 Tom, welcome to ODSC India. Pleasure to have you here and thank you. You've traveled quite the distance all the way from Astoria That's right. Yes, 14 hours on the plane. Oh, yeah quite a long distance But you're been a busy man here. You're giving both a talk and a workshop. That's right So can you please tell us Sam what you're talking about what the workshops is on and let people know what your area of expertise is so my expertise is in finance and using you know Intelligent and automated systems in financial applications like trading systems and so on and my talk was really on RV there yet with fully automated intelligent fully autonomous trading systems and The short answer of the talk is not quite but I was basically giving a nice overview where we're already using AI in trading and Finance and also what are the roadblocks yet to come to like fully automated systems? so You know, there's some really interesting topics there and it's all a little bit different from your usual AI stuff and so The aim of that was also to show people what is different in finance then From conventional AI applications Yeah, excellent. I'm sure those were very well attended talk talks because them I don't think I've ever met a data scientist who wasn't interested in trying to make money on the stock market But it is quite difficult because you know traditional quant finance is based on you know statistics and Discrete math now you're moving into the world of continuous algorithms stuff like that, but like how far advanced is the hype over the reality like saying using machine learning for for finance Do you think there's some real? Gains being made there excuse the pun For sure. I mean there is quite a few applications in different areas But they're also usually very specific You know for example people use satellite imaging to track the number of cars in front of a shopping center and then look at like if there's a potential for the demise of that specific company and Trade on that or they look at the lids on oil tanks to see how Full all the oil storage spaces and then trade on trade the oil price on that So these are you know or sentiment analysis, so these are typical applications But you know we could take it a step further and say well We managed to beat the world chess champion the world gold champion in those things Couldn't be applied as to trading systems and people have tried that But we're still a while away from that for various reasons which I pointed out in my talk One of them is that we have we deal with a lot of noise in financial systems And another is that whilst you actually deploying these machines you are changing the rules of the game Which is not necessarily the case for chess or go and and as you change the rules of the game The machine has to adapt to that which is still a challenge for those systems. Oh very interesting for those people out there who are interested in Using their data science skills for finance. What are some good tools they can use? for that so obviously in terms of you know programming Programming languages Python learning that is really good because it's a language of data science and more and more in finance That's used as well So traditional languages like C++ are still strong, but Python is really on the rise and My workshop is actually about using one of the platforms called quantopian For basically building quant models and what's really good. There is there's already data provided for you As well as a platform where you can test your models So it takes all the really nitty-gritty hard work out But also the cost of market data is in fact really really high and usually permissible for Someone who wants to get into the field so you know that can really help people to get started in that area It's nice to help people to get into this track. Yeah, no, absolutely because Data-derived models and right without access to that data, then you're not gonna have any models of that Exactly. Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head because a lot of people are going into finance for the first time They don't realize The cost of this data and the licensing issues around and stuff like that What are some other good sources of financial data that people can use for their data science modeling that you know of? Well, I mean, there's obviously all the sources that you pay for which generally for as someone who wants to get started on their Own this is really expensive, you know, and then everyone knows the big names There's obviously more free sources. There's one called quadal, which is an open-source database There is also other Providers, you know, yahoo used to do this, but they're not doing it anymore And I think, you know, quadal is one of the really good ones At the moment, yeah, you know, there's a few other small ones, but I Can't actually think of any. Yeah, it's a bit of proud using them right now so much because I'm working with professionals I used to call used it's something called the Fred database the Federal Reserve Economic Database I think it's something like 400 times here is that so yes Fred is a really nice one to use as well for sure Excellent, and that's got quite a lot of things in there, of course So, I mean what's good with something like Quantobien is there's really a whole universe of equities and futures provided for you For free which I think is a great place to start. You would probably pay What's of a hundred thousand dollars a year to get your hands on those data? Yeah, and so how have you found ODSC India? You've been here two days now, right? Has been so far it was actually really really amazing I know India from my time spec when I arrived in Bombay and Or Mumbai now and now coming to Bangalore is a really different experiences. It's a lot more organized and clean here And and really pleasant and the conference is amazing I'm not saying this lightly, but I really think it's probably Definitely one of the most well-organized conferences I've ever been to so really really enjoyed this thanks the nourishment team Yeah, and the attendees like a very educated audience here. We're finding over the last couple days, which is great So Tom, thank you very much for coming to ODSC India from such a long distance Attending and speaking and doing a workshop. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me really pleasure to be here very welcome