Didier Sornette - Biography#

Didier Sornette is Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH Zurich since 2006, also a professor of the Swiss Finance Institute, special professor at the Institute of Innovative Research of Tokyo Tech and, since Sept. 2019 dean of the Institute of Risk Analysis, Prediction and Management, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China. In 2008, he founded the Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO), a scientific platform aimed at testing and quantifying rigorously, in a systematic way and on a large scale the hypothesis that financial markets exhibit a degree of inefficiency and a potential for predictability, especially during regimes when bubbles develop. The FCO enjoys a significant visibility among financial investors and professionals (http://www.er.ethz.ch/financial-crisis-observatory.html). Since 2012, his group have developed xYotta, an original collaborating platform where users can openly collaborate and contribute to various ideas/projects, combined with a prediction market to facilitate quality assessment of various ideas/projects based on a wisdom of the crowd approach, and empowered by a tools repository and data visualisation softwares (https://xyotta.com).

In his research, Didier Sornette uses rigorous data-driven mathematical statistical analyses combined with nonlinear multi-variable dynamical models including positive and negative feedbacks to study the predictability and control of crises and extreme events in complex systems, with applications to all domains of science and practice, including financial bubbles and crashes, earthquake physics and geophysics, the dynamics of success on social networks and the complex system approach to medicine (immune system, epilepsy and so on). A significant part of Prof. D. Sornette's research is based on the hypothesis that most extreme risks (and gains) are "dragon-kings", a term that he introduced to refer to outlying events resulting from specific generating mechanisms and with a degree of predictability. He conjecturse that dragon-kings almost always result from maturations and drifts towards a critical instability, with measurable precursors either at the technical and/or socio-economic levels.

He is the author 650+ research papers, two single authored monographs and 9 co-authored books. During his career, as of December 2019, he has led 36 students to complete their PhD as well as about 120 master theses under his supervision and he has guided 38 post-docs associated with his group.