HIDA Lecture: Machine Learning for Monitoring Sustainability in the Corporate and Public Sector

Thursday 18 Sept 2025, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

Zoom (online)

HIDA Lecture: Machine Learning for Monitoring Sustainability in the Corporate and Public Sector 

Date

September 18, 2025, 11:00 am - 12:00 am

Abstract

Achieving global sustainability targets—whether through corporate accountability or public sector aid—requires better tools to monitor and evaluate progress. This talk presents a suite of machine learning (ML) approaches, including large language models (LLMs), designed to scale sustainability tracking across both the corporate and public domains. We introduce an open-source ML framework that extracts millions of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indicators from corporate reports, enabling systematic assessment of ESG transparency and performance across Europe’s largest firms. Our findings uncover striking disparities in ESG reporting and highlight limited progress in key environmental areas. Beyond the private sector, we demonstrate how LLMs can support global efforts to monitor and optimize development aid, offering new capabilities for analyzing unstructured data and informing data-driven decisions. Together, these tools represent a new generation of ML-driven monitoring systems that empower policymakers, investors, and global institutions to make more transparent, equitable, and impactful sustainability decisions.

Speaker

Stefan Feuerriegel heads the new Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Management. He holds a dual affiliation as a full professor at LMU Munich School of Management and the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics, and Statistics at LMU Munich. In 2024 he visited the Stanford University in the USA as a Visiting Scholar.

Previously, Stefan was an assistant professor at ETH Zurich. He gaduated in 2015 with a Ph.D. at the Chair for In­form­a­tion Sys­tems Re­search (Prof. Dr. Dirk Neu­mann), Uni­ver­sity of Freiburg. Dur­ing his re­search stays, he partnered with re­search­ers from the Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, the Na­tional In­sti­tute of In­form­at­ics (NII), Tokyo, Mc­Combs School of Busi­ness at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Aus­tin, and Carne­gie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity (CMU), Pitt­s­burgh. He has also been in­vited as a lec­turer to teach in the Re­search Sprint at Berkman Klein Cen­ter for In­ter­net and So­ci­ety, Har­vard Uni­ver­sity.