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FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized, two-day conference celebrating free and open-source software development. The conference has a geographic focus on European open source ecosystems and projects. FOSDEM is primarily aimed at developers, across the entire range of software and aims to enable them to meet and discuss the status of projects.

Motivation and Objective

Representing a Matrix as a JSON object is a task that appears in many modern data science contexts, in particular when one wants to exchange matrix data online in a portable manner. There is no universally agreed way to achieve this task and various options are available depending on the matrix data characteristics and the programming tools and computational environment one has available.

Equinox is an open source platform that supports the holistic risk management and reporting of major sustainable finance projects (the financing of projects with material physical footprint) such as project finance.

Equinox aims to integrate in the database a number reference databases that facilitate tasks of sustainable portfolio management. In the current focus such reference material concerns the emissions factors for various processes and activities. In the latest (Solstice Day!) update of the Equinox Project we discuss the integration of reference data an in particular greenhouse gas emissions factors as catalogued in the IPCC Emissions Factors database (EFDB).

The frontpage graphic is adapted from Steffen et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet”. Science (2015). The Planetary Boundaries concept was proposed in 2009 by this group of Earth system and environmental scientists. The group suggested that finding a “safe operating space for humanity” is a precondition for sustainable development. The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions since the Industrial Revolution have become the main driver of global environmental change.

Interest in Sustainable Finance is growing

What is “Sustainable Finance”? A working definition is: A financial system that takes into account environmental, social and governance considerations to ensure long term sustainability of the human economy.

You can imagine that with a scope and ambition that sweeping, the devil hidden in the details will be of gargantuan size. The definitions of so-called ESG factors, the incorporation of sustainability into business strategies, the governance, policies and risk management applicable to ESG Risks, the ESG and climate-related disclosures and the development of “green” financial products are all topics that combine urgency, complexity and potentially dramatic impact.

Bending the Curve - Sustainability Conceptualized as a One Dimensional Exercise

The opening of the Global Scenario Group report “Bending the Curve: Toward Global Sustainability” by Paul Raskin, Gilberto Gallopin, Pablo Gutman, Al Hammond and Rob Swart, published in 1998 goes as follows:

The GSOC 2021 collaboration between Open Risk and the Hydra Ecosystem - Project Wrap-Up

Google Summer of Code 2021 came and went amid the still ongoing worldwide pandemic experience. Open Risk was happy to join forces with the Hydra Ecosystem in exploring a proof-of-concept for next generation API’s using Hydra.

Offline versus Online

In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity over digital networks, and offline indicates a disconnected state. Both states have many sub-divisions. For example the type online access varies enormously according to the bandwidth and latency of connections. Similarly, people may be “offline” as not having network access or completely unplugged, as in not having access or using any electronic device.

According to wikipedia Conflation is the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, opinions, etc., into one, often in error. This may lead to misunderstandings, as the fusion of distinct subjects might obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts. Why does conflation happen in the first place? There are several possible factors which in some contexts may be co-existing and overlapping:

Some form of Informal Risk Management has been practiced by individuals since time immemorial as it is essential for survival, both at the individual and group level. This is the domain of intuitive decision-making, assessing situations on the spot and taking immediate action to avoid obvious risks. It is also the domain of folk wisdom, traditional knowledge and insights passed down orally through generations, expressed in proverbs, stories, and cultural practices (think e.g., Don’t put all your eggs in one basket or, There is never only one cockroach and the long list of Risk Management One-Liners ). This know-how reflects the collective experiences and beliefs of communities, providing guidance on how to successfully handle adverse scenarios.

A GSOC 2021 summer project collaboration between Open Risk and the Hydra Ecosystem

Summer is underway and for the Google Summer of Code 2021 season Open Risk is happy to join forces with the Hydra Ecosystem. The project aims to guide students to build a hypermedia enabled REST service around standardized credit portfolio data. More specifically the project will build a REST service as backend for a hypothetical banking entity that collects and disseminates credit portfolio data conforming to an established public standard (the EBA NPL templates, see below).

Concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in the context of economic networks

In this second Open Risk White Paper on Connecting the Dots we examine measures of concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in the context of economic systems represented as network (graph) structures. We adopt a stylized description of economies as property graphs and illustrate how relevant concepts can represent in this language. We explore in some detail data types representing economic network data and their statistical nature which is critical in their use in concentration analysis. We proceed to recast various known indexes drawn from distinct disciplines in a unified computational context.

Course Objective

Graphs (and the related concept of Networks) have emerged from a relative mathematical and physics niches to become mainstream models for describing and interpreting various phenomena. The objective of the course is to review various important graph types as they are increasingly explored in data science and sketch their linkages and relationships (a graph of graphs!).

Motivation

Equinox is an open source platform that supports holistic risk management and reporting of Sustainable Finance (Sustainable Portfolio Management). The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards from EBA, PCAF and Equator Principles to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios, in particular of project finance investments.

Semantic Web Technologies integrate naturally with the worlds of open data science and open source machine learning, empowering better control and management of the risks and opportunities that come with increased digitization and model use

The ongoing and accelerating digitisation of many aspects of social and economic life means the proliferation of data driven/data intermediated decisions and the reliance on quantitative models of various sorts (going under various hashtags such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science etc.).

Data Types are a fundamental building block of data science

Data science is about data, but data are not simple and tame beasts. They have character and attitude, which can cause a lot of friction between them and the data scientist. There is a lot of sweat and tears involved when confronting data, but data scientists can do worse than know how to handle in particular Data Type quirks. Namely, a good fraction of data science involves not modelling data, not transforming data, not even cleaning data but simply goading data around the right containers, providing them with the right stage that fits their character. Getting the data type wrong is many a source of both spectacular bugs and hidden, insidious application errors.

Celebrating Pi Day 2021

Pi Day is celebrated every year on March 14th. The reason of course is that the day is denoted in some calendars as (3/14), which evokes of 3.14, the first three digits of “π”. A thin excuse maybe but sufficient for the true believers to join along! The occasion represents an annual opportunity for mathematics and science enthusiasts to recite the infinite charms of Pi, including its irrationality, to talk to friends and family about math and its uses, and, when everything else fails, simply eat pie.

This CrashCourse is an introduction to semantic data using Python.

Course Content

It covers the following topics:

• We learn to work with RDF graphs using rdflib
• We explore the owlready package and OWL ontologies
• We look into json-ld serialization of RDF/OWL data
• We try data validation using pySHACL
• We use throughout a realistic data set based on the Credit Ratings Ontology

What is the future of stress testing?

To speculate on the future of Stress Testing we need first a basic definition what stress testing is. Broadly speaking, the goal of Stress Testing is to assess how a system would behave under adverse conditions that - while not the most likely outcome with the knowledge of today - are within the realm of the plausible.

Visualizing a year in lockdowns and restricted mobility

As we move into February 2021 the world will be experiencing almost a year under pandemic conditions. This has markedly changed behavioral patterns of human mobility across the board. One major difference with previous pandemics is that through the use of a variety of digital technologies and new data collection channels we know have an unprecedented view of those changing mobility patterns.