Hot Technologies for Financial Services

Senior architects and alpha developers in the Finance industry are constantly looking for cutting edge technology to gain competitive advantage. This community delivers intense applications that require hyper-fast computation, reliable/secure connectivity, high-performance messaging and extremely-scalable big-data analytics. This track will explore innovative techniques to manage large data-sets in Risk and Trading systems, near-time delivery with mobile web applications and intranet, novel approaches to high-performance computation (HPC) and finally allowing the machines to extract intelligence out of it all. Premier speakers will discuss their approaches and their applicability to capital and money markets, retail/investment banking, trading systems, credit card companies, securities exchanges, etc.

Day of week:

Friday

Location:

Legends Ballroom - Robinson-Whitman

Host:

Vassil Avramov

Presentations

High performance CPU/GPU clusters -Increasing throughput and decreasing latency by leveraging mechanical sympathy

10:20pm - 11:10pm

By: Clive Saha

Certain areas of finance, in particular Risk Management, have been running large compute clusters for years. However, simply relying on the cluster providers for orchestration does not necessarily lead to increased performance and definitely does not exploit the hardware resources efficiently. Similarly, various hardware acceleration devices such as FPGAs and GPUs have been gaining traction in finance, but leveraging them correctly in clusters raises the bar even higher. Achieving ROI on a large cluster of heterogeneous resources requires tailored data layouts and protocols, leverage of mechanical sympathy and specialized job orchestration algorithms. In this talk we explore some interesting strategies to increase cluster performance using techniques like topology-aware communication, job-aware caching, pre-fetching, real-time/streaming vs batch processing etc. We will also look into the techniques that are employed by some of the foremost technology pioneers and leaders in the cluster field and evaluate their applicability within the world of Finance.
HTML5 Adoption in Finance - Migration Strategies and Challenges

5:10pm - 6:00pm

By: Mazy Dar , Asim Malik

Financial desktop applications pose uniquechallenges to developers adopting HTML5. Power users, such as traders, expect native functionality not supported by HTML5, including real-time notifications, pop-up windows, keyboard control and Excel integration. Additionally, financial firms have significant investments in existing applications written in Java, C++, .NET, Flash and Silverlight, making complete rewrites in HTML5 impractical and creating a need for application interoperability.

In this session we will discuss some of the tools and real-world techniques being used by financial firms to deliver native user experience with HTML5, including the use
of Chromium. We will discuss approaches for achieving application interoperability and for implementing an incremental, step-wise approach to adopting HTML5
Leveraging unstructured data for Operational Intelligence when last minute fixes are 'strategic'

4:00pm - 4:50pm

By: Dan Schwartz

There is a wealth of information in unstructured data: e.g. logs, etc. The conventional wisdom is that these are there for debug purposes or for development usage only. However, in the last few years there has been a proliferation of mining tools that allow us to harness the value of that data to the point where it can become a first-class participant in the MIS stack. Moreover, this approach possesses some fundamental advantages relative to its more structured brethren in terms of cost, intrusiveness a release cycle. In this talk, we will look at some techniques as they apply to real-world use-case of a critical system delivery and why we chose to make a temporary fix part of the strategic stack going forward.
Real-time Aggregation of Big Data for Trading and Risk Management

1:40pm - 2:30pm

By: Paul Waters

Changes in the Regulatory environment are forcing firms to enhance their Risk Management systems. There is an increased demand to run more sophisticated scenarios, monitor the effects of real time market movements on ad-hoc portfolios and produce results more quickly. We will examine new technologies and approaches that allow us to deal with the challenges of aggregating hundreds of million pieces of data on the fly; migrating from existing systems with minimal disruption; integrating with legacy systems for real time data feeds; performing complex calculations/aggregations across asset classes in real time.
Trading based on Text Analytics of Online News and Social Media

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Prem Melville

With the advances in automated text analysis, unstructured data sources such as a financial news and social media are becoming an effective source of trading signal to supplement existing structured data feeds. An important component of such analysis is to characterize the sentiment expressed in online text about specific publicly-traded companies and commodities. Sentiment Analysis focuses on this task of automatically identifying whether a piece of text expresses a positive or negative opinion about the subject matter. Such expression of sentiment tends to be very domain specific, and we present recent advances in Machine Learning that help us adapt sentiment analysis to a target domain, such as Finance. We describe an approach to trading on sentiment expressed in text, and demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on back-testing results over several years of financial news. We discuss alternative sources of user-generated content, such as blogs and Twitter, which can provide additional trading signals. In addition to sentiment analysis, we provide an overview of other aspects of text and social network mining that become relevant when incorporating such social media sources.
Financial Services Unconference

11:30pm - 12:40pm

By: Amr Elssamadisy

Meeting each other in the context of conversations we care about is why at QCon we are giving prime time to the unconference format; it creates a space for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and creativity.

First we’ll father in a circle to be guided through creating an agenda using open space technology. Then there will be three three 20 minute time slots, each with 5 concurrent break out discussions that were designed by you.

Attendees often know more than the speakers! Bring your questions, ideas - be prepared to be surprised.