Mission

Helping Finance Professionals Understand and Use Data

The Financial Data Science Association was formed out of a recognized need to bridge the gap between Financial Economics and the emerging field of modern Data Science and Machine Learning/AI research. Innovations across Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and the commoditization of cutting-edge statistical methods through scalable platforms and tool-kits are allowing organizations both large and small to gain efficiency and competitive improvements by leveraging their data resources.

Organization Structure

Started in 2015, FDSA is a Social Enterprise registered in Scotland, and operating on a global scale. Our directors have geographic representation across Europe and North America, and our events continue to include more diverse crowds, both culturally and intellectually. FDSA’s stewardship and membership structure is based around contributions to the mission of the organization. So, the more one is involved with organizing events, presenting, teaching, sponsoring, researching, drafting whitepapers, and so on, the larger their “ownership” of the organization. Membership is therefore by invitation, although we encourage those who have contributed to apply for recognition by emailing us at members@fdsaglobal.org. Sponsorship will be recognized with a number of individual memberships, dependent upon the tier and organization type of the sponsor.

Leadership

Chairmanship of the organization rotates on a yearly basis on October 1st. The Chairman-elect is chosen from the active Board of Directors. Members of Distinction may apply to the Board of Directors, and will be considered as and when vacancies appear.

Chairman

James Hodson co-founded the AI for Good Foundation (www.ai4good.org), he is an Early Stage Researcher at the Jozef Stefan Institute AI Lab (www.ailab.ijs.si), and is scientifically involved in US and European research projects. James advises a select set of promising early-stage data and AI-driven companies in the US, Europe, and beyond. Previously, James directed AI research at Bloomberg LP in New York, leading a large team in a rich cross-disciplinary research agenda.

Board of Directors

Damian Borth is Director of the Deep Learning Competence Center at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern and co-founder of Sociovestix Labs, a social enterprise in the area of financial data science. Damian’s research focuses on large-scale multimedia opinion mining applying deep learning to mine insights from online media streams. His work has been awarded the Best Paper Award at ACM ICMR, the McKinsey Business Technology Award, and a Google Research Award.

Anastassia Fedyk is a researcher in finance and economics at Harvard University. Her research focuses on behavioral biases in individual and group decision-making, and how limited attention and imperfect information processing affect market reactions to news. Previously, Anastassia was a researcher and portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, where she built regime-switching models, low latency equity trading strategies, and news-based sentiment indicators for the credit markets.

Marko Grobelnik works in the area of artificial intelligence with emphasis on Data/Text Mining, Semantic Technologies, Network Analysis, and Complex Data Visualization. He collaborates with major European and US academic institutions and industry partners such as BT, Microsoft Research, NYT, Bloomberg, and Accenture. Marko has authored many scientific papers and books in the area of machine learning, data mining, text mining and semantic technologies. He is CEO of Quintelligence and co-founder of Cycorp Europe.

Andreas Hoepner is an Associate Professor of Finance at the ICMA Centre of Henley Business School and was FDSA’s first Chairman (2015-2016). He is currently heading the ‘Practical Tools’ research group of the Mistra Financial Systems (MFS) research consortium. Dr. Hoepner sits on independent assessment committees for the Investment & Pensions Europe (IPE) Awards (Categories: Climate Change Risk, ESG, Smart Beta), the Investment Innovation Benchmark (IIB), and the RI Awards. He sits on advisory boards for Bank J. Safra Sarasin, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and the French Social Investment Forum (FIR).

Rupini Deepa is a Doctoral Researcher of Finance at the ICMA Centre, Henley Business School. Her primary research is in Responsible Investment (RI). She has been an invited speaker at the United Nations-supported initiative, Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) Critical ESG Themes event in London and the Research, Innovation and Stewardship in RI event in New York in 2015. Rupini is currently the Secretary to the Assessment Committee of the Investment Innovation Benchmark (IIB) initiative, and assisted in consulting organisations including the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the University of Cambridge’s Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL).