Beneficiaries & Partners
BigDataFinance – 14 universities, companies and research institutes.
Beneficiaries
TUT
Department of Industrial Management/ Research Group on Financial Engineering
As a strategic guideline of Tampere University of Technology (TUT), management of industrial activities is acknowledged as one of the focal areas in research and education. The department supports organizations in their business renewal and generates new knowledge in order to enhance their competitiveness and sustainability.
Research Group on Financial Engineering at the Department of Industrial Management stands at the crossroads of financial engineering, data science and computing using computational methods with an emphasis on extensive use of real data providing robust and realistic solutions. We aim to develop new approaches to relax unrealistic assumptions that often are applied for the sake of soluble theoretical models over agreement with empirical data in the existing literature.
Prof. Juho Kanniainen, the Head of the Research Group, is coordinating two EU-projects: HPCFinance and BigDataFinance.
Department of Signal Processing (SGN)
Department of Signal Processing (SGN) is part of the Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering. Signal processing has been chosen as one of the strategic top fields of research specially supported by TUT. We have here among the many active researcher groups The Signal Processing Algorithm Group (SPAG) twice elected as Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence.
We offer studies combining signal processing of e.g. audio, images, video and biological signals, and hardware and software systems related with them. Different digital signals such as speech in mobile phones, sound in CD and mp3 devices, images and video in digital cameras and television as well as signals in measurement systems can be analyzed and processed with means of signal processing.
About 170 people work on SGN. Our teaching personnel consists of about 20 people from which 15 are professors. Around 50 of our personnel is working on a M.Sc. thesis and roughly 85 on a Ph.D. thesis. In addition to the researchers, we hire yearly several students as research assistants or summer employees. Our researchers have been employed mainly to the industry and research institutes.
Nearly half of our personnel, researchers and students come from countries outside of Finland. Every year dozens of international specialists of signal processing visit our Tampere International Center for Signal Processing (TICSP) and our researchers often go and visit international universities and conferences. Our Department has an international and relaxed atmosphere.
ING Groep N.V
We are a global financial institution with a strong European base, offering banking services. We draw on our experience and expertise, our commitment to excellent service and our global scale to meet the needs of a broad customer base, comprising individuals, families, small businesses, large corporations, institutions and governments. Our customers are at the heart of what we do.
Our more than 53,000 employees offer retail and commercial banking services to customers in over 40 countries. Our strengths include our well-known, strong brand with positive recognition from customers in many countries, strong financial position, omnichannel distribution strategy and international network. Moreover, ING is currently the number one ‘diversified financials’ company in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.
University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland
The Department of Banking and Finance (DBF) is part of the University of Zurich. It scores among the leading Banking & Finance Departments in Europe, well connected with our counterparts worldwide. It aims at world class research in banking and finance. The research is relevant to industry, policy, and society as a whole. DBF possesses broad expert competences in the disciplines of banking, corporate finance, financial economics, and quantitative finance. We achieve our goals by appointing outstanding and internationally recognized scientists, creating the best possible research conditions, and promoting young talents. DBF offers bachelor, master and doctoral programs, complemented by various professional development programs. Our teaching is state of the art, both in terms of academic content and didactical means. DBF places great emphasis on an inter-disciplinary approach. We encourage critical, analytical, and creative thinking. DBF fosters value-oriented reflective capabilities, as well as global consciousness, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. More information at http://www.ibf.uzh.ch/
Jožef Stefan Institute
Jožef Stefan Institute Website
Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI) is the leading research institution for the natural sciences in Slovenia with over 900 researchers within 25 departments working in the areas of computer science, physics, and chemistry and biology. The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with approximately 40 researchers, is one of the largest European research groups working in the areas of machine learning, data mining, language technologies, semantic technologies and sensor networks. The key research direction is combining modern statistical data analytic techniques with more semantic/logic based knowledge representations and reasoning techniques with the purpose to make progress in solving complex problems such as text understanding, large scale probabilistic reasoning, building broad coverage knowledge bases, and dealing with scale.
AB
AB is a leading investment-management firm with US$485 billion in client assets under management, as of 30 June 2015. We serve institutions around the world including pension plans, foundations, endowments, insurers, central banks, governments and sovereign wealth funds. Our broad array of services ranges from active management to customized liability-driven solutions and encompasses fixed income, equities, alternatives, multi-asset strategies, dynamic asset allocation and passive indexing, across global, regional and local markets. At AB we strive to keep our clients ahead with our forward-looking global perspective, independent research and investment discipline across all asset classes.
