Inside UCL’s Financial Computing Centre, the Planet’s Brightest Quantitative Analysts Are Now Calculating Our Future
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On a recent winter’s afternoon, nine computer science students were sitting around a conference table in the engineering faculty at University College London. The room was strip-lit, unadorned, and windowless. On the wall, a formerly white whiteboard was a dirty cloud, tormented by the weight of technical scribblings and rubbings-out upon it. A poster in the corner described the importance of having a heterogenous experimental network, or Hen.
Six of the students were undergraduates. The other three were PhD researchers from UCL’s elite Financial Computing Centre. The only person keeping notes was one of them: a bearded, 30-year-old Polish researcher called Michal Galas. Galas was leading the meeting, a weekly update on the building of a vast new collection of social data, culled from the internet. Under the direction of the PhD students, the undergraduates were writing computer programs to haul millions of pages of publicly available digital chatter - from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news stories - into a real-time archive which could be analysed for signs of the public mood, particularly in regard to financial markets. Word of the project, known as SocialSTREAM, had reached the City months ago. The Financial Computing Centre was getting calls most days from companies wanting to know when it would be finished. The Bank of England had been in touch.
During the meeting, Galas asked each undergraduate about a particular corner of the database. Most of the time, the language was computer: impenetrable exchanges about batching, pseudo-storage and the risks of propagating on tiers. “Should that work in a distributed field as well?” an undergraduate asked. “If you have different connectors running on different machines, you might start duplicating…” Galas considered this. “Personally,” he replied, “I would run the connectors outside the cloud machine.”
Every now and again, though, the discussion became comprehensible. The students discussed annoyances - so much data about animals! - and possibilities. One of the PhD students, Ilya Zheludev, talked about “Wikipedia deltas” - records of deleted sections from the online encyclopaedia. Immediately, the students hit on the idea of tracking the Wikipedia entries of large companies and seeing what was deleted, and when.
The mood of the meeting was casual and exacting at the same time. Galas, who is from Gdansk and once had ambitions to be a hacker, is something of a giant at the Financial Computing Centre. One of the first students to enrol in 2009, he has a gift for writing extremely large computer programs. In order to carry out his own research, Galas has built an electronic trading platform that he estimates would satisfy the needs of a small bank. As a result, what he says goes. Galas closed the meeting by giving the undergraduates a hard time about the overall messiness of their programming. “I like beauty!” he declared, staring around the room.