Meet a professor - Gaétan de Rassenfosse

Can you describe yourself in a few words?

I was born and bred in Brussels, Belgium, 35 years ago. I studied “business engineering” at the Solvay Business School, part of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). I then did a PhD in Economics, also at the ULB, during which I specialized in Economics of Innovation. While I did spend some time abroad during my studies (in Canada, France and Germany), I wanted to move away from Belgium for my postdoc. That’s why I went to the University of Melbourne for about four years. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Australian way of life, I also missed Europe and wanted to get closer to where research was happening (and to family). I am very happy with my move to EPFL.

You’ve been at EPFL for almost 4 years now, how has your vision of the institution evolved?

My vision has remained the same. I keep being impressed by the quality of the faculty and students and by the research conditions that the institution offers. I am also pleased with the collegial atmosphere at the CDM and by the positive attitude of colleagues, both admin and faculty. I am very excited by the prospect of CDM offering a bachelor in business engineering. Although there is nothing concrete yet, this would be a pertinent addition to our offering. Different skillsets are required for students to excel at both engineering-related subjects and business-related subjects (including, e.g., finance, strategy, business analytics, law, etc.), which can be a real challenge. Students with such a complete profile and a strong technical background will be well equipped to have a profound impact on society.

You define yourself as a computational social scientist. What does that mean?

Economics, which is one discipline of social sciences, is on the verge of a revolution. The discipline experienced a strong push forward, beginning about 70 years ago, when computers started to be used in academic departments for performing regression analyses and new regression methods started being developed. Today, computing power and methods (I am thinking of parallel computing and advances in data sciences) are such that we can analyse a larger quantity of data in a more sophisticated way, which is the role of a computational social scientist. Traditional economics departments are often not adequately equipped to train students in this area and very few professors understand the associated tools. The CDM, which sits in a school with a strong computational background, is ideally placed to contribute to this revolution. For my part, I seek to train my PhD students with the best available “classical” training in Economics (the Gerzensee graduate course), and I push them to rely heavily on data science for their research.

What is your flagship research project and why is it important?

The field of Economics of Innovation faces one recurring challenge: it is difficult to observe (and hence to measure) innovation due to its intangible nature. Since the 1980s, we have been using patent data as one directly observable measure of innovation. But this yardstick has many limits. One of them is that it remains at least one step away from the market. This limitation matters because without a link between inventions/patents and the market, it is difficult to study the impact of innovation on a range of market outcomes that economists typically care about. In one of my research projects, we crawl the web and process selected webpages to identify, in a novel way, the link between patents and commercial products. This is a major data science effort that involves the processing of big data, the implementation of several (semi-)supervised classifiers as well as natural language processing. Once completed, this project will open the way to a broad range of studies. I would like to thank SCITAS for their involvement in the project, as well as Profs. Aberer and Chappelier for their joint supervision of students’ projects and advice on some technical aspects. More information on the project at http://www.iproduct.io.

Tell us about the atmosphere in your chair with 6 researchers? How do you maintain a good atmosphere?

It is important to select people with the right mindset in the first place. That’s why I involve all my team members when recruiting someone new. As for group activities, the CEMI chair of Dominique Foray and my chair organize an annual research retreat with current and former members. This event is important to strengthen the bond within my own group, but also across groups. My lab also sometimes organizes so-called “Innovation lunches” where team members present their own or someone else’s paper or teach us some new techniques. On an individual level, I try to be as responsive as possible and to help to the best of my ability.

Can you describe your typical day during the semester and during semester break?

My ideal day is very disciplined: I wake up early, start early to work, do sport at lunchtime, work kind of late, go to bed early and eat healthily. I tend to get closer to this ideal during my non-teaching semester and to somewhat drift away from it during the teaching semester. Regardless of the time of year, I am always fighting to keep on top of my never-ending to-do list. I push my research as much as possible during semester breaks but I also make a point of enjoying what the EPFL location has to offer: the lake in the summer and the mountains in the winter. Otherwise, I also like to catch up with friends and family during the breaks by popping back to Brussels.

Outside of research, do you have another passion or interest?

The question is well phrased. Indeed, research is a passion! I like doing sport (especially running, swimming and snowboarding) and I enjoy good food (well, I guess one compensates for the other…). But nothing pleases me more than spending an hour reading a comic book with nothing else in mind. I also enjoy traveling the world.