The University of Michigan and U.S. Office of Financial Research are proud to present the speakers for this year's Big Data in Finance conference:
Richard Berner
Prior to his confirmation as OFR Director, Berner served as Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury with responsibility for standing up the Office of Financial Research (OFR). Before joining the Treasury in April 2011, he was co-head of Global Economics at Morgan Stanley. Berner previously served as chief economist at Mellon Bank and as a member of Mellon's Senior Management Committee. He served as a senior economist for Morgan Stanley, Salomon Brothers, and Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, and as director of the Washington, D.C., office of Wharton Econometrics. For seven years, he worked on the research staff of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. He has also been an adjunct professor of economics at Carnegie-Mellon University and George Washington University. Berner has been a member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office, the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Berner has won forecasting awards from Blue Chip Economic Indicators, The Wall Street Journal, Market News, and the National Association for Business Economics. He was awarded the 2007 William Butler Award for Excellence in Business Economics. Berner received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and his bachelor's degree from Harvard College.
Sendhil Mullainathan
Sendhil Mullainathan is the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He has worked on poverty, behavioral economics and a wide variety of topics such as: the impact of poverty on mental bandwidth; whether CEO pay is excessive; using fictitious resumes to measure discrimination; showing that higher cigarette taxes makes smokers happier; modeling how competition affects media bias; and a model of coarse thinking. His latest research focuses on using machine learning to better understand human behavior. He enjoys writing, having recently co-authored Scarcity: Why Having too Little Means so Much and writes regularly for the New York Times. He helped co-found a non-profit to apply behavioral science (ideas42), co-founded a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development (the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab), serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation, has worked in government in various roles, is affiliated with the NBER, BREAD, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Award, has been designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, labeled a “Top 100 Thinker” by Foreign Policy Magazine, and named to the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired Magazine (UK). His hobbies include basketball, board games, googling and fixing-up classic espresso machines.
Kara M. Stein
Kara M. Stein was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and was sworn in on August 9, 2013. Ms. Stein joined the Commission after serving as Legal Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor for securities and banking matters to Sen. Jack Reed. From 2009 to 2013, she was Staff Director of the Securities, Insurance, and Investment Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. During that time, Ms. Stein played an integral role in drafting and negotiating significant provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. As Staff Director for the Senate Banking Subcommittee of primary jurisdiction over the SEC, Ms. Stein also organized and participated in over twenty hearings on such issues as the: evolution of market microstructure, regulation of exchange traded products, state of the securitization markets, risks to investors in capital raising processes, including through public offerings, role of the accounting profession in preventing another financial crisis, establishment of swap execution facilities, and role of the tri-party repurchase markets in the financial marketplace. Ms. Stein was Legal Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor to Sen. Reed from 2007 to 2009 and served as both the Majority and Minority Staff Director on the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing and Transportation from 2001 to 2006. She served as Legal Counsel to Sen. Reed from 1999 to 2000, following two years as a Legislative Assistant to Sen. Chris Dodd. Before working on Capitol Hill, Ms. Stein was an associate at the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, a Skadden Public Interest Fellow, an Advocacy Fellow with the Georgetown University Law Center, and an assistant professor with the University of Dayton School of Law. Ms. Stein received her B.A. from Yale College and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Lewis Alexander
Lewis Alexander, Managing Director, is the US Chief Economist and Managing Director at Nomura, a global investment bank. He has a broad base of experience in senior policy making roles as well as past experience in the financial services industry. Mr. Alexander joined Nomura in September 2011. From March 2009 through March 2011, he served as a Counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, working on a wide range of domestic financial issues. These included the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (bank stress tests), the cost and effectiveness of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and analysis and monitoring of systemic risk. He also led the initial effort to establish the US Treasury's new Office of Financial Research. From 1999 through 2009, Mr. Alexander worked for Citigroup, first as the head of emerging market economics, and later as Citigroup's Chief Economist. Before joining Citigroup, he worked for ten years in the Division of International Finance of the Federal Reserve Board, lastly as Deputy Director. From 1993 through 1996, he also served as Chief Economist of the US Department of Commerce. Mr. Alexander has an AB. and AM. from Stanford University and an M.Phil and Ph.D. from Yale University all in economics.
