Class description

As the world of finance attempts to understand what brought our country’s economy to the brink in 2008, and as federal regulators seek out new strategies to avoid or manage future crises, it is evident that “systemic analysis” methodologies are required to model “systemic events”. The financial world is a closely interlinked Web of financial entities and networks, supply chains and financial ecosystems, where multiple financial entities may be counterparties to a complex financial contract. Financial analysts, regulators and academic researchers recognize that they must address the unprecedented and unfamiliar challenges of monitoring, integrating, and analyzing data at scale.

• Regulators, analysts, and the financial press are denied an understanding of capital market operations sufficient to forge knowledgeable and prudent financial policy.
• Business analysts are uncertain of the quality of their internal risk and accounting numbers.
• The academic community is lacking the information required to examine and analyze actual market operations and behavior.
• The public lacks the information to make sound financial decisions reducing confidence in our financial systems and increasing the risk of bank runs and systemic crisis.

Financial risk and information managers are gradually recognizing the concepts of metadata management, precise data definitions based on ontologies, and semantic models and knowledge representation as essential strategic objectives. These same concerns apply with equal urgency to the financial regulators tasked with understanding individual firms and the overall system. A sound data infrastructure and open standards are necessary, both for effective regulation and for coordinating industry efforts.

A compelling technical outcome is that there will be increasing synergy from applying computational technology, BIGDATA and Linked Data, social networks and social media, to address difficult modeling and monitoring problems in financial ecosystems. This may result in improved tools for regulators to monitor financial systems as well as fundamentally new designs of market mechanisms, new ways to reach consumers, new ways to exploit the wisdom of the crowds to review and rate financial products, to make recommendations, etc.

Who should take this class? The ideal student will have the following characteristics:

• An interest in new information management technologies including semantic technologies, metadata and ontologies.
• BMGT Senior
• Double major in IS and Finance or IS and Accounting.
• Completed BMGT 302 and 402 with a grade of B+ or better.
• Computer Science of Computer Engineering Senior who has taken CMSC 424 or equivalent.
• MS in Finance or MS in IS students with a basic understanding of programming and database management.

Please contact me by email louiqa@umiacs.umd.edu before you enroll.

Topics

• Knowledge representation and ontologies.
• Financial Industry Business Ontology FIBO
• Semantic web and semantic technologies.
• Entity identification, record linkage and de-duplication and Legal entity identifiers (LEI).
• Text processing and extraction and text mining of financial records.
• Mortgage securitization, MERS and the mortgage supply chain.

Logistics:

• This course will meet for 5 sessions from Tuesday April 1 through April 29.
• Before each session, students will be responsible for viewing a video or slide presentation and reading several papers.
• Each student will generate questions about the material and this will be the basis for the class discussion.
• There will be guest lectures and presentations on software.

Course grades will be determined using the following elements:

• Weekly questions; Class participation; Comments after lecture.
• Presentation
• Research Project and 12 page paper.