You can view a recording of the event on the YouTube channel of the April Conference.

Big Data has become a reality that no one can ignore. Big Data is our environment whenever we need to make decision. Big Data is a buzz word that makes everyone understands how important it is. Big Data shows a big opportunity for academia, industry and government. Big Data then is a big challenge for all parties. This talk will discuss some challenges of Big Data analysis as well as Data Science, the scientific issues behind Big Data. Then, this talk will provide several real-life Big Data Applications.

Cities are primarily labor markets. Well-functioning labor markets allow the emergence of high-quality urban amenities like theaters, museums, parks, restaurants, and many other attractions. The per capita productivity of cities increases with the size of their labor markets. However, the number of workers in the labor force indicates only the size of a potential labor market. Because deficient urban transport systems decrease workers' mobility within a metropolitan area, large labor markets become fragmented into smaller adjacent markets, minimizing the potential productivity of a city. Unaffordable housing, created by constraints on urban land development and housing supply, can also reduce the size of labor markets by either preventing workers from migrating to a city or by segregating low and medium-skilled workers into distant, poorly accessible areas.
Because the productivity of cities is so dependent on well-functioning labor markets, increasing mobility and improving affordability should be the primary objective of urban planners. They should monitor the evolving location of jobs within a metropolitan area and develop transport systems that reflect the demand-driven geographical distribution of employment and housing. They should build multimodal transport systems that would best increase mobility under a continually evolving urban land use. They should audit land use regulations to allow both firms and workers to consume the quantity of land and floor space that best fits their requirements in specific locations. Planners should continuously monitor the housing affordability of different income groups and take remedial action as soon as housing becomes unaffordable to workers in different sectors of the urban economy.

Focusing on the fast growth of Brazil-Russia-India-China’s, i.e. BRICs’ outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and multinational companies during the crisis (Andreff 2014, 2016 a, &b; 2017) has left unheeded that some other emerging economies also grow much faster than average in the global economy and have become significant and fast-growing direct investors abroad. A sample of such (thirteen) new-wave emerging countries (NWECs) is gathered on the criterion of being ranked among the most significant foreign direct investors in the global economy (Andreff, 2016c). A literature review exhibits only very few articles existing on OFDI and multinational companies from these NWECs so far. Then gathering descriptive statistics enable tracing OFDI by NWECs-based multinational companies back to the 1970s, checking its geographical orientation and industrial structure, and assessing the relative importance of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in the expansion of such new coming OFDI. A simple econometric estimation exhibits that direct investment moving off the NWECs is explained by so-called push factors such as the home country’s GDP, GDP per capita, GDP rate of growth, the share of high-technology exported products in overall export, the number of technological patents registered, and how much inward foreign direct investment stock has previously been hosted. These results are discussed in the light of Dunning’s investment development path model (1981, 1988; Dunning & Narula 1998) and Matthews’ linkage-leverage learning hypothesis (2002).

Over the past century, we have explored the solar system, split the atom, and wired the earth, but somehow, despite all of our technical prowess, we have struggled to understand something far more important: our own cultural differences. Observing the wide variety of cultural permutations, people assumed for centuries that there were as many explanations for these permutations and rifts as there were examples of them. Michele Gelfand’s research shows that many cultural differences reflect a simple, but often invisible distinction: The strength of social norms. Tight cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive. The tightness or looseness of social norms turns out to be a Rosetta Stone for human groups. It illuminates similar patterns of difference across nations, states, organizations, social class, and households. It is also a global fault line: many of the conflicts we encounter spring from the structural stress of tight-loose tension. By unmasking culture to reveal tight-loose dynamics, we can see fresh patterns in history, illuminate some of today’s most puzzling trends and events, and see our own behavior in a new light. At a time of intense political conflict and rapid social change, this template shows us that there is indeed a method to the madness, and that moderation – not tight or loose extremes – has never been more needed.

In an era characterized by turbulence and discontinuity, by ever-changing scenarios, by a sophisticated highly demanding and highly evolved clientele, by exogenous shocks of a destabilizing nature and pandemic flow (the last in order of occurrence is the coronavirus), logistical skills require a profound rethinking and formalization.
The European Logistics Association, ELA, is actively keeping standards of logistics competence up to date to meet these challenges. This paper reflects on two sessions of experimental workshops working with logistics industry leaders to formulate modern era required competencies in emerging areas of logistics in the light of digitalization, resilience and sustainability.
Moreover, in addition to an update, the standards also require sectoral customization, especially in the maritime sector where some peculiar features distinguish it from the more widely known manufacturing one. The complexity of the scenario because of the concentration of operators, digitalization, the growing size of vessels, the concerns for sustainability and others contingent factors makes us believe that standard skills to operate in logistics are a prerequisite but not sufficient. For these reasons, a revision and re-design of the standard competencies for both managerial and operational positions is needed.
Aim of the research is to understand if qualification systems are consistent with the evolving markets’ needs.

