About us

SoDa Laboratories is associated with Monash University's Department of Economics and Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics, within the Monash Business School.

We exist to discover social science insights from alternative data. We are data-source agnostic, with expertise and interest in alternative data in all shapes and forms including satellite imagery, digitised textual sources, internet activity and latency, search terms and trends, social media, news, and more.

We couple a large appetite for rapidly emerging sources of new data with a pan-empirical toolset that ranges from causal empirical methodologies to the latest data science and machine learning approaches.

We believe that although economics has increasingly become an empirically-centred discipline, it has been slow to adopt powerful methodologies from other disciplines that are changing the way data is produced, envisioned and analysed.

In this spirit, SoDa Labs is a hub for inter-disciplinary collaboration with links from our home in the economic sciences to colleagues and collaborators in computer science, political science, history, sociology, legal studies, geo-spatial sciences, remote-sensing, and geography.

SoDa Laboratories is also about real-world impact. Through our partner web applications and sites, and our evolving suite of collaborations with government and industry we seek to bring the best of SoDa to some of humanity's most important problems.