Projects

Digital Advice with Artificial Intelligence in the Context of Smallholder Farming in the Global South

True Cost of Food

We believe that one solution for transitioning towards more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive food systems is the implementation of the true cost of food from farm to fork, i.e. environmental, social, and health externalities being accounted for in the cost of food. Several (scientific, business and policy) attempts have been proposed, yet they either focus on carbon emissions or waste footprint, the social or the health and nutrition aspects.

Shaping the future of mobility

Urgent environmental challenges as well as the sharing economy have spurred the recent emergence of new business models related to shared mobility. The associated innovative transportation paradigms require a reduction of vehicle fleets as well as an optimization of travel times in order to pave the way towards sustainable mobility. Yet, sustainable mobility sharing solutions do not only require considering the environmental impact, but also have to be viable for firms and their customers. Only meeting the needs of all stakeholders allows for a large-scale implementation of such disruptive transportation concepts and hence yields a significant impact on the future of our society.

Toward Interpretable Machine Learning

Many of today’s decision-making processes are increasingly being made by computer-based systems: from whether a company receives a loan, to whether an individual’s parole is granted. However, modern machine learning techniques, including deep learning, focus solely on predictive accuracy and completely disregard the topic of interpretability. This shortcoming has significantly curtailed the adoption of state-of-art machine learning techniques in many industries, including healthcare, finance, insurance and law, in which regulations and business practice require transparent, trustful and auditable decision support systems.

Redesigning the pharmaceutical R&D landscape for the post-COVID-19 economy

Assessing the distribution of research efforts among small companies, large companies and universities can provide important – and urgent – insights into the design of policies to encourage and support pharmaceutical innovation to combat COVID-19 and other diseases.

Systemic Risks and Sustainability

In an increasingly interconnected world, our planet as well as human community are facing systemic events that occur very infrequently but whose impacts may be catastrophic on society at large. We can mention climate change and financial crises as typical examples.