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Type of Talk: UTCS Collo

quium/AI

Speaker/Affiliation:Astro Teller/Cerebellum Capital, Inc

.

Date/Time:Thursday, February 25, 2010, 11 a.m.

Locati

on:ACES 2.402

Host: Peter Stone

Talk Title: Time Traveling A

nd Other Small Problems of AI-Based Finance

Talk Abstract:

Ima

gine a domain so hard that not only do people believe computers can''t
do it - many people believe even people can''t do it. And this despite
existence proofs. A domain structured as a worldwide 24/7 competition in<

br />which more than 2 billion people compete directly or indirectly. A sin

gle
competition that allows participants tens of thousands of choices<

br />thousands of times per second and allows competitors to act anywhere o

n a
time frequency range from a microsecond to a year. A domain in whi

ch data
is everything and no one has ground truth. A domain which is e

ntirely path
dependent, has only one history, and in which control e

xperiments are
nearly impossible. A competition in which more than $20
trillion dollars
are at stake. The field of quantitative finance, wh

ile it has attracted
criticism over the past few years, is an enormou

sly rich domain for
computer science - full of unsolved problems that

require both new science
and innovative engineering. Cerebellum Capita

l was founded not to create a
platform for smart people to build fast

arbitrage systems for making money
on the markets, but to architect a

nd build a software system capable of
structural search in trading str

ategy space - a system capable of
autonomously finding, testing, ref

ining, launching, improving, and when
necessary decommissioning nov

el trading strategies. This talk will give a
tour of the challenges an

d opportunities we have found as a group of
outsiders approaching this
domain as a computer science problem.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Astro T

eller is co-founder and CEO of Cerebellum Capital, a hedge
fund manag

ement firm whose investments are continuously designed,
executed, an

d improved by a software system based on techniques from
statistical m

achine learning. Astro is also co-founder and Chairman of
BodyMedia,

Inc, a leading wearable body monitoring company. From 1999 to
2007,

Dr. Teller was also Chief Executive Officer of BodyMedia, Inc. Prior

to starting BodyMedia in 1999, Dr. Teller was co-founder, Chairman, and<

br />CEO of Sandbox Advanced Development, an advanced development technolo

gy
company. Before his tenure as a business executive, Dr. Teller tau

ght at
Stanford University and was an engineer and researcher for Phoe

nix Laser
Technologies, Stanford''s Center for Integrated Systems, a

nd The Carnegie
Group Incorporated. Dr. Teller holds a Bachelor of Sci

ence in computer
science from Stanford University, Masters of Science
in symbolic and
heuristic computation, also from Stanford University

, and a Ph.D. in
artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon Univers

ity, where he was a
recipient of the Hertz fellowship. As a respected
scientist and seasoned
entrepreneur, Teller has successfully created
and grown five organizations
and holds numerous patents related to hi

s work in hardware and software
technology. Dr. Teller''s work in scie

nce, literature, art, and business
has appeared in international me

dia from the New York Times to CNN to
NPR''s "All Things Conside

red." Teller regularly gives invited talks for
national and inte

rnational technology, government, and business forums on
the subject
of the future of intelligent technology.