New Director of the Center for Collective Learning (CCL) at Corvinus

From February, Johannes Wachs leads the Center for Collective Learning (CCL) at Corvinus University. The center was established in 2023 within the Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies (CIAS) as a center of excellence in data science applied to economics, business, and management — a mission that directly reflects the University’s strategic commitment to data science as a key area of institutional specialization. Supported by the LearnData ERA (European Research Area) Chair grant, the CCL hosts world-class research on the dynamics and evolution of knowledge: how it moves, grows, and decays, from teams to nations, and from the past to the future. It is an interdisciplinary hub where researchers address both classic questions of the social sciences and the defining transformations of our time, such as digitalization and artificial intelligence. 

The appointment of a full-time director based in Budapest was envisioned from the outset as a key milestone of the five-year ERA Chair. The grant stipulates the hiring of a permanent on-site leader by the end of the project’s third year, ensuring the center’s long-term sustainability and institutional anchoring at Corvinus. This step was realized in February this year with the appointment of Johannes Wachs. 

Johannes Wachs is a researcher at CIAS and the program director of the MSc in Social Data Science at Corvinus. His research focuses on the digital economy and its economic geography, including how people build software together, how AI is transforming knowledge work, and the role geography plays in these processes. His recent study, published in Science this year, demonstrates the rapid global diffusion of AI in software development and shows that experienced developers capture most of the productivity benefits. As Director of the CCL, he aims to strengthen the group’s impact on digital economy topics and expand its international reach. “AI is fundamentally reshaping how knowledge is created and distributed,” says Wachs. “I can think of no better place to study that than inside a research group that has made the evolution of knowledge its core question.” 

The CCL was founded by César A. Hidalgo, who remains the ERA Chair holder and continues to shape the center’s scientific direction. A professor at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), Hidalgo is one of the leading figures in economic complexity and applied artificial intelligence — and it was his vision that brought the CCL to Corvinus in 2023. He sees the appointment as a natural next step for the center. “Johannes represents the new generation of scholars studying how knowledge evolves in the digital age,” says Hidalgo. “His leadership comes at an exciting moment for the center, and I am confident he will help take the CCL to new levels of visibility and scientific ambition.”