Title:

Playing with Data: my path from a Math & CS undergrad to leading a Deep Learning team in quantitative finance, with many stops along the way

Biography

Nikolai Yakovenko is a research lead at Point72, a large hedge fund headquartered in Connecticut, specializing in deep learning for quantitative research. He first got into the field by training deep learning models to play competitive poker. Poker being a long standing interest, both as a (human) player, and coding up strategies for computer opponents. Since catching the deep learning bug, Nikolai has been an applied deep learning researcher at Twitter and Nvidia, where he developed deep learning models for problems ranging from personalized recommendations and conversational AI, to resume parsing and computational genomics, as well as dabbling in computer vision. Nikolai will walk through his journey from learning to code at an early age, undergrad and graduate school in math and computer science, joining the Google Search team, and various other projects before catching the deep learning wave five or six years ago.