New FIRSA preprint 📄 Why do some European regulators adopt FinTech sandboxes while others choose different tools? Choosing Not to Experiment finds that non-adoption follows a clearer institutional logic than adoption. Early comments welcome. doi.org/10.33774/aps...

Choosing Not to Experiment: Regulatory Sandbox Adoption and Policy Instrument Choice in Europe

Regulatory sandboxes are widely read as signals of innovation-friendly financial regulation and as evidence of regulatory modernity. Yet only eleven of thirty EU and EEA jurisdictions operate one. Thi...

doi.org

For years, serious research presentations required an ugly LaTeX Beamer template. 🤮 Those days are over. 📊 I made a small AI skill for turning papers into Quarto and RevealJS presentations. Link to post below: alfredohs.com/blog/quarto_... #Quarto #RevealJS #AIAgents #AcademicTwitter

🚨 New Tutorial! A practical walkthrough for deploying an R Shiny app on Google Cloud Run, starting from a working app, a Dockerfile and a GitHub repository. 🔗 firsa.eu/posts/cloud_... #RStats #Shiny #GoogleCloud #OpenScience

📢 Join us on 17 June for an online webinar on Quantitative Text Analysis in the Age of LLMs. With @seraphinemaerz.bsky.social and Bertrand De Longueville. 17:00 UK, 18:00 Brussels, 19:00 Vilnius Register here: tinyurl.com/2pkcjxsw #QTA #LLMs #TextAsData

📊 FIRSA webinar on building research dashboards with R and Shiny is now online. It covers the basic structure of a Shiny app and practical design choices for clearer dashboarding, using the FIRSA dashboard as an example. 🎥 www.youtube.com/watch?v=FICw... #RStats #Shiny #OpenScience

Building Research Dashboards with R and Shiny

YouTube video by FIRSA (MSCA-Horizon Project)

youtube.com

📊 Free webinar on 12 May Building Research Dashboards with R and Shiny RShiny basics for researchers, students, analysts, and other R users interested in interactive dashboarding for research communication. 18:30 Vilnius time (EEST) Registration: forms.gle/f9t9dpYTT3Gc... #RStats #dataviz

Building Research Dashboards with R and Shiny

Free online webinar Tuesday 12 May 2026, 18:30 CEST (Vilnius) A practical introduction to building research dashboards with R and Shiny for researchers, PhD students, analysts, and other R users inte...

forms.gle

Happy to see our most recent tutorial on RSelenium featured in RWeekly (2026-W16)! The screencast below shows a minimal example of what can be done with automated browsers. Use responsibly! Tutorial: firsa.eu/posts/rselen... Follow RWeekly rweekly.org #Rstats #OpenScience #DataVisualization

Want to an easy way to learn web scraping? 🤖 Check out this new tutorial on Selenium in R. It covers how to automate web browsers to collect data from dynamic websites ➡️ firsa.eu/posts/rselen... #RStats #RSelenium #WebScraping #DataScience

What are the odds you own crypto assets? 📉 How is financial literacy related to ownership? 📖 Our new dashboard lets you simulate the probability of recent crypto-asset ownership based on a statistical model. 🔗 dashboard.firsa.eu #bitcoin #rstats #shiny #crypto #fintech #OpenScience

📄 New FIRSA working paper. Are crypto holders really more overconfident? Using recent EU-wide data, I find the answer depends a lot on how overconfidence is measured. Pre-print version, comments welcome. 🔗 firsa.eu/posts/crypto... #FinTech #OpenScience #EUData #RStats

💰 Is Bitcoin money or myth? 📢 Presenting this Saturday at the 6th Money View Symposium hosted by @ineteconomics.bsky.social Register here: 🔗 fs8.formsite.com/CNZLjX/0acgs... 📍 Online event, free attendance 📅 Saturday, February 28 ⏰ 12:30 New York #PoliticalEconomy #Monetarytheory #Bitcoin

