Cornell – Citi Financial Data Science Webinars

Cornell Engineering. Operations Research and Information Engineering. Financial Engineering Manhattan

Featuring Machine Learning experts from Cornell, Citi, and more…

You and your colleagues are invited to attend the Cornell – Citi Financial Data Science Webinars. Through the online talks in Spring 2021, we are excited to collaborate with Citi in highlighting machine learning applications in finance.

All webinars are from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm EDT.

This webinar is free and open to all guests. Registration is required (RSVP). You will receive the webinar link and dial-in info upon registration (the confirmation email will come from
no-reply@zoom.us)

Date: Tuesday, May 11th, 2021
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT
Speaker: Nicholas Venuti | Morgan Stanley
Title: Advances in Sequential Deep Learning

Abstract

Sequential data serves as the basis for many real-world applications such as machine translation, voice-to-text conversion, and motion tracking. As the order and context of past datapoints are needed for future prediction, these datasets must be modelled temporally either by constructing features or utilizing recursive models.

Many state-of-the-art solutions include recurrent neural networks (RNNs), as these methods are able to exploit both techniques by capturing the time-based nature of these systems while leveraging the expressiveness of deep learning architectures. While RNN variants such as gated recurrent units (GRUs) and long-short term memory (LSTM) networks have dominated sequential deep learning, recent studies have found that temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) can match or exceed these networks in prediction performance while greatly reducing the training time of the models.

In this talk, we will provide a general overview of four common architectures: vanilla RNNs, GRUs, LSTMs, and TCNs. We will compare the model stability, memory requirements, and training times of each. Lastly, we will review the performance of these architectures on a variety of benchmark image, text, and audio datasets.

Program Agenda:

  1. Nicholas Venuti’s Presentation
  2. Q&A
  3.  “Lightning Talk” – featuring CFEM Alumnus Vineel Yellapantula
  4. Discussion

Speaker Bio

Nicholas Venuti is a Machine Learning Research Scientist in Morgan Stanley’s Machine Learning Center of Excellence, whose main research focus is deep learning architectures for time-series predictions. After obtaining his Bachelor of Science in Biomolecular Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University, Nicholas began his career working in data analytics at an environmental consultancy. Afterwards, he obtained his Masters of Data Science at the University of Virginia, where his thesis studied using NLP to identify semantic shifts in religious and political texts as an early indicator for extremist views.

“Lightning Talk” Info:

CFEM alumnus Vineel Yellapantula will discuss his summer project at AbleMarkets under Prof. Irene Aldridge, “Quantifying Sentiment in SEC Filings.” By utilizing Natural Language Processing techniques and the BERT model, he explored how text present in the MD&A section of 10-K and 10-Q filings affect the performance of the stock. He also tested the efficacy of multiple factors derived from these texts using a long-short market-neutral trading strategy.

Vineel Yellapantula (MFE Cornell ’20, MSc Mathematics BITS Pilani ’18) is a Decision Analytics Associate at ZS Associates.

We hope to see you online!

The Cornell-Citi Team

**Please excuse any duplication of this announcement


If you are interested in our past seminars, you are welcome to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and watch our videos!

Past CFEM Events

February 16th, 2021
Speaker: Charles-Albert Lehalle (Capital Fund Management)
Title of Presentation: “An Attempt to Understand Natural Language Processing and Illustration on a Financial Dataset”

March 9th, 2021
Speaker: Bruno Dupire (Bloomberg)
Title of Presentation: “Some Applications of Machine Learning in Finance”

April 13th, 2021
Speaker: Peter Carr (NYU) and Lorenzo Torricelli (University of Parma)
Title of Presentation: “Stoptions” and “Additive Logistic Processes in Option Pricing” (PDFs available upon request)

Brooklyn Quant Experience Lecture Series: Ioana Boier

Brooklyn Quant Experience Lecture Series, NYU Tandon

Ioana Boier, Head of Quantitative Portfolio Solutions at Alphadyne Asset Management will give the following talk on Thursday, May 6th at 9:30 AM EDT. 

Attend Virtually >>

Meeting ID: 963 6903 9340
Password: FREBQEIB

Title

Computer Science for Finance (Beyond Programming)

Bio

Ioana Boier is the Head of Quantitative Portfolio Solutions at Alphadyne Asset Management. Prior to joining Alphadyne in 2019, she held senior quantitative research and management roles at Citadel LLC, BNP Paribas, and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Ioana is the author of multiple peer-reviewed publications, patents, and the recipient of several awards for applied research delivered into products. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics.