Didier Sornette Keynote Speaker

Prof. Dr. Didier Sornette, Professor of Entrepreneurial Risks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), is an expert in exploring data patterns to help predict crises and extreme events in complex systems, like global financial crises, with particular applications to risk assessment in economics and technology.

Didier is Director of the Financial Crisis Observatory, a project to test the hypothesis that markets can be predictable, especially during bubbles. He has introduced the concept of Dragon-Kings, an extension of the king effect, a theory to predict crises such as economic bubbles, social disruptions, engineering failures, epileptic seizures and more. In 2004, he used Amazon.com sales data to create a mathematical model for predicting best-seller potential based on very early sales results.

In 2019, Dr. Sornette founded the Institute of Risk Analysis, Prediction and Management, at the Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Southern University of Science and Technology.

From April 2019 until January 2023, Dr Sornette worked as an advisor to the global earthquake forecasting system, RichterX, the first fully operational real-time predictive earthquake system.

Didier is an elected Member of Academia Europaea (elected as a full member “class of August 2020”) and Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (Schweizerische Akademie der Technischen Wissenschaften, SATW), as of November 2019. In 2013, Didier was elected to the rank of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Fellow for “scientifically or socially distinguished efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications”.

He has co-authored 11 books, including ‘Critical Risks of Different Economic Sectors’ (2020), ‘New Ways and Needs for Exploiting Nuclear Energy’ (2018) and ‘Man-made catastrophes and risk information concealment’ (2015). He also has 800 publications in international journals with reviews.