SHARE project. She has been working with SHARE data for 3 years and used the SHARE data for developing her master thesis. She is also leading exercises in Basics of Statistics for bachelor students in FEBA. On the other hand, Mihaela is part of the credit risk model validation team of KBC Global services, one of the business partners of FEBA, and she is actively participating in the partnership activities between the company and the university.
Mihaela already has one publication based on SHARE data in the special issue of Journal Revista inclusiones “Aging in times of pandemic’ published in 2021. Last year Mihaela presented her new research on the SHARE data in the international EBES Conference, that took place in Berlin in October 2022. It was also presented in front of representativeness of the public administration of Bulgaria during the International conference: “Artificial intelligence, policies and management in public administration” with a focus on how the results of the research could be used for design and implementation of social policies.
During the invited lecture Mihaela shared with the students from the MSc program “AI for Business and Finance” what are the main issues that one should solve when loading and preprocessing the SHARE datasets, useful tips and tricks how to handle different type of data problems and what are the steps of one successful longitude research using practical examples from her experience. She also explained more about the SHARE survey, being the only international panel survey in which Bulgaria participates and the importance of building of scientific capacity of Big-data experts prepared to work with the SHARE data and to support the European policy makers in taking data driven decisions. During the lecture there were a lot of questions from the students, who were already inspired to investigate deeper the SHARE datasets and develop their own research.