Has the world entered an age of authoritarianism? Rigorous answers to the question have been difficult to reach, leaving academics and laypeople to speculate about how severely the latest strongmen and populists threaten western and developing democracies. This paper applies a robust version of Freedom House’s dichotomous electoral democracy measure during 1989-2018. Using these data, the paper asks: 1) Have democratic breakdowns become more frequent in the past decade? 2) Are these breakdowns ushering in sustained authoritarianism? On both questions, initial evidence does not support prognoses of a rising wave of authoritarianism. The paper then reports tests from a series of economic and institutional predictors for the onset of authoritarianism in electoral democracies.

This talk will explore the extent to which there has been the consolidation of public attitudes towards political issues in Russia over the last quarter of a century. More specifically, it will examine whether citizens’ judgements about policies across a range of issue areas have become less normative and more rooted in citizens’ experiences, interests, social locations, and organisational attachments. Drawing on surveys conducted at regular intervals since the early 1990s, it will seek to identify the ways in which the structure of citizens’ political attitudes in Russia differs (if at all) from 'consolidated' cases, and whether it is necessary to reconsider theories of attitudinal consolidation in the context of 21st century politics.

This paper considers arbitrage-free financial markets with frictions that are represented by bid-ask spreads, and focuses on the important class of markets which exhibits hedging complements. Perfect complementarity has long been regarded by economists to be formally expressed by submodularity (resp. supermodularity) or by the decreasing (increasing) difference property of cost (utility) functions. Thus, hedging complements of a market are formalized by the complementarity of its hedging price and/or super-hedging price in the same way as strategic complements of agents’ payoff functions in game theory; see Bulow, Geanakoplos, and Klemperer (1985). Our first contribution shows that the hedging price of a market with independent marketed bid-ask securities is submodular and has a tractable explicit formula, as the sum of a “generalized” convex Choquet integral and of a modular term. Moreover, the hedging price is “generically” a generalized convex Choquet integral, since the second term is null “generically.” Thus, for a market with independent marketed bid-ask securities, the multi-prior model by Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) coincides “generically” with the Choquet expected utility model of Schmeidler (1989), in the sense that the non-additive risk-neutral probability associated with the Choquet integral is able to summarize the information of the bundle of standard risk-neutral probabilities. Second, we study the class of markets with hedging complements or equivalently with hedging price that is submodular. Such markets with hedging complements, once normalized, satisfy the call-put inequality considered by Chateauneuf, Kast, and Lapied (1996) and confirmed by empirical research. Moreover, modifying the definition of parity as in Cerreia Vioglio, Maccheroni, and Marinacci (2015) their put-call parity holds for markets with independent marketed bid-ask securities (or with hedging complements). This comes from the fact that the notion of generalized Choquet integral used in the paper is equivalent with the notion of Choquet integral on Riesz space introduced by Cerreia-Vioglio, Maccheroni, Marinacci, and Montrucchio (2015b).

The main objective of this book is to provide the necessary background to analyze cryptocurrencies markets and prices. To this end, the book consists of three parts: the first one is devoted to cryptocurrencies markets and explains how to retrieve cryptocurrencies data, how to compute liquidity measures with these data, how to calculate bounds for Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies) fundamental value and how competing exchanges contribute to the price discovery process in the Bitcoin market. The second part is devoted to time series analysis with cryptocurrencies and presents a large set of univariate and multivariate time series models, tests for financial bubbles and explosive price behavior, as well as univariate and multivariate volatility models. The third part focuses on risk and portfolio management with cryptocurrencies and shows how to measure and backtest market risk, how to build an optimal portfolio according to several approaches, how to compute the probability of closure/bankruptcy of a crypto-exchange, and how to compute the probability of death of crypto-assets. All the proposed methods are accompanied by worked-out examples in R using the packages bitcoinFinance and bubble.
This book is intended for both undergraduate and graduate students in economics, finance and statistics, financial and IT professionals, researchers and anyone interested in cryptocurrencies financial modelling. Readers are assumed to have a background in statistics and financial econometrics, as well as a working knowledge of R software.

Civilizational identity is widely invoked by politicians around the world, but its association with widely discredited primordialist claims has left it strangely understudied in contemporary social science. The research to be presented argues for reconceptualizing the notion of “civilization” to bring it better into line with what we know about the socially constructed nature of identity and the cognitive purposes that identity generally serves. An approach is then presented for identifying how ordinary people themselves understand appeals to civilizational identity like those their politicians frequently make, and new survey evidence from the 2010s is presented on patterns of civilizational identity in Russia and its implications for political behavior.

Uncertainty and ignorance are what make diverse types of practices, such as science, religion, and public policy, inspiring – while they are full of difficulties. How do these practices respectively deal with uncertainty and ignorance? To answer this question, I propose a philosophy of culture that adopts a transcendental naturalistic attitude, which offers both a corrective against scientistic naturalism and an openness towards a variety of values. I give examples of how this philosophical framework helps to interpret some of the alleged problems of modernity, specifically: the religious disenchantment of nature, the scientific disbelief in a plurality of value-laden perspectives, and the disregard for non-modern worldviews in public policy.

