VADISTAT Award for Best Scientific Contribution at JADT 2026

Jul 16, 2026·
Stefano Blando
Stefano Blando
· 1 min read
VADISTAT Award received at JADT 2026, Palermo
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I received the “2026 Associazione VADISTAT - Per Simona Balbi” award during the 18th International Conference JADT 2026 (Journées internationales d’Analyse statistique des Données Textuelles) held in Palermo.

The prize, awarded for the best scientific contribution presented by researchers under 35 in statistical textual data analysis, recognized the paper “A Multi-Method Validation Framework for Large-Scale Multilingual Text Analytics”, developed with Professor D. Fioredistella Iezzi (Director of the Data Science Master at the University of Rome Tor Vergata).

Research Summary

The study presents a validation framework tested on over 999,000 multilingual reviews to evaluate model consistency across methodologies. The empirical results show that over 95% of output variance is driven by text content, whereas less than 3% is attributable to algorithmic variation, demonstrating that robust analytical conclusions remain consistent across computational approaches.

The research evaluated corpus data made available by Professor Massimo Regoli, to whose memory the paper is dedicated.

Stefano Blando
Authors
Stefano Blando (he/him)
PhD Student in Artificial Intelligence
Stefano Blando is a PhD student in the National PhD Program in Artificial Intelligence at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and the University of Pisa. His research lies at the intersection of AI, agent-based modeling, and economics. He studies adaptive multi-agent systems, differentiable agent-based models, LLM-based generative agents, and robust quantitative methods for financial and socio-economic data.