2021

Ming Hsu

William Halford Jr. Family Associate Professor, Haas School of Business and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley

Areas: Biomedical Research, Complexity Science, Economic Research and Analysis, Economics, Software Development

Ming Hsu is an economist and neuroscientist who studies how people make decisions, in terms of both the hardware (i.e. the neural systems that make decision making possible) and software (i.e. the computations that these neural systems perform). He has used Mathematica extensively since his doctoral work at Caltech, studying the formation and evolution of prices in experimental double auction markets. Subsequent work focused on developing new computational models of choice behavior in decisions under uncertainty and relating these models to behavioral and neural data. In the future, he hopes to utilize the text-analytic capabilities of Mathematica to broaden the range of cognitive functions captured in current models of decision making.

2019

Casey B. Mulligan

Professor of Economics, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago

Areas: Computational Humanities, Economic Research and Analysis, Economics, Software Development

Casey Mulligan is a renowned economist who has served as chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisors, a visiting professor at several universities and a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He frequently uses the Wolfram Language in his economic research and has published numerous papers that utilize Mathematica computations and visualizations. Mulligan has additionally developed a Wolfram Language package that provides unique functionality for automated economic reasoning using both quantitative and qualitative assumptions.

2015

Luci Ellis

Head of Financial Stability, Reserve Bank of Australia

Areas: Economic Research and Analysis, Economics, Finance

Dr. Luci Ellis is Head of the Financial Stability Department at the Reserve Bank of Australia, where she led a team of IT developers to create a new internal graphing development process, GraphIT, which creates Mathematica chart objects using .NET. Dr. Ellis has held various positions in economic analysis research and worked on the global macroeconomics team of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. She has written on a range of economic and financial topics, including exchange rates, housing prices, mortgage finance, and factor income shares, and she co-moderates the Mathematica Stack Exchange site under the pseudonym Verbeia. Dr. Ellis continues to advocate for employee adoption of Mathematica and the publishing of CDF-deployed charts while minimizing the Reserve Bank of Australia’s dependency on Excel. Dr. Ellis financed her attendance at the conference herself.

2014

Chad Slaughter

Enova Financial

Areas: Actuarial Sciences, Data Mining and Analysis, Economics, Finance, Financial Risk, Risk, Risk Analysis

At Enova Financial, Chad Slaughter used Mathematica’s deep analysis capabilities to better understand the relationship between performance data and top-level business metrics. This led to the Colossus Project, a completely automated platform that handles Enova’s online loan approval system and can process more than 20,000 loans per hour. Now a consultant, Slaughter is also using Wolfram Development Platform (formerly Wolfram Programming Cloud) to create solutions for Eligo Energy.

2014

Rodrigo Murta

St Marche Supermercados

Areas: Data Mining and Analysis, Economics, Finance, Interface Design, Physics, Population Dynamics, Risk, Risk Analysis

Rodrigo Murta is Retail Intelligence Manager for St Marche Supermercados, a high-end supermarket chain, and the first customer to purchase Mathematica Enterprise Edition in Brazil. He uses Mathematica as a hub for all of the company’s data, workflows, computation, and processing, and EnterpriseCDF to construct reports for store managers and company executives. He is currently experimenting with a web-based report interface that provides even greater access to intelligence reports.

2014

Mark Kotanchek

Areas: Data Mining and Analysis, Economics, Financial Risk, Mathematica Consulting, Probability Theory, Risk, Risk Analysis

Mark Kotanchek left Dow Chemical in 2005 to form the startup Evolved Analytics. DataModeler, one of the largest Mathematica applications produced outside of Wolfram Research, handles data modeling via evolutionary programs. It also performs data analysis and makes sophisticated use of both user interface and kernel technology. At the 2014 Wolfram Technology Conference, Kotanchek revealed a GUI for DataModeler that makes it even easier to use Wolfram’s world-class analysis capabilities.

2011

Philip Zecher

EQA Partners

Areas: Data Mining and Analysis, Economics, Finance, Risk Analysis

As the Chief Risk Officer at EQA Partners, Philip Zecher designed, developed, and implemented a front-to-back trading system, from data acquisition to reporting, using Wolfram technologies. The system manages the flow of data to reduce data errors, time, and costs.

Hear Philip Zecher talk about developing an enterprise-wide trading platform »

2011

Seth Chandler

University of Houston Law Center

Areas: Actuarial Sciences, Economics, Financial Risk, Risk Analysis

Seth Chandler, director of the Program on Law and Computation, studies insurance policy, patent law, and other facets of the US legal system. After Hurricane Ike in 2008, Chandler analyzed catastrophe models and other data in Mathematica to show how the insurance market can better handle paying for hurricane damages. He developed several interactive Demonstrations to help examine the allocation of losses from hurricanes and used them in his testimony before the Texas legislature.

Hear Seth Chandler talk about Mathematica's role in hurricane insurance research » View the interactive CDF transcript of Chandler's testimony before the Texas Legislature »