Linda Avery
Linda Avery is the chief data officer and head of statistics at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Previously, Avery was a managing director and vice president, specializing in technology, at Goldman Sachs. Avery has worked on legal entity identifier (LEI) issues; in 2010, she founded the Global LEI Trade Association, for which she served as co-chair.
Robert Avery
Robert B. Avery is the Project Director of the National Mortgage Database at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He joined the FHFA after retiring as a Senior Economist from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the fall of 2012. Previously he had held positions as a Professor at Cornell University and as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His work at the Federal Reserve focused on supervisory issues related to community affairs and bank supervision. He was a coauthor of a number of studies in these areas including the Federal Reserve’s Congressional Report on Disparate impact in Credit Scoring, and Federal Reserve Bulletin articles on the 2004 through 2011 HMDA data and revisions to the Community Reinvestment Act in 2005. He was also one of the founders of the tri-annual Survey of Consumer Finances and designed the loan sampling systems used for the Federal Reserve’s examinations of small bank safety and soundness and for large syndicated loans. He heads a new inter-agency effort at the FHFA designed to create a comprehensive residential mortgage database to better serve supervisory and policy concerns. He has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin.
Michael S. Barr
Michael Barr is the Roy F. and Jean Humphrey Proffitt Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He was on leave from 2009 to 2010, serving as the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, and was a key architect of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. He currently is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution. He is also a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Professor Barr conducts large-scale empirical research regarding financial services, and researches and writes about a wide range of issues in financial regulation. His recent books includeFinancial Regulation: Law and Policy (Foundation Press, 2016, co-authored with Howell E. Jackson and Margaret E. Tahyar), No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans(Brookings Press, 2012), Insufficient Funds: Savings, Assets, Credit and Banking Among Low-Income Households (Russell Sage, 2009, co-edited with Rebecca Blank), and Building Inclusive Financial Systems (Brookings Press, 2007, co-edited with Anjali Kumar and Robert Litan). Professor Barr previously served as Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin’s special assistant, as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury, as special adviser to President William J. Clinton, as a special adviser and counselor on the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, and as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and the Hon. Pierre N. Leval, then of the Southern District of New York. He received his JD from Yale Law School, his MPhil in international relations as a Rhodes Scholar from Magdalen College, Oxford University, and his BA, summa cum laude, with honors in history, from Yale University.
David Bholat
Dr. David Bholat leads a team of ten data scientists and researchers in Advanced Analytics, a Big Data division in the Bank of England which he helped to establish in 2014. The division is recognised as a leader among central banks in the area of Big Data, as noted in a recent MIT Sloan Review article profiling the division. A former Fulbright fellow, Dr. Bholat graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with highest honours. He subsequently studied at the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago and London Business School. Publications in 2016 include Modelling metadata in central banks; Non-performing loans: regulatory and accounting treatments of assets; Peer-to-peer lending and financial innovation in the United Kingdom; and Accounting in central banks. Other previous publications relevant to the conference include Text mining for central banks; Big data and central banks; and The future of central bank data.
Thomas Brown
Thomas Brown is a partner in the Antitrust and Competition and the Global Banking and Payment Systems practices. He is based in the firm’s San Francisco office. Mr. Brown’s practice focuses on competition law and legal issues affecting the financial services industry. In addition to strategically advising payment systems and financial services clients across a broad spectrum of regulatory issues, he has litigated notable antitrust cases, including class actions, in the financial services industry for more than fifteen years. Mr. Brown was Vice President, Senior Counsel at Visa U.S.A. Inc. There he was responsible for managing the aftermath of the settlement in In re Visa Check/MasterMoney Antitrust Litigation, including the dozens of consumer class actions that were filed following the settlement. He was also deeply involved in the company’s transformation from a co-op to a shareholder owned company.
John W. Carlson
John W. Carlson is chief of staff of the FS-ISAC and the vice chair of the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council (FSSCC). The FS-ISAC is a non-profit corporation formed in 1999, funded by its 7,000 member organizations and focused on assuring the resilience and continuity of the global financial services infrastructure and individual firms against acts that could significantly impact the sector’s ability to provide services critical to the orderly function of the global economy. Prior to joining FS-ISAC, Carlson served as the EVP of BITS/Financial Services Roundtable and MD of Morgan Stanley. John also served in a variety of roles at the OCC, OMB, and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Carlson holds a MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. from the Univ. of MD.
