What’s better than one Datathon? How about two?!
On Friday April 19, Quantbot was thrilled to participate in Schonfeld’s Early Engagement Summit PhD Datathon. Using Code Willing’s dynamic data processing and modeling platform, PhDs from around the country worked in competing groups to find and model alpha signals from pre-determined datasets. This event gave PhD candidates, whose disciplines ranged from Mathematics and Statistics to Economics, the opportunity to test quantitative methods on real financial data, and to encourage their future engagement in the Quant space.
Ashar welcomes PhD candidates before the Schonfeld Datathon
Quantbot employee, Greg, mentors his team through the Schonfeld Datathon
The winning Schonfeld Datathon team
Since everything comes better in pairs, the very next day Quantbot sponsored a separate Datathon at Carnegie Mellon, also powered by Code Willing’s platform. Participating students came from either CMU’s Computational Finance Master’s program (MSCF) or their undergraduate Math program. It was a victory for MSCF since a group of their students took home the top prize, but the 2nd-place undergraduates were equally competitive. After introducing the students to each competition, Ashar Mahoob, Quantbot’s CIO, handed out the prizes on both days to the winning teams. We were thrilled to foster an interest in Quant Finance in all the students, from PhD to undergrad, and we hope they will consider it as a viable career option. We are excited to repeat our success in future!
Quantbot mentor, Rui, celebrates with her winning team at the CMU Datathon
The official victory photo of the CMU Datathon-winning team
Some thoughts from the Quantbot mentors:
Mentoring cwiq-team-central was extremely rewarding. They are a bright and enthusiastic group of students who worked together quite well and sought my guidance regularly. I think the most important lessons I hope the team took away are how rich the field of alpha research is in terms of the breadth of both datasets and the machine learning techniques that can be applied, and how powerful Quantbot’s platform is for quickly developing new ideas and evaluating their performance. – Greg Sternberg
It was a rewarding experience mentoring the winning team, cwiq-team-code. They were a group of motivated young professionals who were highly collaborative and eager to learn. I was amazed by the abundance of brilliant ideas they tested in such a short time. The Quantbot platform proved indispensable in handling these computationally heavy and data-intensive tasks. I hope this victory will inspire them to take on even more interesting and critical challenges that impact global markets – Rui Xiong, Datathon winning team mentor
And an afterword from our CIO, Ashar:
Quantbot Hackathon 2024 provided CMU’s Masters and Undergrad students a first-hand opportunity to work on a real-life alpha research project, under tight time and budget constraints, using real world datasets. I wish I had had an opportunity to participate in such a project when I was completing the MSCF program at CMU years ago. The students had a fun day of learning and competing. Additionally, all the mentors were very impressed by how well the students coordinated the research process and were able to come up with out-of-sample model performance that was in-line with observed performance in-sample.
On April 11th, members from Quantbot attended the annual Joy of Sake event at the Metropolitan Pavilion. Members got the opportunity to try traditional and new types of sake along with some amazing food from local NYC restaurants. They all had a great time at the event and can’t wait to attend next year.
On Thursday, February 29, members of the DTL team enjoyed the last days of skating at the iconic Bryant Park ice skating rink. It was a great night out and we are looking forward to more team outings as spring arrives!
On Monday February 12th, Quantbot had the opportunity to facilitate this month’s NYC Quantum Computing meetup in our office. This month’s presenter, Mani Chandra from nOhm, presented about “Efficient non-Ohmic Charge Transport in Two-dimensional semiconductors.”
Mani Chandra is the CEO of nOhm Devices, a new startup at MIT. He has a PhD in high-energy astrophysics from the University of Illinois. Some of his achievements include being awarded the Astronomy Department’s Chu award for research excellence and the Illinois Distinguished Fellow from the Urbana- Champaign.
Many people showed up to tonight’s talk and were able to collaborate and share their thoughts on the topic.
Here is a synopsis of tonight’s presenation: Charge transport in semiconductors is usually diffusive (“Ohmic”) due to electrons scattering off defects and phonons, as described by the textbook Ohm’s law. However, in sufficiently clean two-dimensional materials, Ohm’s law breaks down and gives rise to novel “non-Ohmic” charge transport regimes wherein electrons flow like a fluid. These novel regimes – ballistic and hydrodynamic transport – allow for the creation of highly-efficient electronic devices, with much lower power consumption and heat dissipation compared to current generation electronics (which are based on field-effect transistors). I will present an overview of transport physics in semiconductors and talk about our efforts to use non-Ohmic charge transport to design highly-efficient readout electronics that can be co-located with qubits and various quantum sensors in the innermost cryostage of dilution refrigerators, where the cooling power is limited to ~1 mW. The resulting integrated cryogenic electronics will enable the scaling up of quantum systems, similar to the historical progression from discrete transistors to integrated circuits.
On February 9th, Quantbot had the opportunity to attend to a lecture by Ahmar Mahboob about the nature of language and linguistics.
Prior to the lecture, Ahmar posed questions such as, “Is language a purely human ability or can other life forms learn language too?” and “Is language related to environment and climate change?”. By asking these questions, the main focus of the lecture was uncovered: to understand on a deeper level how language can impact personal and professional lives as well as address societal and environmental concerns.
Ahmar is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Some of Ahmar’s achievements include being a two time recipient of the President of Pakistan’s Award for Highly Qualified Overseas Pakistanis as well as being recognized as the field leader in English language and literature by the Australian Magazine. Additionally, his poetry was inducted into the Australian Poetry Hall of Fame in 2021.
Thank you Ahmar for a great presentation!
