ifoHack 2023

For the first time, the ifo Institute is organizing its very own hackathon – the ifoHack 2023. Teams from different backgrounds ranging from economics and statistics to computer science, design, and engineering will develop prototypical solutions to economic and social problems using state-of-the-art technology, tools, and infrastructure. Documentation of work, collaboration, and live demos are not only requirements when being evaluated by an expert jury but are key for future research success.

The ifo Institute combines sharp economic reasoning and expert knowledge in empirical methods; using current advances in computational methods and open-source tools to leverage both yields enormous potential to address policy-oriented economic and social questions. For example, participants will build a predictive business climate model based on microdata provided by the ifo Institute and present its operating value via a web interface.

Our partners KfW Bank (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau) and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Aerospace Center) will also bring exciting challenges such as using Natural Language Processing for extracting sentiment from financial newspaper articles, predicting user behavior, or using spatial data for predicting real estate prices and will offer exclusive insights into their research activities.