Participation to the Econom'IA conference

The econom’ia conference

“This conference aims to explore and foster the cutting-edge applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Text Mining, Web Mining, Data Visualization, and other innovative techniques in all the fields of Economics. Econom’IA brings together researchers from the academic world as well as entrepreneurs that use innovative techniques to analyse economic data.

This 2-day conference proposes training workshops in the morning to discover new tools and techniques. The afternoon is devoted to presentations and discussions of articles using at least one of the innovative techniques covered in the workshops.

The 2 days are led by leading researchers in the field.”

My own participation

I had the opportunity to attend the whole conference, but I will talk more about the second day when I presented my own work!

Second day of the conference

I recently had the pleasure of attending a fantastic training and presentation event. The day started with a warm welcome and greetings from 8.45am to 9am.

From 9am to 12.30pm, we were treated to an excellent introductory course on machine learning led by Mathieu Bernard, a CNRS research engineer at Economix. The hands-on course covered the basic concepts of machine learning, including building predictive models, data preparation, learning and evaluation. It was a great opportunity to brush up on our Python skills.

After a delicious lunch break from 12.30pm to 2pm, the afternoon was dedicated to presentations from esteemed speakers in the field.

First, from 14:00 to 15:00, we heard from keynote speaker Emmanuel Flachaire from the University of Aix-Marseille on “Interpretability and causality in machine learning”. It was a fascinating and thought-provoking talk that managed to build bridges from machine learning to academic research in economics, especially for an econometric approach when presenting his last paper with co-authors GAM(L)A: An econometric model for interpretable Machine Learning.

From 15:00 to 15:45 I had the honour to present my work on “Cracking the Code: Enhancing Development Project Classification with NLP on OECD CRS data”. It was a great opportunity to share my research and insights with the community and receive valuable feedback and questions.

There was a short break from 15:45 to 16:00 before Johannes van der Pol of the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, took the stage from 16:00 to 16:45 to discuss “One patent to rule them all? The scope of multi-standard essentials explored”. It was a very informative and engaging presentation that sparked interesting discussions and debates about the machine learning techniques used and the overall research question.

Finally, from 16:45 to 17:30, Rim Bahroun from EconomiX, Université Paris Nanterre, presented on “Large Langage Models for advanced text processing: application in economics”. It was a great way to end the day with a fascinating presentation that summarised the progress of techniques in natural language processing.

Overall, the training and presentation event was a great success and a fantastic opportunity to expand our knowledge of machine learning and its applications. I would highly recommend attending future events like this to anyone interested in the field and would like to thank the organising committee for this first successful edition.