Date/Time: Monday November 16 at 5pm

Location: Mudd 3514

ABSTRACT:

Shrouded in secrecy, modern financial markets are driven less by traditional finance than by bleeding-edge engineering built to route information around the globe and extract predictive signals from what looks like pure noise. In this interactive Q&A -- one of the rare conversations you genuinely cannot have with Claude or its cousins -- we'll peek inside a world where simple questions like "What is a price?" unlock immense technical complexity across physics, low-latency networking, machine learning, and systems architecture.

BIO:

Darko Kirovski earned his PhD in VLSI CAD from UCLA a quarter-century ago. He then spent a decade at Microsoft Research, split between the cryptography and machine learning teams, focusing on systems research. After that came nearly 1/6 of a century as a quant in Jump Trading's jcs group, one of the world's premier market makers. Since leaving last April, being benched by a non-compete agreement, he has spent his time looxxmaxxing, running some wild machine learning experiments, and reading the most-awesomest book ever, Terra by Anthony Kowalski.