IDSS and WorldQuant collaborate to advance innovation in data science, finance, and risk analytics

MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) announces a new collaboration with WorldQuant, LLC, a global quantitative investment management firm. As a founding industry member of IDSS and a founding sponsor of IDSS’s finance initiative, WorldQuant will support IDSS’s mission to advance research and education at the intersection of statistics, data science, information and decision systems, and social sciences.

With the ability to capture and analyze data at an unprecedented scale—thanks to big data, machine learning, and other technological innovations—IDSS can now develop better models and metrics that can drive better business and policy decision-making. IDSS, which integrates systems thinking, quantitative analysis, a focus on human behavior, and data science, aims to tackle substantial challenges in the area of finance. By bringing together researchers from a variety of disciplines, IDSS combines diverse perspectives and approaches to understand complex, interconnected financial systems.

“Access to high-quality data is a critical step in the process of addressing the pressing societal challenges in IDSS’s key domains, including finance,” said IDSS Director Munther Dahleh. “IDSS is excited to collaborate with WorldQuant in an effort to develop important insights about complex financial systems.”

Specifically, this effort will focus on a range of challenges, such as managing an increasing number of interconnected and dependent systems, developing new analytical risk metrics and approaches for measuring systemic risk, and understanding and predicting vulnerabilities.

“WorldQuant is excited to collaborate with IDSS and provide its faculty and staff with the opportunity to work with WorldQuant on various research projects,” said WorldQuant Founder and CEO Igor Tulchinsky. “The exponential growth and quantification of data is the single most important trend in the world today, and it is becoming increasingly important to provide high quality education and research opportunities.”

WorldQuant is also a sponsor of Solve and a participating sponsor of HUBweek 2016, a week-long event on and around the MIT campus.