Didier Sornette is professor of Entrepreneurial Risks in the department of Management, Technology and Economics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), a professor of finance at the Swiss Finance Institute, and is associate member of the department of Physics and of the department of Earth Sciences at ETH Zurich. He is a founding member of the Risk Center at ETH Zurich since June 2011. He is a PI at the Future Resilient Center a the National University of Singapore and is a specially appointed professor of Tokyo Institute of Technology since Nov. 2016 in the new Institute of Innovative Research.

Professor Sornette’s research is based on the hypothesis that most extreme risks (and gains) are ‘dragon-kings’, that is, they almost always result from maturations and drifts towards a critical instability, with measurable precursors either at the technical and/or socio-economic levels. He uses rigorous data-driven mathematical statistical analysis 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 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) towards the diagnostic of systemic instabilities.

In 2008, he launched the Financial Crisis Observatory to test the hypothesis that financial bubbles can be diagnosed in real-time and their termination can be predicted probabilistically. The Financial Crisis Observatory now delivers daily an exhaustive survey of +25k assets worldwide and a summary cockpit of the main positive and negative bubbles developing in all asset classes. Since 2012, him and his group have developed InnovWiki, 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.