Workshop on the Next Generation Financial Cyberinfrastructure

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

The Great Recession of 2008, and its reverberations that are being felt all over the world even several years later, have highlighted significant limitations in the ability of regulators and analysts/researchers to monitor and model the national and global financial ecosystem. Specifically, there is an urgent need for financial cyberinfrastructure to ingest and process numerous streams of financial transactions, as well as the accompanying data streams of economic activity, in real time. Also absent are open standards and shared semantics so that this data can be used to populate models of individual markets, financial networks and the interconnected ecosystem representing the global financial system. This calls for focused efforts aimed at developing computational research frameworks, models and methods, as well as the necessary cyberinfrastructure for regulating systemic risk in financial systems on par with efforts in other areas of national priority. Against this background, this workshop (and related activities) aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of academics in Computer Science, Finance, Economics and Social Sciences to work closely with the OFR and other regulatory agencies, and the financial and the computing industrises to: (1) Develop a blueprint for next generation financial cyberinfrastructure for regulating and mitigating systemic risk in financial markets (2) Identify the computational research challenges that need to be addressed in order to realize a cyber-enabled framework for regulating systemic risk; (3) Develop best practices for a cyber-enabled regulatory framework; and (4) Prepare a diverse cadre of PhD students to pursue multi-disciplinary research in Finance Informatics. A one and a half day workshop will be organized in Washington D.C. A doctoral consortium will be held concurrently with the workshop and continued at the University of Maryland. The doctoral consortium will be aimed at graduate students with strong backgrounds in mathematics and computer science and an interest in some aspect of finance informatics. The doctoral consortium participants will be exposed to a multi-disciplinary curriculum that reflects many of research areas and methodologies that are discussed in the report on computational research challenges. The workshop report will be widely disseminated through a variety of venues.