about me

I enjoy writing. I'll write to you in English, Spanish, Polish, Italian or Sicilian; or, if you prefer, I'll write in Perl, Python, R, SQL or HTML.

Being an economist, I wrote the economics notes at doviak.net and the research presented here. And I've been working with Arba Sicula to develop a neural machine translator for the Sicilian language.

Try our Tradutturi Sicilianu at Napizia. It's "econometrics with words."

Economics helps us understand how the incentives that we face influence the decisions that we make. Economics also provides a good toolkit for measuring those incentives and the effects of our decisions.

But economic theory provides a better description of the decisions that people should make than it does of the decisions that people really do make. People do not change their minds when they are presented with new information. Instead they find a new rationale for the decisions that they already made.

Nonetheless, economics is useful because it helps us measure the incentives that we face and the effects of our decisions. And its measurement toolkit can also be adapted for use in other fields. Economics helped me develop a neural machine translator.

Today, we've got enormous datasets filled with words, thoughts and emotions, so researchers have developed models statistical methods to understand that linguistic data. I'm developing some of those methods at Napizia. Come visit me there or send me an email.

Thanks for visiting wdowiak.me!