BEng & MEng Thesis on Data Markets

Get introduced in the data economy! Calling all students interested in data markets! I just published offers for students at Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicación interested in working with us to observe the evolution of data markets as part of their Bachelor or Master Thesis. You can easily find them in the website of the Signals Systems and Radiocommunications (SSR) Department.

Spurred by the widespread adoption of AI / ML, ‘data’ is becoming a key production factor, comparable in importance to capital, land, or labour in an increasingly digital economy. In spite of an ever-growing demand for third-party data in the B2B market, firms are generally reluctant to share their information. This is due to the unique characteristics of ‘data’ as an economic good (a freely replicable, nondepletable asset holding a highly combinatorial and context-specific value). As a result, most of those valuable assets still remain unexploited in corporate silos nowadays.

However, an ecosystem of companies already trade data over the Internet [1]. Recent studies revealed more than 2k data providers offering data products in commercial data marketplaces [2]. Some analysts have estimated the potential value of the data economy at $ 2.5 trillion globally by 2025 [3, 4], and the development of healthy data markets would be key to making the most of AI/ML, which is expected to reach a market of $ 15-20 trillion in 2030 [5, 6]. Not surprisingly, unlocking the value of data has become a central policy of the European Union, which also estimated the size of the data economy at 827C billion for the EU27 in the same period. Within the scope of the European Data Strategy, the European Commission is also steering relevant initiatives aimed at identifying relevant cross-industry use cases involving different verticals and at enabling sovereign data exchanges to realise them.

In this context, I am offering the possibility to work on two Bachelor Thesis and a Master Thesis from February 2025 intended to create tools to better observe the evolution of data markets, and answer questions such as what companies are selling data, which kind of data, how do they deliver their data or data-driven services and at what price, among others. The three projects are the following:

1. **Design and implementation of a tool to monitor data markets**, which aims to create a scraping tool to crawl and download information about data assets being offered in commercial data marketplaces, structure, and store it in a central repository.
2. **Information retrieval from data products in commercial data marketplaces**, which aims to use NLP models and techniques, including LLMs, to create a tool to structure the information stemming from the description of data products in commercial data marketplaces.
3. **Design, optimization and implementation of data pricing models**, which aims to design, build and optimize prediction models that improve the SOTA to estimate the value of a data product based on already-available information about data products in the market.

[1] S. Andrés Azcoitia and N. Laoutaris, A Survey of Data Marketplaces and Their Business Models. ACM SIGMOD Record, 51(3), (Sep 2022), ACM, New York, NY, USA.

[2] S. Andrés Azcoitia, Costas Iordanou, and N. Laoutaris. Measuring the Price of Data in Commercial Data Marketplaces. First ACM Data Economy Workshop at CoNEXT’22 (2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.

[3] N. Henke, J. Bughin, M. Chui, J. Manyika, T. Saleh, B. Wiseman and G. Sethupathy. The Age of analytics: Competing in a data-driven world. McKinsey Global Institute. Dec. 2016.

[4] G. Micheletti; N, Raczko, C. Moise; D. Osimo, and G. Cattaneo. European DATA Market Study 2021–2023. IDC & The Lisbon Council. May 2023.

[5] PWC Consulting. Sizing the prize What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalise? 2017.

[6] J. Bughin, J. Seong, J. Manyika, M. Chui, and R. Joshi. Notes from the AI frontier: Modeling the impact of AI on the world economy. McKinsey Global Institute. 2018.