Big Data and Digital Transition for Sustainable Development

Dear Colleagues,

The data revolution has been propelled by several key factors, such as the increasing scientific interest in the open data movement, the new opportunities for crowdsourcing, new sources for data collection, the proliferation of techniques of analysis of Big Data, the emergence of new standards of artificial intelligence, and the implementation of technologies related to the Internet of Things. All these elements have brought data to the forefront of decision-making and accountability processes in the digital era.

This influx of new data sources, technologies, and analytical approaches has the potential to enhance forms of evidence-based decision-making, providing greater fairness and inclusivity. The insights derived from data mining can complement and integrate official statistics and survey data, providing high-quality, detailed, timely, and relevant information crucial for tracking and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlined in Agenda 2030.

Digitalisation has reshaped the conceptualisation of the processes of development, and Big Data and computationally intensive analytics empower the economic choices at many levels. Their role is now pivotal for the advancement of modern scientific discoveries in a high-paced landscape of demand for technological innovations, but they also help institutions to unveil underreported disparities within society, providing critical insights for global, regional, and national development and policy making. However, the access to such technology is still imperfect: the risk is that the less developed and most marginalized countries could be left behind in the access to digitalization. Factors related to the exclusion from access of the value of information technology are language barriers, a lack of resources to maintain stable infrastructures, a lack of education, and low digital literacy, or even forms of discrimination against minorities and socially remote groups. All of these issues especially impact the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Land-locked Developing Countries (LLDCs), and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

This Special Issue welcomes the submission of original research papers on the following topics (but is not limited to them):

• Contributions on the topic of the role of Big Data for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals;
• Multivariate models of evaluation of the impact of the digital transition on sustainable development;
• Large observational and experimental studies on the sustainability of consumer behavior with digital data collections;
• Computationally intensive methodologies for sustainable and robust decision-making;
• Techniques of data fusion and composite indicators to synthesize new measures of digital transition or sustainable development from multivariate data sources.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Venera Tomaselli
Dr. Giulio Giacomo Cantone
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainability
• Big Data
• data science
• digital transition
• sustainable development