Giorgio Alleva is full professor of statistics at the Faculty of Economics at Sapienza University of Rome. Currently Director of the Department of Methods and Models for Economics, Territory and Finance. Former President of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). He had taught also at the University Luiss ‘Guido Carli’ of Rome and at the Universidad del Salvador di Buenos Aires. He has been the scientific coordinator of projects with the European Commission and has coordinated research activities at the FAO, the World Bank and the OECD. As President of Istat, he had been member of the European statistical system Committee, the High level group on Quality, the Working Party on statistics of EU Council. He represented Italy in the UN Statistical Commission. The current main areas of interest are related to the development of official statistics for researchers and policy makers: sampling design; integration of different data sources; experimental statistics from big data; quality of the statistical information.