Dr. Dan Loeb

Dan Loeb will share how trading securities intersects with elections and how his work at Susquehanna International Group (SIG) is affected by the decisions made on Election Day. He will discuss SIG most recent experiences with this type of trading during recent elections in the United States and elections abroad including Brexit.

Biography:

Dr. Daniel (Dan) Loeb: At first my career took a traditional academic route, I earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics from Caltech. Professor Richard Wilson introduced me to discrete mathematics which would eventually become my thesis topic at MIT. Meanwhile I added breadth to my mathematical training by taking a number of computer science and economics classes. Caltech studies microeconomics and game theory from a very mathematical approach. In fact I often found the mathematics in my economics courses more challenging than the mathematics in my math courses: maximizing a function of a dozen variables with several constraints, whereas in math after getting past explicit examples in 2 or 3 variables we always went straight to the "general case".

At MIT, I studied umbral calculus (a branch of combinatorics) under the direction of Prof. Gian-Carlo Rota and received my Ph.D. in 1989. I then taught and continued my research at the University of Bordeaux in France.

In 1996, I was looking to take a sabbatical and return for a while to the United States. A coauthor of mine Walter Stromquist encouraged me to consider non-academic employment, so I applied to Daniel H. Wagner Associates where he was in charge of their Pennsylvnia office.

My first projects at Wagner Associates were redesigned the corporate website (which was a great initial project since it exposed me to the wide variety of mathematical work done at the fine) and to the evaluation of a credit risk model used by BMW based on fuzzy logic.

However, I soon started working in mathematical finance for the Susquehanna International Group for their newly created Statistical Arbitrage Group in their Quantitative Research Department. As this project continued to be successful and grew in size, it took up all of my time and I eventually left Wagner Associates to work fulltime at Susquehanna where I am now responsible for a group of over a half-dozen mathematicians developing proprietary trading strategies with which to invest to the partner's money.

Dr. James Beard

Costas arrays are special permutation matrices that provide minimum crosstalk between two signals that are mismatched in either timing or frequency.  Their original purpose and still their most important use is as a frequency hop scheme for communications and radar signals.  Costas arrays can be searched over orders up to about 20, generated through number-theoretic equations, or obtained through databases.  A database on IEEE DataPort provides all known Costas arrays through order 1030.  We will look at a simple frequency-agile waveform that uses a Costas array to select the frequencies of the pulses.

Biography:

Dr. James K. Beard, (M’64 LM’04, LSM'05), ORCID ID* 0000-0003-4430-8704 was born in Austin, TX in 1939. He received a BS degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1962, an MS from the University of Pittsburgh in 1963, and the Ph. D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1968, all in electrical engineering.  He is a member of Phi Eta Sigma, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Xi.  He studied for his Ph. D. under a GSRF Fellowship (matched U. Texas Austin and Ford Foundation funding, administered by U. Texas Austin) and completed his Ph.D. under an NSF Fellowship.

Between 1959 and 2004, he worked in Government laboratories, industry, and as an individual consultant.  Employers include precursors or current divisions of Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, most recently Lockheed Martin in Moorestown, NJ.  Dr. Beard is the inventor of record for US Patent No. 6,870,501 awarded March 2005, "Digital Radio Frequency Tag" assigned to Raytheon Company.  He is currently an individual consultant based in Medford, NJ near Philadelphia.  He is the author of a number of papers and a book, “The FFT in the 21st Century” (ISBN 978-1402076756, Springer-Verlag, 2003).

Current research interests include system engineering solutions to homeland defense issues, estimation and decision theory, radar and communications concept and waveform design, and digital radar concepts.  He was Publications Chairman for FUSION2005.  Dr. Beard is also a member of the AIAA.

* The ORCID ID is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors and contributors.