HPC & AI on Wall Street: Covering the High Performance FinTech Landscape 

HPC & AI on Wall Street, one of the most important annual fintech conferences of the year, will take place next week at the Roosevelt Hotel, 45 E 45th St, New York City on Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 11 and 12. The conference this year has added a major focus on the challenges and opportunities AI offers to financial services companies.

Earlier this year, Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCWire, EnterpriseAI and Datanami, and BluSky investment management firm, New York, announced that the conference, formerly known as HPC on Wall Street, would include an expanded focus on AI while retaining its core emphasis on the opportunities and challenges of implementing advanced scale compute.

The one-and-a-half day program (details here) will cover the latest in high performance fintech software and on the demanding computational resources needed to drive advanced workloads. Topics will include the technical and organizational challenges involved in high performance AI implementations; bridging the gap between regulations, compliance, policy and innovation; new AI democratization technologies for easing machine learning onboarding; IoT and edge computing strategies; developments in cryptocurrency and blockchain; and new utilizations of machine learning for identifying venture investment opportunities.

“The decision to scale out HPC on Wall Street to include AI was the natural next step following the industry’s growing focus on AI,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications. “Across the spectrum of industry verticals we’re seeing a growing demand for AI coverage, and this is especially true in the FinTech market. By expanding the event to a one-and-a-half-day program that covers HPC as well as AI, this event is the singular source for IT professionals in the financial services segment.”

A feature of this year’s conference is a presentation on Thursday, Sept. 12 at 8:15 am EST from Hambrecht Ventures Partner and Chief Technology Officer Thomas Thurston, who will give an invited talk on “Using Data Science and AI to Guide Investment Decisions.”

Thurston, a global evangelist known for combining AI, HPC and data science, will discuss his innovative approach to identifying disruptive growth investment opportunities with an extraordinarily high rate of success. Since 2008 Thurston and his team have helped guide billions of dollars in growth efforts using machine learning, complex systems modeling and unstructured data mining.

Thurston and his teams’ system is designed to deliver objective insight into private businesses and markets that otherwise disclose little or no public data. He’ll share his thoughts, some of them counter-intuitive, on predictive factors for new business success, including elements that have less value than is generally thought, and how executives use augmented decision making as they grow their businesses.

The conference begins at noon on Wednesday, and the afternoon sessions will offer a panel line-up that includes “AI On-Prem HPC vs Hybrid Cloud – Management & Practices” led by industry analyst Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect 360 Research, and “AI + HPC in the Cloud - Management & Practices, “ moderated by Rick Sherlund, vice chairman, technology investment banking, Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Thursday morning, after Thurston’s presentation, Kristin Boggiano, founder of Women in Derivatives and chief legal officer of AlphaPoint, a technology provider in the security token and cryptocurrency space, will lead a panel on “Bridging the Gap Between Regulations, Compliance, Policy and Innovation.”

This will be followed by Sagar Gakwaid, director, Engineering Centre for Machine Learning at Capital One, who will discuss “Building High Performance Development Teams for HPC+AI,” with a focus on the building blocks for constructing high performance development teams and including such topics as hiring the right mix, the art of career coaching, rewarding culture enablers and scaling high performing teams.

At 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, processor vendor AMD Corporation will discuss innovative solutions to meet the challenges and possibilities in the digital age, followed at 3:15 by a session moderated by Michael Oros, executive director, Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), on “Storage Innovations for High Performance Workloads.”

At 4 p.m., Shahin Kahn, senior partner at Orion X, will lead a panel discussion on “Blockchain and Crypto Advances in Financial Services,” followed at 5 p.m. by a panel discussion led by Snell on “2020 Predictions in Financial Services.”