The Information Metamorphosis in Economics
Prof. dr. ir. Uzay Kaymak – Professor in Intelligence and Computations in Economics at Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, has delivered his inaugural address entitled The Information Metamorphosis in Economics on Friday 6 March.
His research interests are fuzzy decision making, distributed optimization in logistics and intelligent agents for financial modeling.
Kaymak has been appointed endowed professor as of 1 September, 2008, through the Vereniging Trustfonds EUR. The objective of the Trust¬fonds is promoting growth and flourishing of Erasmus University Rotterdam.
About Uzay Kaymak
Uzay Kaymak holds a Chartered Designer degree in Information Technology and obtained in 1998 his Ph.D. from Delft University of Technology with a thesis entitled ‘Fuzzy Decision Making with Control Applications’. He started working as a Reservoir Engineer at Shell E&P, Technology Applications and Research. In 2000, he switched to the Erasmus School of Economics, to work successively as assistant and associate professor in the field of Economics & Informatics.
He is a member of the editorial board of various scientific journals and has participated in several European Networks of Excellence on intelligent systems. Uzay is a popular teacher, which resulted in a nomination for the Teacher of the Year award of the Faculty in 2003/2004.
Abstract
Life in the 21st century is perhaps best characterized by the information trace we leave behind us. Not only do we have access to ever larger amounts of information than we have had before, but we can also monitor and observe more processes than ever before, capturing large quantities of data and information. Most of our current economics activities revolve around generating, managing, processing and exploiting this information. The ubiquitous availability of information brings new challenges to the business and the society. In this inaugural address, we consider some of these challenges and discuss how the interaction between economics and other disciplines can provide new approaches to address the new challenges. In particular, we concentrate on the interaction between economics and computer science, and argue that it can contribute to increase the global impact of economics and business research in the Netherlands.
