Industry News: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for January 2, 2018

Increasing Automation in Offices Paying Off for Advisory Firms

…ThinkAdvisor. “The main reason, in my opinion, for the automation, is that it costs less, and is faster in terms of being more responsive to the end customers.” The automation may come from the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning or even older forms of technology. “Automation, even without taking artificial intelligence into consideration, provides faster, more accurate information at a significantly lower cost,” Davis said. “I don’t believe there are any drawbacks with respect to back-office operations.” Vasant Dhar, a professor of information systems at New York University, also sees that some back- … 2017-12-27 00:00:00 http://techcenter.thinkadvisor.com/2017/12/27/increasing-automation-in-offices-paying-off-for-ad CloudQuant Thoughts: Automation works. Most people think automation at a “macro” level though. We are thinking about automation in every step of our lives. What can we do to automate our daily tasks without having to think about what can some programmer do for us? Automation tools like Jenkins, Python, even MS Excel Macros that make our professional lives more productive will always help. Yet we also believe that you need to automate based on what is important to you. In 2018 we will be working to systemize our decision making. We want all of us to compound our understanding using a principle-driven approach to decisions to improve our product, our client relationships, and our own lives.

Outlook 2018: Alastair Hawker, Quantitative Brokers

…he fact remains that MiFID II has been enormously resource-consuming for the industry on both sides of the Atlantic despite it being an EU regulation. What changes do you expect to see in regards to artificial intelligence in 2018? As a firm, we have spent a lot of time researching and discussing AI/machine learning this year. Undoubtedly, it’s a huge area that will continue to grow and become part of everything in the industry. The next step will be better understanding the applications and limitations of AI/machine learning, and there will be a move away from it being a buzzword to being able to develop true use… 2017-12-29 08:00:35+00:00 https://marketsmedia.com/outlook-2018-alastair-hawker-quantitative-brokers/ CloudQuant Thoughts:  This article states that the demand for Quants and Technologists has been “relentless” in FINTECH. We agree. The best sources of candidates for these skills are going to be colleges like the University of Chicago where we get many of our interns. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t participate. The best people are not the current students. The best people are the subject matter experts that grow their own skills. Pick up your skills. Attend online classes on Python, Math, and AI. Learn how to apply statistics. Many people are using our own platform to grow their quant skills this year. Here are a couple of resources that I have used:

• CloudQuant Intro on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc4OeMLN6IA&list=PLxZR6_lMNx-ixTK9ISnvhrUiwkvcD0ebI
• Chicago Python Users Group (FinSIG): https://www.meetup.com/_ChiPy_
• Metis Chicago: https://www.thisismetis.com/locations/chicago
• Automate The Boring Stuff with Python: https://www.amazon.com/Automate-Boring-Stuff-Python-Programming/dp/1593275994

Machine Learning for Trading

…Direct link to article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3015609 The purpose of this paper is to discover whether it is possible to train a machine-learning algorithm to behave as a risk-adverse investor by using a dynamic model involving transaction costs. Transaction costs are frequently overlooked due to the complexity of integrating them into the learning algorithm used to train the trading system. By specifying a series … 2017-12-29 00:00:00 http://www.quantnews.com/2017/12/29/machine-learning-trading/ CloudQuant Thoughts: Not everyone was taking time off over the new year. Some new research for Machine Learning and Trading was posted.

How Do You Vote? 50 Million Google Images Give a Clue (AltData from Photos)

…rd car project generated a host of intriguing connections, not so much startling revelations. In the most recent paper, and one published earlier in the year by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, these were among the predictive correlations: ■ The system was able to accurately predict income, race, education and voting patterns at the ZIP code and precinct level in cities across the country. ■ Car attributes (including miles-per-gallon ratings) found that the greenest city in America is Burlington, Vt., while Casper, Wyo., has the largest per-capita carbon footprint. ■ Chicago is the … 2017-12-31 00:00:00 https://nytimes.com/2017/12/31/technology/google-images-voters.html CloudQuant Thoughts: The best quote in this article is “The significance of the project, experts say, is a proof of concept — that new information can be gleaned from visual data with artificial intelligence software and plenty of human help.” This is a huge new area of Alternative Data. We find projects like this to be really interesting. What happens when you apply this to the number of cars in a commuter or factory parking lot? Can you get predictions on economic factors that represent tradeable factors?

AI and Deep Learning in 2017 – A Year in Review

…ry of the year was probably AlphaGo (Nature paper), a Reinforcement Learning agent that beat the world’s best Go players. Due to its extremely large search space, Go was thought to be out of reach of Machine Learning techniques for a couple more years. What a nice surprise! The first version of AlphaGo was bootstrapped using training data from human experts and further improved through self-play and an adaptation of Monte-Carlo Tree Search. Soon after, AlphaGo Zero (Nature Paper) took it a step further and learned to play Go from scratch, without human training data whatsoever, using a technique a technique … 2017-12-31 14:59:46+00:00 http://www.wildml.com/2017/12/ai-and-deep-learning-in-2017-a-year-in-review/ CloudQuant Thoughts: A very good review of 2017. There has been a lot happening out there and it is difficult to stay up to date. This is one of the reasons that we publish this news every week.

