Event Summary
Today’s financial markets are deeply dependent on technology to improve their function and enable expanded access to all participants. But why is technology so fundamental to modern markets? In this month’s Austin Forum, Optiver’s Scott Richardson and Luke Wilson will walk us through the role of financial markets in today’s society and how technologies, like machine learning and reprogrammable hardware, make modern financial markets possible.
Speaker
Scott Richardson, Managing Partner-Austin, Optiver
Scott Richardson is the managing partner of Optiver’s Austin office. Optiver is a global proprietary trading firm. In Austin, we develop and run ML-based algorithmic trading strategies in world futures markets. This offices serves as a global HQ for Optiver’s quantitative research and hardware research/engineering. Before moving with Optiver to Austin, Scott ran various algorithmic trading groups at Optiver in Chicago.
Luke Wilson, Chief Data Scientist, Vizias
Luke has spent the last 20 years advancing the state of the art in high performance computing and artificial intelligence through roles in academia, finance, and technology.
In 2005 Luke joined the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and The University of Texas at Austin as a member of HPC research staff and lecturer in the Department of Statistics and Scientific Computation. While at TACC Luke helped in the design, deployment, operations, and programming of more than a dozen Top500 systems from vendors such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and Cray. In 2016 Luke became Director of Training and Professional Development at TACC and developed the successful and popular TACC Institute Series of week-long training courses in HPC, Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, HPC Administration, and HPC Leadership. In 2017 Luke made the move to Dell Technologies, where he served as Chief Data Scientist and Distinguished Engineer for HPC/AI in the Infrastructure Solutions Group. While at Dell Luke led the development and publication of dozens of patents in areas such as infrastructure configuration, cloud computing, and containerization.
In 2022 Luke joined market maker and high-frequency trading firm Optiver as Head of Global Research Infrastructure, where he let a global team advancing their compute, storage, networking, and software strategies and deployments. Luke holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at San Antonio and has worked on many high-profile projects, including providing data processing support for the Nobel Prize-winning LIGO project and introducing performance and parallel scaling optimizations for early transformer neural networks, paving the way for technologies like GPT-3/ChatGPT. He is the author of more than two dozen peer-reviewed research papers. Outside of work Luke enjoys science fiction and superhero movies, classical history and Egyptology, golf, and spending time with his wife and 2 children.