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The latest issue of Wired has an interesting article about a 29 year old mathematician who is using crowd sourced machine learning to manage hedge funds.
Richard Craib is a 29-year-old South African who runs a hedge fund in San Francisco. Or rather, he doesn't run it. He leaves that to an artificially intelligent system built by several thousand data scientists whose names he doesn't know.
Under the banner of a startup called Numerai, Craib and his team have built technology that masks the fund's trading data before sharing it with a vast community of anonymous data scientists. Using a method similar to homomorphic encryption, this tech works to ensure that the scientists can't see the details of the company's proprietary trades, but also organizes the data so that these scientists can build machine learning models that analyze it and, in theory, learn better ways of trading financial securities.
"We give away all our data," says Craib, who studied mathematics at Cornell University in New York before going to work for an asset management firm in South Africa. "But we convert it into this abstract form where people can build machine learning models for the data without really knowing what they're doing."
He doesn't know these data scientists because he recruits them online and pays them for their trouble in a digital currency that can preserve anonymity. "Anyone can submit predictions back to us," he says. "If they work, we pay them in bitcoin."
So, to sum up: They aren't privy to his data. He isn't privy to them. And because they work from encrypted data, they can't use their machine learning models on other data—and neither can he. But Craib believes the blind can lead the blind to a better hedge fund.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Sunday December 18 2016, @04:56PM
Because it's not an either or proposition and the current situation is neither. The money mostly gets taken by plutocrats that contribute nothing of value to the country at the expense of the innovators and producers.
Giving it to the government in order to pay for things like infrastructure, education, healthcare and and other things that grow the economy would be a huge improvement over the current situation where we're being held hostage by a group of plutocrats that whine because they're only very wealthy rather than really, really, ridiculously wealthy.
The short sighted measures that they demand in order to keep jobs here cost us huge amounts of money when the taxpayers ultimately have to pay for the negative externalities and consequences of the anti-social behaviors exhibited by most corporations.
The worst of it though is that it impedes other companies that want to go into those markets as they now have to compete with companies that have grown to the point where there's no way of growing large enough fast enough to compete. Many of those companies grew large by violating antitrust laws while the DoJ turned a blind eye. Neither Apple nor Google was taken to task for their antitrust violations. And Intel only got a slap on the wrist after it was really too late to make a meaningful difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:08PM
Giving it to the government in order to pay for things like infrastructure, education, healthcare and and other things that grow the economy
Higher salaries and richer pensions for government workers, who are already the most pampered in the entire economy.
group of plutocrats that whine because they're only very wealthy rather than really, really, ridiculously wealthy.
Not arguing the term "plutocrats", but they don't whine about it. This is their calling, what gets them up in the morning.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:23PM
Government workers are not the highest paid in the country. I am a government worker and most of us make less than our private sector counterparts do. And by a considerable margin. I'm making less than half what I would be making in the private sector.
I'm not sure where people get the idea that we're overpaid comes from, but it's not true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:19PM
Have you noticed that voters in red states often elect a Democratic governor, and voters in blue states often elect a Republican?
I think it's because voters in red states want to ensure a certain level of services in their state, that the environment does not get trashed, laws aren't set up to discriminate against gays, etc.
And voters in blue states are tired of state workers taking a ride on their dime with incredibly generous pensions (which they insist are "paid in", but guess by who - the taxpayers again), vacation, and sick leave policy. And nieces and nephews getting fixed up with do-little jobs on the public payroll.
Newsflash: most workers in corporate America don't get to roll over their vacation days anymore, and we never could roll over sick days. And we don't get 12-15 sick days a year or whatever state employees get.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Francis on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:36PM
The issue there isn't the state workers, the issue there is that the politicians keep going out of their way to damage labor's negotiating power.
Allowing plutocrats to keep their spoils is a large part of the problem. Back when tax rates went to above 70% for the top tier income earners there was little incentive to wring every possible cent out of a business.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:38PM
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:13PM
Government workers are not the highest paid in the country. I am a government worker and most of us make less than our private sector counterparts do. And by a considerable margin. I'm making less than half what I would be making in the private sector.
I'm not sure where people get the idea that we're overpaid comes from, but it's not true.
Well, I haven't been given enough information. You may still be very overpaid simply because you don't do much or do what you do very poorly. You might even owe society money because your job inflicts net harm on society.