Your Year on Kaggle: Most Memorable Community Stats from 2017

…2017 has been an exciting ride for us, and like last year, we’d love to enter the new year sharing and celebrating some of your highlights through stats. There are major machine learning trends, impressive achievements, and fun factoids that all add up to one amazing community. Enjoy! Public Datasets Platform & Kernels It became clear this year that Kaggle’s grown to be more than just a competitions platform. Our total number of dataset downloaders on our public Datasets platform is very close to meeting the total number of competition dataset downloaders – both around 350,000 … 2017-12-26 00:00:00 http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/12/26/your-year-on-kaggle-most-memorable-community-stats-from-2017/ CloudQuant Thoughts: Kaggle is proof that crowdsourcing works.

AI Weekly: AI democratization depends on tech giants

…urrently hoovering up much of the world’s AI talent supply? Google chief scientist Fei-Fei Li has talked about it in relation to tensor processing units, and CEO Sundar Pichai in relation to AutoML, machine learning made to create machine learning. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes democratization as putting AI in the hands of “every developer, every organization, every public sector organization around the world.” The implications of AI that touches every industry and sector of society demand that tech giants consider democratization beyond championing the use of their own AI services. This year, step… 2017-12-28 00:00:00 https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/28/ai-weekly-ai-democratization-depends-on-tech-giants/ CloudQuant Thoughts: It also depends upon the people. It has to be interesting and rewarding.

Meet The Woman Behind Woebot, The AI Therapist

…ms. And this pace is really too fast for our systems to respond. While I was at Stanford I started collaborating with Andrew Ng in his lab and started to become really interested in the potential for artificial intelligence to be able to address this in a meaningful way. I decided to leave academia and really pursue and test different technologies with a view to be able to launch something as a direct to consumer product. There’s just such a huge need for something like that. Woebot came from a lot of design sessions and really trying to craft not just how to build an effective support for mental health online but … 2017-12-31 00:00:00 https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethharris/2017/12/31/meet-the-woman-behind-woebot-the-ai-therapist/ CloudQuant Thoughts: Women are innovating in all areas of technology. We love seeing ventures like this one succeed.

Esperanto exits stealth mode, aims at AI with a 4,096-core 7nm RISC-V monster

…Monster Although Esperanto will be licensing the cores they have been designing, they do plan on producing their own products. The first product they want to deliver is the highest TeraFLOP per Watt machine learning computing system. Ditzel noted that the overall design is scalable in both performance and power. The chips will be designed in 7nm and will feature a heterogeneous multi-core architecture. There are 16 of the large OoOE ET-Maxion cores with their own private L1 and L2 caches. Additionally, Ditzel said they plan on putting 4,096 ET-Minion cores – each with everything noted above. That is, each o… 2018-01-01 10:45:47+00:00 https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/686/esperanto-exits-stealth-mode-aims-at-ai-with-a-4096-core-7nm-risc-v-monster/ CloudQuant Thoughts: Wow. Sounds interesting. Wonder if their product is available on AWS or Google cloud. Does anyone know?

The $15 Minimum Wage Movement Is Winning, And That’s Bad News For Cashiers

… business enterprises do not have tax payers to pay the bills. This means that they must find other ways to cope with minimum wage hikes like the substituting of workers with automation equipment and artificial intelligence software. That’s especially the case for shopping malls and other retailers that have been under pressure from competition from on-line retailers; and restaurant owners who have been facing soaring rents and all sorts of labor regulations. In fact, Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot and the like have been experimenting with self-checkout counters, while McDonald’s, Panera Bread and other franchise ou… 2018-01-01 00:00:00 https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2018/01/01/the-15-minimum-wage-movement-is-winning-and-thats-bad-news-for-cashiers/ CloudQuant Thoughts: We wonder if there are tradeable ideas here? Which traded companies are seeing a boost in sales as automation replaces workers?

AI operators will play a critical role as bots redefine the workplace

…omewhere between them and us is the AI operator, whose ability to speak robot will help man and machine move beyond these initial growing pains. Tomer Naveh is chief technology officer at Albert, an artificial intelligence marketing platform for the enterprise…. 2017-12-29 00:00:00 https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/29/ai-operators-will-play-a-critical-role-as-bots-redefine-the-workplace/ CloudQuant Thoughts: This answers some of our previous questions.

The 12 Worst Tech Pitches Of 2017 That I Can Remember, Ranked

… Lalafo can extract a lot of information just from a single image. Then analyse and compare it, suggest a price and show the listing to people who are the most likely to be interested in it. By using machine learning and analysing multiple data sources for each user, Lalafo wants to alert you when you stopped using that cool brown bag or chic green jacket seen in your selfies. Lalafo wants to help you remember what you have and make suggestions for what you may want to sell next, how much money you could make and how many people would like to buy it. 2. … 2017-12-30 00:00:00 https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2017/12/30/the-weirdest-pitches-of-2017-that-i-can-remember-ranked/ CloudQuant Thoughts: Really? I had to read this out of morbid curiosity. Ouch.