The unusual AI competition getting students internships at top HFT firms
If you want to stand out in the AI and quantitative finance space, it's not unusual to participate in competitions like hackathons and math Olympiads. Alternatively, you can make the competition itself.
The ACM international conference on AI in finance (ICAIF) has issued an open call for competition ideas for its upcoming conference this November. The ideas, which must be kept to four pages, will be judged on "impact, originality, and relevance to the ICAIF community." Successful ideas will be turned into a competition at the event itself. Ideas that provide "positive social impacts," will receive precedence.
The ICAIF's 'competition to provide a competition' has some illustrious judges in the form of Naftali Cohen, a quant and senior data scientist from hedge fund Schonfeld, and Vamsi Potluru, a JPMorgan AI research director whose work with the firm includes the application of synthetic data.
Winners of last year's competition suggest that writing a competition can itself help your career. Of four competitions at ICAIF in 2023, one was organized by a JPMorgan research scientist, one by an ex-Bank of America director, one by UCL and Edinburgh university professors, but the last, interestingly, was on Financial Reinforcement Learning, and was organized by students. It involved using reinforcement learning, an AI technique focused on trial and error, to create a data-centric stock trading model, and build lightweight order execution systems.
Reinforcement learning is a niche in the quantitative finance field, but it has its fans. One is Goldman Sachs EMEA head of applied AI Francesco Maria Delle Fave, who said at last year's Quant Strats conference that it is particularly useful in derivatives trading and executions.
Since the proposal of the competition, many of the students involved in its creation have gone on to impressive internships in finance, with three starting last month. Ethan Havemann of the core organizing team started a software engineering internship at high frequency trading firm Optiver. Steve Ewald of the platform team joined IMC Trading, another HFT firm. Andrew Li of the platform team started an engineering internship at Capital One, a bank investing heavily in AI research. Havemann announced his internship shortly after submissions for the competition opened, while Ewald announced his shortly after the winner was announced.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @AlexMcMurray. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
