Guillaume Chevillon
Professor, ESSEC Business School, Paris 

Pedagogy & Research: Economics, Forecasting, Statistics, AI & data analytics, Creative Technologies.
Currently holding the ESSEC Chair in Media & Digital.

Founding Academic Director:

ESSEC Metalab for Data, Technology & Society – since 2020, the school's center for developing Pedagogy & core/applied Research,  transforming corporations and shaping the public discussion on the societal impacts of the AI & Data revolution.
ESSEC | CentraleSupélec Master in Data Sciences & Business Analytics – since 1995, training 150-180 students from 30 nationalities every year to a unique blend of data science, AI, deep learning and their contemporary business uses.  Consistently ranked #1 in Europe & #3 worldwide by QS.

WELCOME TO MY HOMEPAGE. 

I am an Econometrician who works on Economics and Forecasting, and more recently on their interaction with AI. 

I am (full) Professor at ESSEC Business School, in the greater Paris area and codirector of the ESSEC Metalab for Data, Technology & Society that we founded in 2020. The Metalab fosters  academic research, develops pedagogical programs, federates a community of companies and interested individuals, and participates in the public discussion (see my Media & Texts page for information about my recent contributions).   I am also a member of the OECD network of AI experts and of the Executive Committee of the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics (SNDE), I am a former Head of the Department of Information Systems, Decision Sciences & Statistics at ESSEC (2020-22). 

At ESSEC, I am also the founding Academic Director, and have been in charge over 1995-2025 of the ESSEC | CentraleSupélec Master in Data Sciences & Business Analytics – we're proud of this program which uniquely blends very advanced courses and professional projects for about 180 students per year with very diverse backgrounds and representing about 30 nationalities. It is recognized as one of the most challenging and rewarding programs in Data Science or in Business Analytics (it has on average been ranked #1 in Europe, #3 worldwide by QS). 

More recently, I have been very interested in the manner in which AI and Creative Technologies impact our cognitive abilities. I have been running with Jeff Guess at Ecole des Arts de Cergy a program on AI & Creativity with guests artists in residence.  

On the Research side, as Economics cannot be a proper experimental science (contrary to Physics and Natural Sciences, economists cannot and will not conduct large scale experiments on economies), if we have any hope for it ever to become a proper "science" rather than a set of opinions, we need to be able to refute and reject wrong theories.  This is the purpose of econometricians:  we develop tools to judge economic theories by their empirical relevance. The lack of experimentation implies that we have to resort to historical data and see what laws and principles are permanent and hidden. This is in fact a form of data sciences developed specifically with social sciences in mind. 

In this context my interests have also been recently about the interplay between Data Sciences and Social Sciences since both are ultimately about understanding human behavior and how we can have a progressive modelling strategy, i.e. truly moving towards science.  My specific focus of interest lies in dynamic phenomena, their models and the principles of dependence over time generated by human or social forces, and of course forecasting! I mostly work on theory but have applied my work in macroeconomics, energy, finance and most recently climate change and cultural studies. 

I obtained an MPhil and a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, and a Master in Engineering from Ecole des Mines de Paris. I have been a visiting scholar or professor at, inter alia, Brown, Oxford, NYU, Keio, UNSW Sydney and the NY Federal Reserve. I regularly publish or am interviewed in mainstream media, please refer to the corresponding pages to read my contributions. 

News

March 2025

• After 10 years building and running the ESSEC|CentraleSupélec Master in Data Sciences & Business Analytics, I'm very pleased with the fantastic program we've created and the many cohorts of students that have passed through it. I have now resigned and have been replaced by my colleague Jeroen Rombouts who has joined the team! I will now focus on the ESSEC Metalab for Data, Technology & Society as well as the Media & Digital Chair.

• Numérique, la nouvelle frontière ? Relfets Magazine, 156, mars-avril 2025, pp. 46-7.

January 2025

• We are  in the process of revamping the Media & Digital Chair at ESSEC which I took responsibility for,  with a new Executive Director, Jean-Noël Tronc  – more to come soon!

• Intelligence artificielle : « Une nouvelle forme de créativité émerge, accessible à tous », Le Monde, 4 January 2025, with Julien Malaurent, without paywall here in French or in English.

December 2024

• Excited to present The Queer Algorithm  in  poster at NeurIPS 2024 workshop on Queer in AI on December 10. 

November 2024

• Happy to be invited to the 6th Aarhus Workshop in Econometrics on 28-29/11 to present my paper with Anurag Banerjee "A Quasi/Latent Method of Moment Estimator for Nonstationaty State-Space Models, with an Application to Explosive Random Coefficient Autoregressions"

• Sands of Self is published in Azimuts, n°58 "Utilisation de l'intelligence artificielle en art et en design", pp. 104-9 with Mounir Ayache & Jeff Guess. 

October 2024

• The project Sands of Self is presented October 10, 2024 – April 7, 2025 at the 101 Art Design Center in Fuzhou as part of Terrestrial Waves.
  We've started a new project this year with Jeff Guess, Nicolas Gourault and Elouan Le Bars. 

