Riva Paola

Researcher

Dr. Paola Riva is Junior Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering of Politecnico di Milano (Italy).

She is an emerging scholar in data-driven performance management with focus on public sector. She has a strong background in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Public Management, grounded in her Mathematical Engineering education and in her Ph.D. focused on the role of online user-generated data in supporting decision making of cultural heritage institutions. Dr. Riva's experience spans diverse areas, from analyzing social media data to evaluating the impact of digital transformation in both cultural and higher education institutions. Her analytical and technical skills, demonstrated by her proficiency in statistical analysis and machine learning tools (R,

Python, PowerBI), offer a valuable perspective on translating AI solutions into tangible improvements for public service

delivery. She is actively involved in research projects with cultural and higher education institutions, and she is committed to translating research into real-world impact, fostered by the collaboration with the Observatory for Digital Innovation in Heritage and Culture of Politecnico di Milano. Dr. Riva actively contributes to the research community, presenting her work at international conferences and supervising undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations.

Career

October 2023 – Today: Assistant Professor at Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering Dept. (DIG), Politecnico di Milano, Milano (IT)

February 2022 – Today: Collaborator at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Madrid (ES)

October 2019 – Today: Collaborator at Politecnico di Milano Graduate School of Management (GSOM), Milano (IT)

March – September 2023: University Research Fellow at Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering Dept. (DIG), Politecnico di Milano, Milano (IT)

November 2019 – May 2023: Ph.D. in Management Engineering at Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering Dept. (DIG), Politecnico di Milano, Milano (IT)

March – August 2022: Visiting University Research Fellow at Ontology Engineering Group (OEG), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Madrid (ES)

February – October 2019: University Research Fellow at Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering Dept. (DIG), Politecnico di Milano, Milano (IT)

October 2018 – January 2019: University Internship at Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering Dept. (DIG), Politecnico di Milano, Milano (IT)

October 2014 – July 2018: Master of Science in Mathematical Engineering at Mathematics Dept. (DMAT), Politecnico di Milano, Milano (IT)

October – December 2017: Internship at Business Integration Partners S.p.A., Milano (IT)

March–September 2016: Erasmus+ Exchange Semester SoSe16 at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt (DE)

October 2010 – July 2014: Bachelor of Science in Mathematical Engineering at Mathematics Dept. (DMAT), Politecnico di Milano, Milano (IT)

Research

Research on Artiﬁcial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing for performance management of public and cultural services: At the intersection of the three research areas of performance management, public management, and data analytics and AI, my research aims at understanding how the uptake of Artiﬁcial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is inﬂuencing the public sector in terms of performance management and accountability of public service provision, focusing speciﬁcally on cultural services. I employ AI models and NLP techniques to elaborate data integrated from multiple sources, i.e., social media data and online reviews, official statistics, public reports, to critically reflect on the implications for public sector institutions of support their decision-making leveraging these AI models and data.

Additional research projects: I am also researching about the impact of AI on the activities and skills of cultural heritage professionals within a project developed by the Observatory for Digital Innovation in Heritage and Culture of Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with Scuola Nazionale Patrimonio Attività Culturali. Specifically, I contributed to the project by studying in depth the literature on the measurement of impacts of AI on skills within the specific sector of cultural heritage and across various sectors. I also participated in multiple in-depth interviews with cultural heritage professionals to qualitatively study the impacts of AI on skills. Informed by these two steps I also developed a conceptual framework to support the development of a survey to quantitatively measure the impacts on AI on activities and skills of cultural heritage professionals measuring the actual perceptions of these professionals towards the impact of AI on their job activities.

Selected Publications

Riva, P. (2025). Content Analysis of Public Branding Strategies: Uniqueness and Isomorphism in Facebook Posts of Italian Museums. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop “New frontiers in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence” (BDAI 2025) Aosta, Italy, May 29-30, 2025, edited by Consuelo Rubina Nava and Stefano Tedeschi.

Agostino, D., & Riva, P. (2024). The design and use of a digital PMS, and the emergence of gaming logic: the experience of the Italian Ministry of Culture. In Handbook of Accounting and Public Governance (pp. 223-243). Edward Elgar Publishing. DOI: 10.4337/9781800888456.00024

Paola Riva & Deborah Agostino (2022) Latent dimensions of museum experience: assessing cross-cultural perspectives of visitors from tripadvisor reviews, Museum Management and Curatorship, 37:6, 616-640, DOI: 10.1080/09647775.2022.2073560

Agostino, D.; Brambilla, M.; Pavanetto, S.; Riva, P. The Contribution of Online Reviews for Quality Evaluation of Cultural Tourism Oﬀers: The Experience of Italian Museums. Sustainability 2021, 13, 13340. DOI: 10.3390/ su132313340

Agostino, D., Arnaboldi, M., Diaz, M. L. L., & Riva, P. (2020, July). Exploring the Importance of Facebook Post Writing as a Museum Engagement Tool. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Social Media—ECSM (pp. 28-36). DOI: 10.34190/ESM.20.074

Riva, P., Sturla, P., Calissano, A., & Vantini, S. (2019). Landscape Perception through Complex Data: Exploring George Hargreaves’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture, 4, 42-56. DOI: 10.14627/537663005

Community service