Research talk 7 - Artificial intelligence for Wall Street

Dr. James Zhang is a senior engineer from the R&D Machine Learning team in Bloomberg. In this talk he spoke on the applications of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing on finance, which add value to the huge streams of real-time data being generated by the global financial markets.

James talked about some examples in the real world which reflect the characteristics of fintech. As the stock price is very sensitive to the media, a highly responsive system is needed to capture any possible important news and extract the information of interest. Like in a example James gave, the shares of a stock surged more than 20% just two minutes after a important report was announced. What also worth-noting is that the key content is actually hidden within only a few sentences, which requires strong natural language processing techniques to pinpoint.

He also showed some other interesting problems in Bloomberg, such as analyzing and making predictions from millions of news stories and social media messages each day.