In less than two decades, economic complexity grew from a handful of papers to an active field of fundamental and applied research. Today, scholars and practitioners use economic complexity methods to explain variations in diversification patterns, economic growth, inequality of income and of gender outcomes, and sustainability. In this talk, Dr. César Hidalgo (Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute, University of Toulouse) will present an overview of the field of economic complexity and where it's going.
This seminar is co-sponsored by the Institute for Social Science Research, Department of Economics, and Department of Mathematics and Statistics, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The ISSR Scholars Program promotes successful research and grants development for social science faculty across UMass Amherst. Dr. Hidalgo joins us in support of his mentorship of ISSR Scholars Isabella Weber (Department of Economics) and Maryclare Griffin (Department of Mathematics and Statistics).
César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean-Spanish-American scholar known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. Hidalgo leads the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) of the University of Toulouse. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Professor at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Between 2010 and 2019 Hidalgo led MIT’s Collective Learning group. Prior to working at MIT, Hidalgo was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Hidalgo is also a founder of Datawheel, an award winning company specialized in the creation of data distribution and visualization systems. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor in Physics from Universidad Católica de Chile. Hidalgo’s contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2018 Lagrange Prize and three Webby Awards. Hidalgo's is also the author of dozens of peer-reviewed papers and of three books: Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015), The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press, 2014), and How Humans Judge Machines (MIT Press, 2021).
