Abe de Jong and Herman de Jong receive grant for ICT Innovation Project

Professor of Corporate Finance Abe de Jong and Professor of Economic History Herman de Jong have received a grant of 160,000 euro from the ICT Innovation Fund of the University of Groningen for a project titled ‘Digitization of printed registries to structured data’ .

The project aims to deliver a machine learning-powered online platform to extract structured information from scanned source material. The tool will be able to handle data published as printed registries, e.g. securities, trade statistics, population and production censuses, patent data etc. to enable research on such data. These sources can easily cover tens of thousands of pages. Currently, scanned or digitized versions may be obtained using existing OCR tools. But they often give scanned information as unstructured text or as paragraphs ill-suited for interpretation in the form of tables or statistics. The proposed tool will instead produce output as ordered spreadsheet data of ready-to-use for research. The project will be developed together with colleagues from UG’s Centre for Information Technology (CIT).  

Other collaborations

Abe de Jong and Herman de Jong are both professor at the Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance of the Faculty of Economics and Business. Apart from this new project, Abe and Herman are currently working on two other research projects together, one focused on creating financial metadata for economics, finance, and economic history in the Netherlands, the other focused on the Amsterdam exchange, investor behaviour, and Dutch economic growth between 1870-1940.

Questions? Please contact Abe de Jong or Herman de Jong.