The Bank of Japan is hosting the 8th Conference on Nontraditional Data, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing in Macroeconomics (ECONDAT 2026 Fall Meeting) from October 5-6 in Tokyo. Deputy Governor Shinichi Uchida delivered the opening remarks. The conference, co-organized with Banca d'Italia, the Federal Reserve Board, and other central banks, focuses on data science, nontraditional data, and artificial intelligence techniques, including their economic implications and use in measuring sentiments and expectations through large language models (LLMs).