Piero Cipollone: Data science in central banking

Welcome address by Mr Piero Cipollone, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, at the virtual conference jointly organized by the Bank of Italy and the Irving Fischer Committee of the Bank for International Settlements, Rome, 19 October 2021.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am delighted to open this virtual conference on Data Science in Central Banking, jointly organized by Banca d'Italia and the Irving Fischer Committee of the Bank for International Settlements. I would like to welcome all the participants joining us today from some sixty countries.

1. Introduction

For the last two years, we have lived through a dramatic period as the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe. Never before as in these dark days has Data Science in the form of big data and machine learning (ML) algorithms proved so helpful in the war against Coronavirus. The lack of biological knowledge on this virus has spurred the data science community to step up and contribute to the fight against COVID-19. Scientists from many different disciplines and public organizations have acknowledged the importance of data analytics by open sourcing the virus genome and other datasets in the hope of a swift data-driven solution.

In this four-day conference we will endeavour to share among institutions and academia the newest and most interesting applications of Data Science and machine learning to sharpen our analytical capacity to cope with new and rapidly evolving economic equilibria.

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