Stephen Daffron
Stephen C. Daffron has been a fixture in the development and implementation of technology, data, and operational processes in FinTech for well over two decades. He was deeply involved in the creation of the earliest electronic trading systems used for commodity futures and options in the early 1990’s, pioneered the operational processes that allowed the explosive growth in derivatives trading and processing, managed the integration of major acquisitions (including Morgan Stanley’s acquisition of Smith Barney and Goldman Sachs’s acquisition of Spear Leeds Kellogg), oversaw the growth of the technology and operations that spring‐boarded the prime brokerage business, and subsequently moved to the buy‐side to supervise the growth of processing capability at the industry's most successful hedge fund. Since 2013 Stephen has been the Chief Executive Officer of Interactive Data (IDC), a private equity owned firm, recently sold to Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) for $5.2B. Prior to IDC he was the Global Head of Technology, Operations, and Data for Morgan Stanley (MS). Before being recruited by Morgan Stanley's CEO John Mack in 2007, he was the Chief Operating Officer for Jim Simon's Renaissance Technologies. Earlier aspects of his long career include over a decade at Goldman Sachs where he pioneered the re‐engineering of the operations and technology functions for payments, derivative processing, credit risk/collateral control,and investment management. He has served on industry committees throughout his career including chairing SIFMA's Operations and Technology Committee for many years and working on subcommittees involved in the streamlining of industry processing including T+3, T+2, and the integration of DTCC—where he sat on the Board for many years and chaired the Operations and Technology Committee as well as serving on the Risk and Executive Committees for that industry utility. He still serves on the Treasury Departments Office of Financial Research (OFR) Advisory Committee. Stephen also sits on the board of advisors for the Yale School of Management International Center of Finance. Prior to his career on Wall Street Stephen served for twelve years in the U.S. Army in various command and staff roles culminating in a tour as Associate Professor at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point. His education includes a B.S. From USMA, MBA MA, M.Ph. and Ph.D. From Yale.
Sanjiv Das
Sanjiv Das is the William and Janice Terry Professor of Finance at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business. He previously held faculty appointments as Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and UC Berkeley. He holds postgraduate degrees in Finance (M.Phil and Ph.D. from New York University), Computer Science (M.S. from UC Berkeley), an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, B.Com in Accounting and Economics (University of Bombay, Sydenham College), and is also a qualified Cost and Works Accountant. He is a senior editor of The Journal of Investment Management, coeditor of The Journal of Derivatives and The Journal of Financial Services Research, and Associate Editor of other academic journals. Prior to being an academic, he worked in the derivatives business in the AsiaPacific region as a VicePresident at Citibank. His current research interests include: the modeling of default risk, machine learning, social networks, derivatives pricing models, portfolio theory, and venture capital. He has published over eighty articles in academic journals, and has won numerous awards for research and teaching. His recent book Derivatives: Principles and Practice was published in May 2010. He currently also serves as a Senior Fellow at the FDIC Center for Financial Research.
Stephen Feinberg
Stephen Fienberg is the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, and the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the CMU co-director of the Living Analytics Research Centre. Fienberg earned his Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University in 1968, and joined Carnegie Mellon in 1980, where he has served as the chair of the Department of Statistics and as Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Fienberg is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Royal Statistical Society. Fienberg’s principal research interests lie in the development of statistical methodology, especially for problems involving categorical data in the form of contingency tables. Recent research has focused on approaches appropriate for disclosure limitation in multidimensional tables and their relationship with results on bounds for table entries given a set of marginals, estimating the size of populations (especially in the context of census taking), and Bayesian approaches to the analysis of categorical data.
Alfred O. Hero
Alfred O. Hero III is the John H. Holland Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also the Co-Director of the University's Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) . His primary appointment is in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and he also has appointments, by courtesy, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Statistics. He received the B.S. (summa cum laude) from Boston University (1980) and the Ph.D from Princeton University (1984), both in Electrical Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has served as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and as a member of the IEEE Board of Directors. He has received numerous awards for his scientific research and service to the profession including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2013 and the 2015 Society Award, which is the highest career award bestowed by the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Alfred Hero's recent research interests are in high dimensional spatiotemporal data, multimodal data integration, statistical signal processing, and machine learning. Of particular interest are applications to social networks, network security and forensics, computer vision, and personalized health.
