PEX – Understanding Unemployment in the Era of Big Data.
This branch of research is supported by a funding grant from the Irish Research Council (IRC) under the New Horizons Interdisciplinary Research Project Award.
The primary aim of the research project “Understanding Unemployment in the Era of Big Data: Exploring how data-driven theory and algorithmic knowledge can support better policy and personal decision making” is to explore how emerging analytical methods and computational tools can improve the experience of unemployment. It is a future driven stream of the WUERC project, exploring concepts like the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and its potential consequences on future work and unemployment. Taking the recent deployment of the PEX algorithm (probability of exit from the live register) by the Irish Department of Social Protection (DSP) as the point of departure, the project aims to produce data-driven models of unemployment dynamics that incorporate conventional and emerging theory on the experience of unemployment. In this way, the project aspires contribute by: Improving, broadening and strengthening the deployment of algorthmic knowledge on unemployment in Ireland and beyond; contribute to the emerging sociological and organisaiton studies work on the social life of algorthimic knowledge; contribute to the nascent field of operational algorithms, by creating an up to date tool to capture the important individual characteristics that fall outside of the scope of the PEX algorithm while making the tool assessable to those at the centre of the model.
The research will expand the WUERC project by developing a broader national and international scope with an ultimate goal of participating in a European-wide Horizon 2020 research collaborative. More information on this project can be found in the PEX tab and throughout the blog postings.
WUERC 