Dr. Paul Bilokon is CEO and Founder of Thalesians Ltd and an expert in electronic and algorithmic trading across multiple asset classes, having helped build such businesses at Deutsche Bank and Citigroup. Before focussing on electronic trading, Paul worked on derivatives and has served in quantitative roles at Nomura, Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley. Paul has been educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, and Imperial College. Apart from mathematical and computational finance, his academic interests include machine learning and mathematical logic.

Francesca Lazzeri is a machine learning scientist on the cloud advocacy team at Microsoft. An expert in big data technology innovations and the applications of machine learning-based solutions to real-world problems, she has worked with these issues in a wide range of industries, including energy, oil and gas, retail, aerospace, healthcare, and professional services. Previously, she was a research fellow in business economics at Harvard Business School, where she performed statistical and econometric analysis within the Technology and Operations Management Unit and worked on multiple patent data-driven projects to investigate and measure the impact of external knowledge networks on companies’ competitiveness and innovation. Francesca periodically teaches applied analytics and machine learning classes at universities in USA and Europe. and is a mentor for PhD and postdoc students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She enjoys speaking at academic and industry conferences to share her knowledge and passion for AI, machine learning, and coding. Francesca holds a PhD in innovation management.

Dr Antoine Jacquier: Reader in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London

His research interests are in Probability and Mathematical Finance. He is particularly interested in large deviations methods and asymptotic expansions for stochastic processes, and their applications to volatility modelling.

He also works on applications of Deep Learning and Quantum Computing in Mathematical Finance.

His personal webpage can be found at www2.imperial.ac.uk/~ajacquie/

Olga Petrova: AI Product Manager, Scaleway

A former theoretical physicist turned machine learning engineer, Olga is now building a smart data annotation platform at Scaleway as a technical product manager. On the community side, she enjoys blogging about the latest advancements in AI both in and out of working hours. Some of her writing can be seen on medium.com/@olgapetrova_92798

Terry Benzschawel is the Founder and Principal of Benzschawel Scientific, LLC. The former Managing Director in Citigroup’s Institutional Clients Business. Terry headed the Credit Trading Analysis group which develops and implements quantitative tools and strategies for credit market trading and risk management, both for Citi’s clients and for in-house applications. Some sample tools include models of corporate default and recovery values, relative value of corporate bonds, loans, and credit default swaps, credit portfolio optimization, credit derivative trades, capital structure arbitrage, measuring and hedging liquidity risk, and cross-credit-sector asset allocation.

After six years of post-doctoral research in academia and industry and two years in consumer banking, Terry began his investment banking career in at Salomon Brothers in 1992. Terry built models for proprietary arbitrage trading in bonds, currencies and derivative securities in Salomon’s Fixed Income Arbitrage Group. In 1998, he moved to the Fixed Income Strategy department as a credit strategist with a focus on client-oriented solutions across all credit markets and has worked in related roles since then. Terry was promoted to Managing Director at Citi in 2008.

Terry received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Indiana University (1980) and his B.A. (with Distinction) from the University of Wisconsin (1975). Terry has done post-doctoral fellowships in Optometry at the University of California at Berkeley and in Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was a visiting scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center prior to embarking on a career in finance. He currently serves on the steering committees of the Masters of Financial Engineering Programs at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles and Carnegie Mellon University’s Computational Finance Program.

Terry is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events and has lectured on credit modelling at major universities. In addition, he has published over a dozen articles in refereed journals and is author of CREDIT MODELING: FACTS, THEORIES AND APPLICATIONS. In addition, Terry has been the instructor for courses in credit modelling for Incisive Media and the Centre for Finance Professionals. Finally, Terry has taught a course on credit modelling at Russia’s Sberbank in Moscow.

Toby Weston: Quantitative Analyst, NatWest Markets

Saeed Amen: Founder: Cuemacro

Helyette GEMAN is a Professor of Mathematical Finance at Birkbeck – University of London and at Johns Hopkins University. She is a Graduate of Ecole Normale Supérieure in Mathematics, holds a Masters degree in Theoretical Physics, a PhD in Probability from the University Pierre et Marie Curie and a PhD in Finance from the University Pantheon Sorbonne.

She has been a scientific advisor to a number of major energy and mining companies for the last 20 years, covering the trading of crude oil, natural gas, electricity as well as metals in companies such as EDF Trading, Louis Dreyfus or BHP Billiton and was named in 2004 in the Hall of Fame of Energy Risk.

Prof Geman was previously the head of Research and Development at Caisse des Depots. She has published more than 140 papers in major finance journals including the Journal of Finance, Mathematical Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Banking and Finance and Journal of Business. She has also written the book entitled Insurance and Weather Derivatives and is a Member of Honor of the French Society of Actuaries.

Her research includes exotic option pricing for which she got the first prize of the Merrill Lynch awards, asset price modeling through the introduction of transaction time (JOF, 2000); she is one of the authors of the CGMY pure jump Levy model (2002). Prof Geman had organized in 2000 at College de France the first meeting of the Bachelier Finance Society, with Paul Samuelson, Robert Merton and Henry McKean as keynote speakers.

Her book, ‘Commodities and Commodity Derivatives’ is the reference in the field. She was a Scientific Expert on Agriculture for the European Commission and is on the Board of the Bloomberg Commodity Index.
She counts among her numerous PhD students Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan