MUSING Workshop - Turning Data Into Risk Knowledge - 21st May 2008

Of note is the MUSING Executive Workshop "Turning data into risk knowledge: Implementation of semantic-based risk management processes in the financial services industry". I've signed up as the agenda looks good. Lots of academics - in particular a guy from Sheffield who is working for GATE.

"MUSING is an Integrated Project co-financed by the 6th Framework Programme of the European Union. Its mission is to shape next generation (Basel II & beyond) semantic-based Business Intelligence, bringing benefits particularly for the financial sector and SMEs by ensuring they have more effective access to credit. MUSING will impact positively on the processes of internationalisation, and empower companies to manage their operational risks more effectively" - they're running the above event details of which you can find here.

I'm interested that a bunch of text miners are focusing on BASEL II compliance and lauding XBRL which seems to be much in the news this week. I read an article in CACM entitled Costs and Benefits of XBRL Adoption: Early Evidence which had good empirical evidence, quoting reporting speed ups of 4x.

If you're interested in this area, there's a good read called Intelligence and Security Informatics for International Security which is now a Google book. My take on the book was that it showed just how ineffective semantic analysis was (70% success rate). I infer that summarisation would fare no better but what do I know.

Sign up - come along - should be a hoot.

Enterprise Computing Strategies Summit

The 451 Group have kindly invited me to speak at the above event on low latency and security. This will give me the opportunity to summarise the High Performance Computing journey that started in 2005 and put in perspective what has evolved over the last three years as we move towards increasingly automated electronic trading.

My approach will be to start with message orientated architectures and argue that they're superior to event driven when it comes to high volumes. Electronic trading mandates the move from end-of-day to real-time risk calculation and analysis - no mean feat. This led my forays into FPGA based Monte Carlo and the whole accelerated simulation idea being followed by various Investment Banks.

Depth Aggregator Market

Of real interest is pricing which used to be done the mid-market average and was becoming market-depth aware about 4-5 years ago. With internalisation and MiFID, we now, in theory, have multiple "exchanges" which we need to consult to ensure we are offering best price. This means depth from each exchange needs to be aggregated as point-to-point won't scale. This could be achieved by depth aggregation services - a nice little business opportunity for someone out there. Perhaps we'll see this sort of service being offered by a smart hosting provider?

Topic-based Multicast Architectures

Specific techniques to calculate in real time could be facilitated by topic based, multi-cast architectures with n of m threshold schemes ensuring data quality.

Visualisation, Social Networking, Idea Networks

Then perhaps looking at the part humans play in this (from trader to trading "intelligence" analyst who builds her idea based social networks) and what visualisation is needed.

Accelerated Hardware Market

I'm then going to summarise the whole accelerated hardware scene, looking at why it's not really going anywhere (apathy, lack of easy integration, no standards, esoteric languages etc) then show the true path (IMHO) - ie monadic languages that are highly parallelisable.

That should be a hoot and quite unique...