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Call for Applications: BERD@NFDI Young Scientist Colloquium 2024

BERD@NFDI Young Scientist Colloquium 2024


June 10-11, 2024
Mannheim, Germany


Extended Submission Deadline: May 20th, 2024


Call for Applications


BERD@NFDI is organizing the 1st Colloquium on empirical research using unstructured data that addresses the special needs of doctoral students and postdocs. 

BERD@NFDI is a research data infrastructure dedicated to transforming how Business, Economics, and Related Data are managed. With a special focus on the use of unstructured data in these disciplines, such as images, videos, audio, and text, the goal of BERD@NFDI is to provide a comprehensive suite of services and tools. These will facilitate the searching, collecting, indexing, processing, analyzing, and preserving both data and algorithms, simplifying your data management needs throughout the entire research process. While building such a platform, it is crucial to continuously monitor the state of play in the respective fields, to foster critical discussion and community engagement, and to guide researchers toward employing state-of-the-art methodologies.


Pursuing these goals, the colloquium will be held at Mannheim Business School, Germany, on June 10-11, 2024.


The colloquium provides a unique opportunity for doctoral students, postdocs, and other empirical researchers across business disciplines and beyond to discuss their (dissertation) research with other research fellows and leading academics. We explicitly invite researchers from all disciplines of business, economics, and social sciences (e.g., marketing, information systems, operations research, finance, accounting, management, economics, economic and business history, politics, sociology, psychology) to apply for the conference. The research submitted to this event must involve the analysis of unstructured data.

Submissions should be in the form of a presentation of no more than 8 PowerPoint slides (plus cover slide, text on all slides in Times Roman, and at least 12 font size) that address the following points:


– the description of the research question(s),
– the description of data,
– the analyses conducted or planned,
– the attempted contributions of the research.


Please send your PowerPoint presentation as one PDF file to Lars Gemmer (gemmer@wiso.uni-koeln.de) and use the subject line “BERD@NFDI Young Scientist Colloquium 2024”. All accepted submissions will be presented at the conference.


On the first day of the event, the participants will be introduced to the scope, functionality, and offerings of the BERD@NFDI platform. In addition, faculty, who are renowned experts in working with unstructured data and ML applications, will present recent best-practice approaches to data handling, pre-processing of unstructured data, and further analyzing that data.

On the second day, the event will mostly proceed in three parallel tracks based on the methodological angle of the participants’ work. Doctoral students and postdocs will discuss their work with their fellow students and experienced faculty, gathering detailed feedback on their empirical strategy and questions involving the use of unstructured data. The focus is explicitly on the methodology applied to the research questions. Other aspects of the research such as the attempted contribution, conceptualization, etc. are relevant to understanding the context and may be touched on, but are not the focus of this workshop. Doctoral students and postdocs in all stages of their academic careers are invited to apply for participation in the colloquium.

There is no conference fee. In addition, we are happy to inform you that we were able to secure extra funding that allows us to support young researchers with respect to their travel expenses. Conditional on your submission to the Young Researchers Colloquium, we will reimburse travel expenses up to the amount of EUR 500 for the first 15 submissions (expenses for transportation + hotel). Proof of travel expenses must be provided. We will inform you about the travel support once we receive your submission. You can find our detailed travel expense reimbursement conditions online.


For more information about the colloquium, please visit our website.


We look forward to your submission.


Best regards,


Prof. Florian Stahl (Conference Co-Chair, Mannheim University)
Prof. Hartmut Höhle (Conference Co-Chair, Mannheim University)


Scientific Committee
Dr. Matthias Assenmacher (LMU Munich)
Dr. Lars Gemmer (University of Cologne)
Prof. Marc Fischer (University of Cologne)
Prof. Sibylle Lehmann-Hasemeyer (University of Hohenheim)
Prof. Goeran Kauermann (LMU Munich)