• How data & AI transform firms & organizations 4-day seminar with the onepoint group at ESSEC, 7-10 October 2024. 

September 2024

• The Master in Data Sciences & Business Analytics is yet again #1 in Europe, #3 worldwide in the 2025 QS ranking.

• Research Presentation: What Does it Take to Control Global Temperatures? A toolbox for estimating the impact of economic policies on climate, with Takamitsu Kurita (Kyoto Sangyo University)

  • NBER/NSF Time Series Conference, University of Pennsylvania

  • Workshop on “Energy Transition and Climate Change”, University of California Riverside

• Research Presentation: The Queer Algorithm,  School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, LA.

Academic year 2023/24:

• Research

  • Annual survey with Verian (ex Kantar Public) and Claranet on AI & Data jobs in large French groups. 

  • Many thanks to participants at my seminar at Keio University, Economics Department on April 23rd, for their lively questions on my paper What Does it Take to Control Global Temperatures? A toolbox for estimating the impact of economic policies on climate, with Takamitsu Kurita (Kyoto Sangyo University)  https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05818 (reviewed in an ESSEC Knowledge Special Edition. – also in French here)

  • ESSEC Foundation for the White Project Award I received on March 27 on AI & Creativity, aiming to work on a right-brain complement to some of my previous work.

  • New working paper: The Queer Algorithm where I draw on multidisciplinary research, with an emphasis on social sciences and economics, to study to what extent the tools of Artificial Intelligence and data analysis currently incorporate in their design the diversity of cognitive and physical human experiences in space and time. My aim to is to render AI efficient at mapping more desirable possible futures. 

  • Workshop on Uncertainty, Shocks & Macroeconomic Fluctuations that we organized at ESSEC with Frédérique Bec (CY Cergy Paris University) & Sophocles Mavroeidis (Oxford University) on March 9, 2024.

  • First issue of the Metalab Review that is devoted to contributions by IDEAS, the student think tank we've created. 

  • ESSEC-CYU-Warwick econometrics workshop at ESSEC.

• Press & Media

  • Three ways to optimise your business school’s AI-related offering, with Abdelmounaim Derraz and Julien Malaurent. Times Higher Education, 23 August 2024.

  • « 85% des métiers de 2030 n’existent pas encore » : vers quelles formations se tourner ? interview by Mathilde de Cessole in L'Express, 4 June 2024.

  • Numérique, à la recherche du Cloud Européen, interview by Nicolas Chalon in L'Hémicycle, No 516, June 2024, pp 124-7

  • Réussir la transformation numérique dépendra surtout de « la capacité des dirigeants d’entreprise à prendre les bonnes décisions pour ne pas se faire distancer » Le Monde, 10 June 2024, with Laure Salvaing (Managing Director, Verian Group). English version here. 

  • I'm grateful to L'Humanité for their invitation to participate in their debate on AI & jobs: « L’intelligence artificielle menace-t-elle l’emploi ?». L'Humanité, 23 April 2024 (paywall). 

  • Kudos to the organisers of the VOUS+AI KIF-Knowledge Immersive Forum at Grand Palais Immersif on April 2nd  –  I was happy to participate, it was a super interesting day. 

  • « L’IA impactera 80% des métiers et vous n’aurez peut-être pas encore choisi le vôtre !» Thotis Media (for Classes Prépa), 28 Feb

• « L'IA, une menace pour l'emploi en France? » interview by Charlotte Hill for Agence France Presse, 24 January 2024.

• • « Nous ne sommes pas voués à être remplacés par des machines, aussi “intelligentes” soient-elles », Le Monde, 15 December 2023 – with Julien Malaurent. English translation here (without paywall).

• • Comment s'adapter à la révolution de l'IA? Interview in L'Obs. 14 December 2023. Intelligence artificielle : « Pour concevoir une agence de sécurité de l’IA, il faut penser, et surtout prévoir, son impact sur les comportements humains », Le Monde, 17/18 Septembre 2023, published in print as "Comment sécuriser les algorithmes" as part of the IDEES report "Est-il possible de réguler l'IA". Thanks to Frédéric Martel for reviewing it in Soft Power on France Culture (17/9).

  • Navigating algorithm insights into our sexual orientation was published by Openly – Thomson Reuters Foundation

• ESSEC Pedagogy

  • The  It is a collective project in the framework of a joint course offered by Jeff Guess (École nationale supérieure d'arts Paris-Cergy) and myself at ESSEC to our students, 

  • The Master in Data Sciences & Business Analytics has regained its position as #1 in Europe, #3 worldwide in the 2024 QS ranking.

  • October: running an intense hackathon on Data & Generative AI for our PreMaster students with Nora Diep and onepoint (10-13/10)

  • Happy to create a new course between ESSEC & ENSAPC on AI & Creation with Jeff Guess & guest artist Mounir Ayache who proposed to create a video game using Artificial Intelligence in all aspects of production. 

    • Exhibition Sands of Self opened at Centre d'art Ygrec -ENSAPC  March 1st–April 27. 

    • A piece related to the exhibition Sands of Self was on display at POUSH as part of the Nord-Est show.

Previous year summaries here.