Zachary Ives
Zachary Ives is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the Associate Dean for Masters and Professional Programs at Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is a co-founder of Blackfynn, Inc., a company focused on enabling life sciences research and discovery through data integration. His research interests include data integration and sharing, managing "big data," sensor networks, and data provenance and authoritativeness. Professor Ives is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, and an alumnus of the DARPA Computer Science Study Panel and Information Science and Technology advisory panel. He has also been awarded the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. He serves as the Director for Penn's Singh Program in Networked and Social Systems Engineering, and he is a Penn Engineering Fellow. He is a co-author of the textbook Principles of Data Integration, and received an ICDE 2013 ten-year Most Influential Paper award. He has been an Associate Editor for Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2014) and a Program Co-Chair for SIGMOD (2015).
H.V. Jagadish
H. V. Jagadish is Bernard A Galler Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Distinguished Scientist at the Institute for Data Science, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Prior to 1999, he was Head of the Database Research Department at AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ. Professor Jagadish is well known for his broad-ranging research on information management, and has approximately 200 major papers and 37 patents. He is a fellow of the ACM, "The First Society in Computing," (since 2003) and serves on the board of the Computing Research Association (since 2009). He has been an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Database Systems (1992-1995), Program Chair of the ACM SIGMOD annual conference (1996), Program Chair of the ISMB conference (2005), a trustee of the VLDB (Very Large DataBase) foundation (2004-2009), Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008-2014), and Program Chair of the VLDB Conference (2014). Since 2016, he is Editor of the Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lecture Series on Data Management. Among his many awards, he won the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award in 2013 and the David E Liddle Research Excellence Award (at the University of Michigan) in 2008.
Jonathan Katz
Jonathan Katz is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, and director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from MIT, and a PhD in computer science from Columbia University. His research interests lie broadly in the fields of cryptography, privacy, and the science of cybersecurity, and he is a coauthor of the widely used textbook "Introduction to Modern Cryptography," now in its second edition. Katz was awarded an NSF CAREER award in 2005, was a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group from 20092010, and received a Humboldt Research Award in 2015. He currently serves on the steering committee for the IEEE Cybersecurity Initiative, as well as on the State of Maryland Cybersecurity Council.
Kabir Kumar
Kabir Kumar leads Omidyar Network’s global policy and ecosystem building efforts. He is a former Senior Financial Sector Specialist at CGAP, where he led CGAP’s Digital Finance Plus initiative and coordinated efforts in key markets in South Asia. Mr. Kumar helped launch CGAP's program on technology-enabled business models for financial services and worked closely with some of the pioneering implementations in the mobile financial services space. Kumar has been an adviser to banks, mobile network operators, technology companies, and investors in over 15 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His work has been quoted in numerous media outlets including CNN, The Banker, Economist, and NPR. He has a dual master's degree in public administration and international relations from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Deborah Lucas
Deborah J. Lucas is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy. Her recent research has focused on how to better measure and account for the costs and risks of government financial obligations. She also has published extensively in the areas of asset pricing and portfolio choice, the dynamic models of corporate finance, money and banking, and retirement policy. Previous appointments include assistant director at the Congressional Budget Office; professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office; and senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. She has been a director on several corporate and non-profit boards, including the American Finance Association. She is an associate editor for the AEJ-Policy, the Annual Review of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Financial Intermediation; an NBER Research Associate; serves on advisory boards for the New York Fed, the Urban Institute, and the Census Bureau; and is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. She received her BA, MA, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
Claire Monteleoni
Claire Monteleoni is assistant professor of computer science at The George Washington University. Her Machine Learning Group is concerned with developing principled methods (known as algorithms) to automatically detect patterns in data. In this era of "Big Data," the various forms of complexity inherent in real data sources increasingly pose challenges for machine learning algorithm design. The GW Machine Learning Group works on the design, analysis, and application of machine learning algorithms, motivated by problems in real data sources, including learning from data streams, learning from raw (unlabeled) data, learning from private data, and climate informatics: accelerating discovery in climate science with machine learning.
