NEWS BRIEFS
Ithaca, N.Y. — The Financial Industry Solutions Center (FISC) is offering Fall 2000 seminars and training workshops during November and December at its headquarters in Manhattan’s financial district. These include lectures and hands-on training in computational finance delivered by leading academic practitioners from academia and industry in a state-of-the-art laboratory environment. Participants will have the opportunity to gain fresh insight into some of the most important theoretical and computational models currently used for financial analysis.
FISC is a joint venture of the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) and SGI dedicated to working with the financial community on solving challenging computational problems in risk management, financial engineering, and business intelligence. FISC headquarters are located on the 3rd Floor of 55 Broad St. in Manhattan’s Financial District.
The first FISC fall workshop, “An Overview Of Modern Data Mining Technology,” will take place on Wednesday, November 8. Cornell computer science professor Johannes Gehrke will lead this introductory program. Participants will learn the basics of data mining, including gaining hands-on experience with data mining model construction through concrete data analysis examples using SGI’s MineSet software.
Later in the month, Peter Forsyth and Ken Vetzal from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, will present the program, “Shouts, Barriers, and Other Exotics: Getting the Price Right.” This course, given on November 29 and 3, will focus on numerical methods for pricing path-dependent options based on discretization of the PDE. Participants will devote their mornings to theory, while the afternoons will consist of “hands on” Matlab exercises.
The FISC Financial Seminars are a series of evening talks that cover a variety of topics relating to financial engineering and computational finance. These lectures are presented at the 55 Broad facility from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. They are free and open to the public.
The next seminar takes place Tuesday, November 14. Peter Maillet from JP Morgan will present “E-finance Transforms: A View of its Impact on Wholesale Financial Services.” Maillet, a managing director, is responsible for B2B Markets practice in LabMorgan, the e-finance catalyst, incubator, and venture capital unit of J.P. Morgan. He will present his perspective on how the value chain of the future is being re-engineered.
The December Seminar will be “An Overview of Bandwidth Trading and Why It Should be Utilized,” presented by Ron Banaszek and Elena Curtis from TFS Energy L.L.C. Telecom Group on Tuesday, December 5. This program will cover the history of bandwidth trading and its relationship to Risk Management, Cost efficiencies, and Market coverage.
A list of FISC programs, including workshops and seminars, can be seen at http://www.fisc-ny.com/seminars.html , which also provides advance registration.
FISC offers the financial community the latest parallel computing and visualization technologies from SGI combined with leading financial modeling and computational finance expertise from Cornell. FISC provides global financial services, investment, mortgage, insurance and banking firms with an environment to develop and test their own proprietary solutions and optimize software with the help of on-site hardware systems engineers and software engineers.
CTC is a high-performance computing and interdisciplinary research center focused on making parallel computing a usable tool for computational science and engineering.
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