An Evening with Prof César A. Hidalgo in Cambridge

Join physicist, professor, and author César A. Hidalgo as he discusses his new book The Infinite Alphabet – a brilliant book which unravels the laws describing the growth and diffusion of knowledge by taking you from a failed attempt to build a city of knowledge in Ecuador to the growth of China’s innovation economy.

César A. Hidalgo, a world-renowned scholar for his work on economic complexity, will walk you through the “three laws” and the many principles that govern how knowledge grows, moves, and decays. By the end of this journey, you will understand why knowledge grows exponentially in the electronics industry and what mechanisms govern its diffusion across geographic borders, social networks, and professional boundaries.

César A. Hidalgo is a physicist, professor, and author known for pioneering work in economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. For nine years he led MIT’s Collective Learning Group before moving to France to found the Center for Collective Learning (CCL), an international research laboratory with offices at the Toulouse School of Economics and Corvinus University of Budapest.
Author of Why Information Grows (Allen Lane, 2015) and co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity and How Humans Judge Machines (MIT, 2014, 2021), he was the sole recipient of the 2018 Lagrange Prize recognizing excellence and innovation in the study of complex systems. Hidalgo is the author of more than sixty peer-reviewed publications that have been cited by tens of thousands of studies. His TED talk on augmented democracy has been viewed over two million times.

Dame Diane Coyle is Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, and the Research Director at the Bennett School of Public Policy. Her latest book is The Measure of Progress: Counting what really matters. Diane's research focuses on productivity, the digital economy and AI policy, and economic measurement. She has been writing about the effects of digital technologies since her first book, The Weightless World, in 1997. The underlying motivation for all her work is the question: what does it mean for the economy to improve, and who benefits? Diane is currently a member of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy Council, the New Towns Taskforce, and advises the Competition and Markets Authority.

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