iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 29/09/2026

OpenAI DevDay feels a bit like Christmas morning: the wrapping is always spectacular, what's inside doesn't always match the wishlist though

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 01/09/2026

Nine months ago, I wrote a Substack post about Google Maps and London's restaurants algorithm and offered an alternative map. The Guardian made a video about it. Google wouldn't comment. Today they've finally written to me about section 3.2.3, "No Scraping." Communication at last lol.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 11/08/2026

Ah, the window seal in the train from The Hague to Amsterdam: perfect place for a performance review of the Dutch public transport chief. (Gotta respect him for taking up a hell of a job though!)

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 15/05/2026

Found in Surry Hills (Sydney) street library: Quantitative Analysis for Management, fairy tales and faith books. Gentrification is complete.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 01/05/2026

Still trying to figure out the Gold Coast. Skyscrapers as beachfront, strip malls 200m inland, barely footpaths, no city centre and somehow Australia’s favourite holiday destination and 6th biggest city. Please explain (in European).

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 29/04/2026

Not saying we’re in trouble but five black swans on my morning run? I’d short.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 26/04/2026

Eh yes, Canberra may be the most boring capital in the world, but buses with front bike racks and superb road cycling through national parks? That’s elite boring done well, if you ask me.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 19/04/2026

Victoria made public transport temp free. Ridership spiked. Headlines: proof of cost barrier. But compare Victoria to NSW, where fares didn’t change and the difference in car use is small. Data shows uplift is from existing riders using it more. So the barrier isn’t cost but trip completeability?

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 12/04/2026

Finally, a valid instrument (spotted in NSW)

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 18/03/2026

Somehow always accidentally passing by on time to exercise my democratic rights. Today the local (Dutch) ones: seriously torn between a local party that gets it (our mechanic is running) and the national one I’m a member of since I was 16. Send help - I’m being judged.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 04/02/2026

A bit late to the game, but I’ve been doomscrolling Moltbook/openclaw for the past hour or so (the social network for AI agents developing inside jokes, religions, posting security alerts, crypto scams and consciousness debates). Don’t know whether to be impressed, scared or underwhelmed:

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 08/11/2025

Vandalism? Art? In London, it’s just Saturday.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 11/10/2025

In my thesis, titled: The Rise Of Central Bank Talk: Essays in Central Bank Communication and Independence, I examine how and why independent central banks talk so much about topics they should not care about. More info and all data and dashboards on centralbanktalk.eu and laurenleek.eu

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 11/10/2025

TO DO: write a Bluesky version of a slightly cringe LinkedIn post, change PhDing to PhDone in my bio, update my personal website and tell my local coffeeshop that I can’t get student discounts anymore… because Tuesday I completed the official part of my education and defended at @eui-eu.bsky.social

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 30/09/2025

Found at the LSE Data Science Institute. More accurate would have been: var coffee = newCoffee();if(coffee.empty){panic()} Since I had the great idea to write my thesis defense slides in JavaScript…

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 19/05/2025

We can see two parallel trends: (1) the increase of non-response rates and (2) the increase of AI agents answers. I even built my own AI agent in a few hours to illustrate how easy it is to do (which is rather worrying!).

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 30/04/2025

We show that these results are not, as generally is assumed, confounded by general changes in communication over time or singular events including the Global Financial Crisis or financial supervision changes and many more!

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 30/04/2025

We test the mechanism chain by showing that increased pressures relate to increased communication.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 30/04/2025

Employing a staggered difference-in-differences and an instrumental variable approach, we find robust evidence that an increase in independence decreases the narrow focus on price stability and increases financial pressures discussed in monetary policy communication.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 30/04/2025

We fine-tune and validate a Large Language Model (Google’s Gemini) to develop novel textual indices of policy pressures regarding monetary policy communication of central banks in speeches of 100 central banks from 1997 to 2023. See centralbanktalk.eu for the data:)

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 30/04/2025

We argue that increases in CBI alter the pressures central banks face, compelling them to address these pressures to maintain their reputation. An increase in independence decreases the narrow focus on price stability and increases financial pressures discussed in monetary policy communication.

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 09/04/2025

Sometimes I accidentally check X - or rather @simeonbischl.de apps me the highlights

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 07/03/2025

Interesting how the Italians placed this in the smart thinking section…

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 14/01/2025

Excited to present some ongoing research at #LMU #polisci in Munich today! Accidentally forgot my wetsuit to start this day properly though…

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 16/12/2024

How better to introduce our new Italian citizen in my presentation?

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 16/12/2024

Prepping a presentation with LLM methodology in which I want to explain the very basic intuition of transformer neural networks - I’m secretly hoping at least someone gets the reference

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 26/11/2024

We show that these results are not, as generally is assumed, confounded by general changes in communication over time or singular events, in particular, the Global Financial Crisis, the establishment of the euro area or first time independence events/epistemic communities. (7/8)

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 26/11/2024

We test the mechanisms too! We confirm that inflation pressures and financial pressures are driving our indices. Also, more independent central banks care about creating their own reputation: pro-actively addressing more pressures in their communication. (6/8)

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 26/11/2024

Using a *staggered difference-in-differences* and *instrumental variable approach*, we find robust evidence that an increase in independence decreases monetary pressures and increases financial pressures discussed in monetary policy communication. We also explore heterogenous effects! (5/8)

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 26/11/2024

Using speeches of all central banks world wide (100) and over time (1997 to now), we fine-tune Google Gemini which we show outperforms many other LLMs at the time of writing for our specific classification task to detect monetary and financial pressures. We use these to create pressure indices (4/8)

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 26/11/2024

We develop and test a theory regarding a previously unconsidered variable in central bank communication: central bank independence (CBI). We argue that increases in CBI alter the pressures a central bank faces, compelling them to address these pressures to maintain their reputation. (3/8)

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 26/11/2024

New pre-print! osf.io/preprints/so... All methods/political economy enthusiasts: check my paper /w @simeonbischl.de: How Central Bank Independence Shapes Monetary Policy Communication: A Large Language Model Application. Key take-away: financial pressures are more of a concern after a CBI event (1/8

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 15/11/2024

Third, some recent output based on this data is presented. This is also all part of my PhD project. (4/

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 15/11/2024

Second, it offers a tool to search through all speeches and display on a sentence level how governors are responding to certain pressures, the topics discussed and various more key facts (3/

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 15/11/2024

First, it offers a tool to get key insights and meta data per central bank such as topics discussed, the audiences targeted, frequency of speeches and policy pressures central banks respond to in their monetary policy communication for 118 central banks from 1997 to now (2/

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Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 15/11/2024

It’s live! The past few days @simeonbischl.de and I have had some intense coding sessions and we are happy to share the result: centralbanktalk.eu this website includes tools to explore central bank communication (1/

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