Even though we had the biggest financial breakdown since the great depression, so far no fundamental changes that I know of to our economic system have been implemented. It sets us up for a similar crisis in the future. This is the first Future Salon in a series where we are looking at alternative economic solutions.
One of the problems was, that even Moody's and Standard & Poor's AAA rated companies were falling. Their risk assessment was useless. This month's Future Salon speakers are working on solving that problem by bringing transparency and competition to risk assessment.
Please join us at the FreeRisk Future Salon on Thursday the 20th of August 6pm please RSVP http://budurl.com/j6n2.
Abstract:
Internet entrepreneurship, and increasingly low margins have made new classes of companies possible. Public-private partnership firms designed around the idea of becoming benevolent natural monopolies. These companies leverage the massive consolidation and centrality possible in a networked environment to obtain market power to create institutions that can innovate at a private industry scales, but by virtue of their openness and transparency can achieve governmental levels of responsibility.
There’s more to this story than just exploiting network effects. The current administration has prioritized working with the private industry as a means to achieving its goals while leveraging the creativity and capital of the private sector,
We will survey the landscape, starting with our own firm:
Financial technology – something we all thought was complete – has been upended. Fundamental assumptions have been exposed as faulty. And now we have the opportunity to recreate our finance industry from the bottom up. We have a choice: a path of openness and information sharing, or more opacity and secrecy.
We will show you the potential of an open approach to assessing corporate credit risk by supplying corporate financial information that can be openly analyzed, avoiding conflicts that have been exposed in the current market.
With our latest project, FreeRisk, we aggregate accurate, accredited risk data, enabling users to generate crowd-sourced algorithms to analyze credit risk and allowing anyone to view the results of these algorithms. FreeRisk aggregates both all standardized XBRL data and public-domain financial data, as well as user-generated content incorporating unstructured data released in financial reports like footnotes, critical to accurate risk assessment. This system allows credit evaluators to focus exclusively on creating and applying risk analytics, instead of working through the complex data management tasks traditionally required to solve these problems or relying on black-box credit ratings.
Speaker bios:
Jesper Andersen is the co-founder of Freerisk and is a statistician, computer scientist and entrepreneur.
He is currently a consultant with the Open Data Group, focusing on machine learning, risk assessment and artificial intelligence systems. He's spoken internationally on finance and statistical systems and is the founder of Certainty Labs, a startup focusing on making complex statistical modeling simpler. Previously he was the lead architect at Visible Path which was sold in 2008.
Jesper holds a B.Sc. in Physics from Haverford College and an M.B.A. from University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, where he received the “Most Promising Entrepreneur” award in 2008.
He currently holds the title of Data Magnate at Metaweb Technologies,
where he works on large-scale data reconciliation problems. Prior to
Metaweb he founded Incellico, a biotechnology software company, which
was acquired in 2003. Toby holds a B.Sc in Computer Science from MIT and is deemed a “Person of Exceptional Ability” by the USCIS.
He loves applying data-analysis algorithms to everything ranging from
pharmaceutical trials to online dating to financial risk models. Toby Segaran is the co-founder of Freerisk and is the author of the O’Reilly title, “Programming Collective Intelligence”,
Amazon’s top-selling AI book. He frequently speaks on the subjects of
machine learning, collective intelligence and freedom of data at
conferences worldwide.
Future Salons have the following structure: 6-7pm is networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP; 7-9+pm is the presentation followed by questions and discussion.
SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross or Cafeteria depending on number of RSVPs. SAP is located at 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304[map]. Free and open to the public. Please spread the word and invite others, but be sure to RSVP http://budurl.com/j6n2 so we know how many people to expect.