Data, Dollars, and Algorithms: The Computational Economy 

You buy lunch from a food truck and pay by waving your cell phone; before you’ve finished your sandwich, the transaction is posted to your bank account. This is an example of how computer technology lubricates the economy. At a deeper level, computation is also essential to many aspects of financial engineering—portfolio selection, risk management, high-speed trading, the design of new market mechanisms such as online auctions, and even algorithms for the donation and exchange of human organs. With BitCoin, money itself has become a computational object. And yet there remain pitfalls in economic life that algorithmic methods have so far failed to overcome. We still struggle to forecast and control macroeconomic cycles of boom and bust and to deal with inequities of wealth distribution. Merely measuring the state of the economy (productivity, employment, inflation) is slow and imprecise. Can abundant data and computational power play a role in improving this situation?

This year's IACS symposium on the Future of Computation in Science and Engineering will  explore how access to copious streams of data and powerful computing resources are transforming our understanding of economic activity—and how those same tools are changing the nature of the economy itself.