Creates
Center for Research in Econometric Analysis of Time Series, CREATES (DNRF78), is a research unit at Aarhus University, hosted by the Department of Economics and Business Economics. Research is conducted within the general fields of time series and financial econometrics. The center is funded as a Center of Excellence by the Danish National Research Foundation via a DKK 80.2m (Euro 10.7m) grant on top of the funding from the host institution. The funding period covers a 10-year period 2007-2017. CREATES’ core group of members are affiliated with Aarhus University. A number of international research fellows (many of Danish origin), are associated with CREATES. The research at CREATES is characterized by interdisciplinary collaboration amongst economists, econometricians, and mathematical statisticians.
University of Manchester
University of Manchester Website
The University of Manchester (UoM) is the largest in the UK and one of the largest in Europe with over 40,000 students and 11,000 staff. It was formed in 2004 by the merger of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST, est. 1824) and the Victoria University of Manchester (est. 1851). UoM has 25 Nobel laureates among its past and present students and staff, the fourth-highest number of any single UK university; four Nobel laureates are currently among its staff – more than any other UK university.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Manchester is the oldest and one of the largest in the UK, with almost 1,000 full-time students. It traces its history to 1948 with the development of the world’s first stored program computer; Alan Turing, a founder of computer science, was later Deputy Director of the Computing Laboratory working on artificial intelligence and the Turing Test. SCS was ranked 4th for research quality in Computer Science in the 2014 UK research evaluation, and has been ranked in the top 10 European universities for Computer Science throughout the period 2009-14 by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. SCS holds the UK Centre of Doctoral Training in Computer Science, funded by the UK EPSRC research council.
Partners
University of Oxford
JSIPS
Bloomberg
Bloomberg, the global business and financial information and news leader, gives influential decision makers a critical edge by connecting them to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas.
Techila
Nobody likes waiting. Techila is a distributed computing middleware and management solution, which brings rocket speed to computing. It is designed to save the time of business users and IT experts time and to speed up the idea-to-deployment cycle across the enterprise.
As the need for computing grows across industries, high-performance computing needs to serve a wider audience. Not all of them familiar with HPC technologies. Techila provides standard simulation and modeling tools hundred folds speed-up, simple user-experience and deployment in minutes.
Techila enables applications to benefit of the computing power available in the customer’s current and future computing servers and clusters, and even to include capacity from the customer’s trusted cloud providers. By using Techila, even existing applications can be integrated easily and securely, delivering an unparalleled experience without complexity.
Olsen Ltd
Olsen Ltd is an asset management and econometrics company, founded in 1985 (successor of Olsen & Associates). During the past 30 years, Olsen has developed its own technologies for collecting, filtering financial data, inaugurating what was one of the world’s largest repositories of research-quality, tick-by-tick FX data. In 1996, Olsen has launched OANDA, an Internet market maker in foreign exchange, the first trading platform with second-by-second interest payments, since then becoming a leading provider of currency-related tools and services. Olsen has pioneered high frequency finance, a new discipline with a bottom up approach to economic and financial modelling; the team published “Introduction to High Frequency Finance” (Olsen et. al. 2001), a standard textbook used by quantitative hedge funds.
University of Amsterdam
University of Amsterdam website
Aalto University – Department of Computer Science
Aalto University – Department of Computer Science website
The department of Computer Science provides world-class research and education in modern computer science to foster future science, engineering and society. The work combines fundamental research with innovative applications.
The department is known for its innovative and consistently high quality work. It is matching the very best teams in the world and is a coveted partner in international collaborations. Research at the department addresses and solves challenging problems of high practical relevance with revolutionary applications.
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG)
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG)
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) provides high quality numerical software and delivers high performance computing (HPC) services. NAG works closely with world-leading researchers in academia and industry to create powerful, accurate and flexible numerical software.
In financial services the NAG Library is embedded in most investment banks main quant libraries where the NAG components are used as building blocks. The NAG Library and consulting services are used for a variety of big data applications. NAG has strong experience in code optimisation and implementation of numerical and statistical code in distributed computing environments .