Selected Publications
Selected works in my focus areas. See also ResearchGate or Google Scholar.
Risk Management
Strategic Foresight
Technology Policy
The annual Global Risks Report is the best-known report of the World Economic Forum. It helps to frame discussions in Davos, and is well known to risk professionals globally.
As a co-author and the designer and administrator of the underlying Global Risks Perception Survey I have had a unique insight into the report process, the evolution of elite risk perception patterns since 2006, and helped to update the risks list.
This report provides an introduction to strategic foresight and highlights where to find more information on specific methods. It offers roughly the same information as an executive course.
The report is inter alia part of the internal training library of INTERPOL. Here you can find a short presentation given to the OECD High-Level Risk Forum on it.
This report is a contribution to the discussion around technology and geopolitical fragmentation or bifurcation with a specific focus on Internet standards and architectures. It also provides a fairly accessible introduction to how the Internet works.
The report has inter alia been presented to the Policy Network on Internet Fragmentation of the Internet Governance Forum and the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Here you can find a brief interview on it.
I was happy to contribute to the first ever UN report dedicated to the topic of existential risk as a co-author.
My contributions specifically highlighted both the relevance of outlier events for risk management as well as specific challenges related to better integrating global catastrophic and existential risks into existing disaster risk management structures.
Here is a 1 min social media video.
In this text for the swissfuture magazine I highlight the problem of incoherent time horizons across issue areas, which lies at the heart of a lot of confusions about the future.
Note that I have used an exploratory AI analogy to frame it for the topic of this magazine issue, but the central argument is of general nature.
My master’s thesis was an eternity ago in AI time and the first analysis of analogies in the AI discourse. Back then I expected the “analogy phase” of the AI discourse to be over within a few years. I was wrong.
The prominence of analogies in the AI discourse has been persistent – if not increasing – and reflective use remains the exception. Hence, in 2024 one of my projects is to provide an accessible and systemic analysis on this topic.
This is a comparative study which looks at the assessment of five cross-border risks of nine European countries and Swiss Re.
If you look at the discussion section, you will find a number conceptual challenges that are relevant to think more rigorously about national risk assessments in general.
Here you can find a blog by the authors of a similar paper in Risk Analysis.
An example of applied foresight. This work was commissioned by the Federal Office for Civil Protection in support of the Swiss National Risk Assessment 2020.
This report argues for a scientific panel on AI (“IPCC for AI”) that should take a systems-wide view and that speed, veto power, and stakeholder representation are key dimensions where a panel on AI might look different from a panel on climate change.
We launched this paper in autumn 2019 in Geneva at an event with Amandeep Gill. Nearly five years later, international discussions around an “IPCC for AI” are gaining momentum (see eg here).