It's all about networking

The Workshop on Financial Networks and Risk Assessment took place at Fields this week as part of the Mitacs International Focus Period on Advances in Network Analysis and its Applications, following the Industrial-Academic Forum on Systemic Stability and Liquidity at the beginning of the week.
 
Back in 2009, when the cool thing was to hold summits, Mitacs organized a very stimulating event on systemic risk. It was at that point that Michael Lynch and I had the idea of organizing a joint event for both the upcoming Mitacs Focus period and Fields thematic program.

Our idea was to mimic the format for the summit itself, with concentrated research talks by academics and practitioners sparking off the discussion during the first two days in the Forum, followed by a more relaxed set of mini-courses, lectures and problem solving sessions during the three days workshop. I think we managed to convey the idea to the organizing committees of the two activities, who in turn did a great job in producing the end result we saw this week. Talk about the power of networking !