Diversity

COST FinAI policies are build on four main pillars.

COST Excellence and Inclusiveness

The two pillars of COST excellence and inclusiveness are:

• Strengthening the excellence through the creation of cross-border networking of researchers
• Promoting geographical, age and gender balance throughout its activities and operations

Those will be addressed as follows: In our COST Action proposal, 50% of the participating countries are Inclusiveness Target Countries. Indeed, we have all almost all ITC on board. All of our COST activities are focused on cross-border collaboration, networking and dissemination of results across borders. 50% of the participating countries are ITC.

Geographical, age and gender balance will be addressed as follows:

• All activities are monitored and prioritized based on wide geographical inclusion and distribution across Europe
• Our networking tools will reserve at least 50% of the funds for Early Career Investigators.
• Gender balance is one of our goals and we will actively promote female participants in all our activities. Preferences, given same qualifications, will be given to female researchers. We actively aim to increase our female participation to 50% throughout the Action.

Participation of non-COST Countries and Specific Organisations

During the proposal phase, we have focused on including COST countries, where we now have almost all of the COST countries included in our network. We have five near-neighbouring countries and five international partners involved, among them the top finance centers globally. One of the first goals of the Action will be to target additional non-COST countries and include them in our network, within the Rules for Participation of Non-COST countries and Specific Organisations and the COST Vademecum. To include specific organisations, we will draw on the network of our proposers, who themselves are in contact with a substantial number of them.

Collaborations between different stakeholders

One of the main objectives of our Action is to enable fruitful collaborations between researchers, engineers, scholars and other stakeholders and business by providing a natural platform for them to meet and build mutual trust. For details, we refer to the technical annex of the proposal.

Impact of research in the industrial sector

One of our goals is to increase the impact of our research in the industrial sector. We will achieve that by promoting the use and development of new technologies in the area of Fintech and Artificial Intelligence. Throughout the research phase, we will actively work together with the Finance industry (this is already needed given the topic of our Action proposal). Furthermore, our results and outcomes will be actively disseminated to SMEs as well as established players throughout Europe. This will be done via the COST networking and dissemination tools, which will always a substantial involvement from the industry. We envision that all conferences and workshops will have at least a 40% participation rate from industry.