At Stevens, research is a quintessential aspect of the institution. Undergraduates, master’s students, doctoral candidates, and professors have access to laboratories and facilities to research topics across many disciplines. Over the past year, a new project to bolster research began under the School of Business; The Center for Research Toward Advancing Financial Technologies (CRAFT) is the first financial technology research center supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Starting in the summer of 2021, CRAFT has grown into a hub of technical investments, portfolio management, market stress-testing, and probing of societal issues like equity and fairness. Earlier this year, CRAFT hired its first Chief Research Officer and began to fund and research an initial suite of financial technology. As the capstone for the organization, CRAFT hosted its Fall 2022 Industry Advisory Board Meeting here in Hoboken on the Stevens campus. Two projects featured at the conference involve a collaboration of Stevens students and faculty and are working on developments to further financial technology.
One of these projects is investigating emerging quantum technologies and their ability to aid financial investors, portfolio managers, and industry professionals in their decision-making processes and improve automated systems. Associate Professor of Business, Zhenyu Cui, here at Stevens is the lead investigator on the project. He says, “There are strong industry needs for faster computing, stronger security, and better scalability in big-data finance […] Quantum processes may help provide that.” One of the most beneficial factors of this project, says Nadine van Son, a senior consultant at CapGemini, is that it combines the research and academic backgrounds of those at Stevens with the industry experience of field professionals. Van Son emphasizes that “this synchronization of academic research and industry knowledge is very important.”
The other CRAFT project that features cooperation between industry professionals and individuals at Stevens focuses on a more social aspect of financial technology. In particular, Assistant Professor of Business and leader on the project Jia Xu at Stevens says, “AI-driven systems are not yet very good at explaining the ‘why’ of their predictions and decisions […] Most AI is not very transparent at all. It’s often mostly a ‘black box.’” Xu and her team want to find the computational biases involved in the automation and AI systems of the financial world. Specifically, they are looking into the subconscious judgments made due to computational ambiguity and their impacts on personal loan extension or denial decisions from automated systems. Like Cui’s team, Xu’s team will be working with industry data in partnership with academic research techniques to find the patterns in financial computations with the hopes of preventing minority groups from being denied access to loans because of the lack of system transparency.
Since its creation in the summer of 2021, CRAFT has been helping follow and drive the revolutionizing of the business industry with new technologies. With some of the Stevens-centric projects seen above, CRAFT is making the best of the academic success of Stevens and the experience of industry experts to better prepare the world and Stevens for the business world of tomorrow.
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