CAS: centre for advanced studies

The JRC‘s Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) was created in 2016 to help improve and bridge the interface between science and policy in order to enhance the JRC‘s capacity to better inform and influence the regulatory frameworks needed to address the new and emerging societal challenges confronting the EU and our societies as a whole. By creating the conditions necessary for innovative and interdisciplinary research, as well as offering a creative and generative space in which ideas and knowledge in emerging thematic fields across different scientific and technological disciplines can thrive and flourish, CAS has become an incubator for formal inquiry, stimulating ideas and activities and providing the JRC with new insights, data projections and solutions for the increasingly complex medium and longterm challenges facing the EU, especially in the fields of demography, big data and digital transformation. Through the performance of advanced, cutting edge research, ranging from applied research to topics of a more academic character, all within a stimulating trans- and interdisciplinary environment, CAS allows external researchers and scientists to work together with the JRC to explore and exchange new ideas and knowledge on scientific research in emerging fields of strategic societal importance, which might otherwise fall outside the policy support activities undertaken by the JRC on behalf of the European Commission

Seismonomics: Listening to the heartbeat of the economy

Seismometers continuously record a wide range of ground vibrations that are not necessarily related to earthquake activity, but are rather caused by human activity such as industrial processes and traffic. We isolate the human-made imprints from a huge data set made of nearly 20 years of continuously recorded seismic data in Beijing, China, and construct a new daily indicator, the Vibration Index, to forecast regional industrial production. We find that our indicator closely tracks business cycle fluctuations particularly during economic crises. Our results provide policymakers with a new tool to monitor the economy at a highly granular level

Information Extraction From the GDELT Database to Analyse EU Sovereign Bond Markets

In this contribution we provide an overview of a currently on-going project related to the development of a methodology for building economic and financial indicators capturing investor’s emotions and topics popularity which are useful to analyse the sovereign bond markets of countries in the EU.These alternative indicators are obtained from the Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) database, which is a real-time, open-source, large-scale repository of global human society for open research which monitors worlds broadcast, print, and web news, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world’s media. After providing an overview of the method under development, some preliminary findings related to the use case of Italy are also given. The use case reveals initial good performance of our methodology for the forecasting of the Italian sovereign bond market using the information extracted from GDELT and a deep Long Short-Term Memory Network opportunely trained and validated with a rolling window approach to best accounting for non-linearities in the data

Centre for Advanced Studies – CAS

The JRC's Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) was created in 2016 to help improve and bridge the interface between science and policy in order to enhance the JRC's capacity to better inform and influence the regulatory frameworks needed to address the new and emerging societal challenges confronting the EU and our societies as a whole. By creating the conditions necessary for innovative and interdisciplinary research, as well as offering a creative and generative space in which ideas and knowledge in emerging thematic fields across different scientific and technological disciplines can thrive and flourish, CAS has become an incubator for formal inquiry, stimulating ideas and activities and providing the JRC with new insights, data projections and solutions for the increasingly complex medium and longterm challenges facing the EU, especially in the fields of demography, big data and digital transformation. Through the performance of advanced, cutting edge research, ranging from applied research to topics of a more academic character, all within a stimulating trans- and interdisciplinary environment, CAS allows external researchers and scientists to work together with the JRC to explore and exchange new ideas and knowledge on scientific research in emerging fields of strategic societal importance, which might otherwise fall outside the policy support activities undertaken by the JRC on behalf of the European Commission. Projects are typically led by a senior scientist with an established reputation in the research area and have a limited duration of a maximum of three years, after which they may be integrated into the JRC‘s core research activities