Who owns crypto in Europe? Join the FIRSA Academic Roundtable (link below) to learn more about research on FinTech (CBDCs, Crypto, Regulatory Sandboxes) from top scholars. 📣 20 Jan · 10:00 CST (Chicago) / 18:00 EET (Vilnius) zoom.us/j/9443773243... Passcode: 995511

🚨 Academic roundtable on fintech regulation. Join the conversation with Colin Chia (University of Victoria), Ghita Chraibi (University of Virginia), and Vytautas Kuokštis (Vilnius University). 📣 (TUE) 20 Jan · 10:00 CST (Chicago) / 18:00 EET (Vilnius) 🔗: zoom.us/j/9443773243... #fintech #finance

💡 What are NFTs? NFTs are unique digital tokens on a blockchain that certify ownership of a specific item. Unlike crypto coins, they aren’t interchangeable. 🔗 Demystifying NFTs Report (2021): blockchain-observatory.ec.europa.eu/document/dow... #FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU #NFT

💡 What is an Innovation Hub? 📌 A contact point where (fintech) firms can ask regulators about new tech 📌 Offers guidance — no live testing 📌 Helps clarify licensing pathways 🔗 ESAs Joint Report (2023): www.esma.europa.eu/sites/defaul... #FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

💡 The EU’s AI Act sets the first global rules for artificial intelligence. 📌 Risk-based approach — from minimal to high risk 📌 Stricter rules for financial AI 📌 Promotes AI testing in supervised sandboxes 🔗 EU AI Act: digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/... #FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

💡 What is MiCA? 📌 The EU’s new framework for crypto-assets 📌 Sets common rules for issuers, exchanges & wallets 📌 Balances innovation with consumer protection 🔗 EU MiCA Regulation: www.esma.europa.eu/esmas-activi... #FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

💡 What is a regulatory sandbox? A regulatory sandbox is a framework that allows firms to test innovative financial services in a controlled environment under the regulator’s supervision. 🔗 Read more on the FIRSA website: www.firsa.eu #FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

🇺🇸💔🇪🇺 Trump’s 2025 UN speech was the longest U.S. address on record and the most negative toward Europe. This is the focus of my first Medium article, where I track how Europe appears in U.S. UNGA speeches from 1946–2025 and visualize the results. 📖 Read on Medium: medium.com/@alfredo-hs/...

Trump’s 2025 UN Speech Was the Most Anti-European on Record

Every September, world leaders speak at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) about the global issues they deem most important. These…

medium.com

💡 FinTech = financial technology. ✅ Cheaper, faster, more inclusive finance ❌ New risks for consumers & regulators FinTech is central to the EU’s Digital Finance Strategy. 🔗 EU Digital Finance Strategy: finance.ec.europa.eu/digital-fina... #FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

Digital finance

New financial technologies can facilitate access to financial services and improve the efficiency of the financial system.

finance.ec.europa.eu

Are you an R user tired of missing out on the LLM craze? In my new tutorial I show how to use OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini models to classify political texts. I connect to the APIs directly from R using reticulate. alhdzsz.net/posts/llms_r... #rstats #dataviz #ai #python #textdata

Zero-shot classification and natural language inference (NLI) offer a powerful way to analyze political texts without labeled training data. This tutorial shows how to classify sentences using a pre-trained transformer model. Google Colab Link: colab.research.google.com/drive/1gCZBy...

Here you can find a a hands-on tutorial on how to perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) using Python’s transformers library from within R via reticulate. firsa.eu/posts/ner_re... #NLP #rstats #Python #Quarto

An insight on latest research from Vilnius University on Europe's FinTech regulatory sandbox development www.vu.lt/en/news-even...

ERA Fellow Dr Alfredo Hernández Sánchez’s Research on FinTech Regulatory Sandbox Development in Europe (FIRSA)

Vilnius University is a prestigious institution of science and studies in Lithuania, which develops world-class science and develops science-based international studies.

vu.lt