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posted by janrinok on Sunday December 18 2016, @02:55PM   Printer-friendly

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.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:21PM (#442719)

    Many people here cannot read Wired articles. Wired chooses to reveal the articles only if you allow their advertising network to download images and run code on your PC. Think about that for a minute - you have to let random, unknown, people download and run unknown programs on your PC. Yikes!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @03:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @03:29AM (#442932)

    After you read a screen/page of the article, do a page-down and when the block comes up, close the tab. Come back to Soylent and open the wired link again. It will open to the screen that you paged-down to

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @01:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @01:55PM (#443118)

    I am not sure about that - I can read Wired articles just fine using TOR and with most / many things blocked.