The pervasive boredom of rote learning seen in Education 1.0 finally yielded to a more learner-centered age of Education 2.0 a few decades ago. Today instructors are confronted with the possibilities and dilemmas of Education 3.0. But now with climate change, dramatic economic unrest, the rise of robotics, world population shifts, and so on, the innovation age of Education 4.0 is desperately needed. As we head toward the Year 2020, we humans are in the midst of a learning revolution.
During the past few years, learning has become increasingly collaborative, global, mobile, flipped, modifiable, open, online, blended, massive, visually-based, hands-on, ubiquitous, instantaneous, on-demand, adaptive, and personal. And this is just a start! This is the age of Education 3.0 where learning is more informal, resource rich, and self-directed and where learner creation of products is the new norm, often with the use of digital media. But wait, many are already hearing the drumbeats of Education 4.0 on the horizon. Can we get there? Fortunately, we are living in an age of educational resource abundance where passion, play, purpose, and freedom to learn take precedence over the more mind-numbing traditional information reception models of learning. The instructors and experts whom we meet and interact with along the way are most effective as curators, counselors, consultants, concierges, and cultivators of our learning. And now such mentors, tutors, experts, colleagues, and instructors can appear instantaneously on a mobile device. Perhaps that is a sign that Education 4.0 is not far away. Naturally, such new instructor roles require a unique and evolving set of guiding principles. As such, Professor Bonk will detail a set of 20 “last” principles of instruction with his “Learning Activation System Template” (LAST) including the Principle of Flexibility, the Principle of Meaningful Learning, the Principle of Choice and Options, the Principle of Cheerfulness and Optimism, the Principle of Spontaneity, the Principle of High Expectations, the Principle of Nontraditional Learning, etc. Suffice to say, there is immense change around the world today related to new forms of learning typically involving technology. In fact, there are three megatrends related to learning technology today: (1) technologies for engagement; (2) technologies for pervasive access; and (3) technologies for the personalization and customization of learning. To better understand these new forms of learning delivery, Professor Bonk will discuss these three megatrends as well as his recent research on the personalization of e-learning. Along the way, insights will be offered into how one might teach in this new learning age. Finally, these days seem ripe for gazing into a crystal ball and pondering what human learning will look like 5, 10, or even 25 or more years into the future. How will we learn? Where will we be learning? And who, if anyone, will we be learning with? Professor Bonk will end his talk with innovations in learning technology, instructional approaches, and the spaces and places for learning to occur. This will include predictions of the future such as robot partners on collaborative teams, world knowledge refreshment stations, Professor Einstein PDAs, the rise of super e-mentors, classrooms as cafes, learning environment engineers, and much more. Is this an evolution or a revolution? Professor Bonk will let the audience decide.

Children’s social mobility in the 21st century is a key topic of the global education agenda. Digital education can play and should play a significant role in this challenge. The great efforts of educational leaders make possible the creation of real educational eco-system that includes the wide sector of non-formal education as an innovative learning and education provider. The rapidly developing non-formal education market is becoming one of the main sources of digital innovations and transformations that are implemented in traditional online learning and edutainment formats.
Non-formal education is also not only an environment of digital educational spaces, but it also allows us to update the content of education, integrating the tasks of the digital era, the needs of the educational process participants and the real market. In this regard, studying the experience of providers becomes critical for understanding the processes of real digitalization of the environment and meanings.
KidZania’s global education strategy includes an experience-based learning approach, Think-Tank, Ambassador Schools and Industry Partners; there is a very important focus on local, contextualized implementation, and evaluations. The discussion about the benefits of digital formats in education is more than ever relevant. There is a wide corpus of studies of the positive effects of edutainment and STEM-education, especially, related to children’s motivation and their enhanced involvement. However, there is a current lack of focus on content that helps children to meet real digital life experiences - too much effort is centered on theory rather than its conversion into practice. Edutainment centers, new science museums and KidZanias amongst others are working to fill this void.
KidZania’s approach to education and entertainment is leading to enhanced life chances for children, through purposeful and innovative ways of engaging with the private sector including digital approaches, and an evidence-based voice in the world of education and entertainment, as well as a sustainable, socially responsible approach to partnerships: return on involvement instead of return on investment. The important focus and the point of contact between researchers and practitioners is the current global schooling and educational environment, their disconnect, the value of experience-based learning and its connections, for better and for worse, with the digital agenda. Can digital really mean better?
In order to move in the right direction for all children, we must however be very mindful of individual children’s socio-economic and socio-cultural contexts. We have an opportunity to get this very right … or very wrong. Will we aid the global educational democratization or widen the gap between have and have-not, between know and know-not and between can and cannot?