Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Computer Science Research & Economic Crisis

Others have asked me and I have asked myself: how can Computer Science research help in this Economic crisis? The crisis is serious and let us assume our economic landscape, for a long time, will be quite different from what we have seen in the past. Perhaps our research can help realize a more robust economic system in the future. What are potential research problems that arise? (for ex: can secure computation work help verify pieces of data? can optimization methods help estimate the value of the underlying securities better? is there a new predictive theory of market dynamics? will a giant database help?) Ideas welcome. (Some discussion of how Science can help, here. The Economists are probably searching their souls).

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hmmm....Computer Science research what (partially) caused the economic crisis in the first place. The notion that you can quantify risk and trade based on it (example, algorithmic trading) is a misapplication of mathematics and computer science and was a root cause of the meltdown.

Misapplication of math occurs everywhere in computer science academic research (modeling internet traffic for instance). But seldom gets called out since it can't (and didn't) bring the world down.

SRK

3:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

True, we need events to call out misapplications. I'd however say the current events called out the weaknesses in modeling (economists), its application (untamed financial officers) and human factors lot more than they called out CS research.
-- metoo.

6:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree. It's really hard to find the best solution for economic crisis nowadays. And maybe yeah, with the help of computer science research, slowly financial analysts may find ways to cope up with the crisis or even overcome such problem. I do hope the best security issues and other related applications will be improved because it can definitely help a lot.

7:24 AM  
Blogger codingplayground said...

old recipe: create news start-ups .

12:47 PM  

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