The event, hosted by the African Institute of
Financial Markets and Risk Management (AIFMRM) in association with
University College London (UCL) and University of Cape Town (UCT), saw
teams of mixed masters and doctoral students taking on practical
problems in an array of areas pertinent to the financial services
industry post the financial crisis.
According
to Dr Andrea Macrina, Senior Lecturer at UCL Mathematics and Adjunct
Associate Professor at UCT, this is a one-of-a-kind competition that
challenges the students to find workable solutions to issues that
companies in the financial sector are genuinely interested in seeing
resolved.
The participating universities this year were UCL, ETH
Zürich, the University of Vienna, the University of Technology Sydney,
the Université d’Évry-Val-d’Essonne in Paris, and UCT.
“The
results of this challenge are, in a word, inspiring,” said Dr Macrina.
“The problems that they research might take the ordinary researcher
perhaps a year to complete. What we do is to concentrate the collective
effort of a group of people on each problem and have them dedicate 100%
of their time to it over the two-week challenge. It is incredible what
can be achieved in such a short time.”
The Third Financial Mathematics Team Challenge brings
together South African and International graduate students to undertake
research in Financial Mathematics on real-world problems in a team
setting.
Five teams of mixed Master’s and Doctoral students each
work on a separate research project for seven days and then present
their findings on the final two days. The teams are mentored by
academics and practitioners from France, South Africa, Australia,
Switzerland and the UK.
Each research problem is proposed by the
mentors and industrial partners. The selected projects will be in
topical research areas. Each team of students is asked to prepare a
report on their findings, which will be collated in a workshop volume.
This
volume will then be available to future Team Challenge participants,
and Master’s and Doctoral students in Financial and Insurance
Mathematics.
This is a great opportunity for students to interact
and collaborate in the fields of Risk, Financial and Insurance
Mathematics.
Links
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Friends of Out@UCL
Professor Ivan Parkin -
Dean, UCL Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences
“I fully support the aims of the Friends of Out@UCL campaign. I have
personal experience of the need for such a campaign and the
difficulties that the LGBTQ+ community face.” Read more…
Snapshots from Space History
Online exhibition of historic space photos from the faculty’s planetary science archives.