Patricia Mosser
Patricia C. Mosser is a Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the director of a new initiative on central banking and financial policy. Previously, Mosser was head of the Research and Analysis Center at the Office of Financial Research, U.S. Treasury Department. Mosser spent over 20 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as both a researcher and monetary policy practitioner. She was a senior manager at the Fed’s open market desk overseeing market analysis, monetary policy implementation including many crisis-related facilities, foreign exchange operations, and analysis of financial stability and reform. She previously served as an economist and manager in the New York Fed Research Department and as an assistant professor in the Economics Department at Columbia. Mosser has written on monetary policy and financial stability topics including crisis policy tools, the monetary transmission mechanism, and financial reform. She serves on the Bank of England’s Macro Prudential Advisory Panel and was previously a member of the Deputies Committee of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) and the Board of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). She received a BA from Wellesley College, an MSc with distinction from the LSE, and a PhD in economics from MIT.
Amiyatosh Purnanandam
Amiyatosh Purnanandam is professor of finance at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. His research covers a wide range of topics in corporate finance, banking and credit risk. His recent research work is mostly related to banking, subprime mortgage crisis, and incentives of government agencies. These papers analyze causes and consequences of financial crisis, measurement and reporting of risk in banking sector, incentive issues in securitization markets, and the effect of market pressure on bureaucracies' actions. Some of Professor Purnanandam's earlier work has analyzed the effect of default risk on corporate financial policies, and equity returns. In addition, several of his papers focus on corporate financing decisions involving IPOs and SEOs. His research has been published in leading journals such as Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Review of Finance. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Intermediation, and International Review of Finance.
Matthew Reed
Matthew Reed is Chief Counsel for the OFR. He also is Chairman of the Regulatory Oversight Committee of the global Legal Entity Identifier system, a committee of more than 50 authorities from around the globe overseeing a new system of financial entity identification. Previously, he was a senior lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where he held a range of positions, including overseeing legal issues for the SEC's interactive data-filing program and deputy for the chairman's initiative to use technology to transform financial disclosures and reporting. Reed also was a lead investigator in an SEC case involving Enron Corp.'s attorneys and was an advisor to an SEC commissioner. Mr. Reed's previous public service work included positions as an advisor to a U.S. senator and lead trial counsel on dozens of cases for the Department of Justice. Reed graduated with high honors from the George Mason School of Law.
Michael Reitblat
Michael is the co-founder and CEO of Forter. Prior to founding Forter, Michael was the VP Product & International Operations at Pango Parking where he was in charge of the deployment and adoption of Mobile Wallet technologies worldwide. In 2008, before its acquisition by PayPal, Michael led Product at Fraud Sciences, where he faced some of the most challenging questions in the cyber security ecosystem. Michael’s fascination with online fraudsters began following a successful “self experimentation with the Internet” phase as a teenager and an even more successful period of service as an intelligence officer in the early days of the Israeli Cyber Command.
Peter Sarlin
Peter Sarlin is an Associate Professor of Economics at Hanken School of Economics (Helsinki, Finland), and Director of RiskLab Finland. Currently, he is a visiting scholar with the Center of Excellence SAFE at Goethe University Frankfurt, and a research associate with the Systemic Risk Center at London School of Economics, IWH Halle Institute for Economic Research and the Systemic Risk Hub, as well as a board member of the IEEE Analytics and Risk Technical Committee and the IEEE Computational Finance and Economics Technical Committee. He is also an Associate Editor of Journal of Network Theory in Finance and Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance & Management. Peter received his PhD (Econ) from the Department of Information Technologies, Åbo Akademi University (Turku, Finland) in 2013. He has also studied at London School of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics and Stockholm University, and has been a Financial Stability Expert and external consultant among others with the European Central Bank, Bank of Finland, Deutsche Bundesbank and De Nederlandsche Bank. Peter’s book Mapping Financial Stability was published by Springer in May 2014. His current research interests include systemic risk, macroprudential supervision, machine learning and visual analytics.
Aurel Schubert
Aurel Schubert is Director General, Statistics of the European Central Bank and Chairman of the Statistics Committee of the European System of Central Banks. He is also Chairman of the Contact Group on Data of the European Systemic Risk Board. Prior, he spent 25 years working at the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, 13 years as Director of Statistics. He is (and was) member of several Austrian and European statistical bodies. He is Honorary Professor for Economics of the University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria; Lecturer at several academic institutions. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of South Carolina (USA) and a Master's degree in Business Administration from the University of Economics and Business in Vienna. Publications: The Credit-Anstalt Crisis of 1931 (Cambridge University Press), as well as over 50 articles on central banking, European monetary policy, statistics and monetary history.
Matthew Shapiro
Matthew D. Shapiro is the Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics and Research Professor (Survey Research Center) at the University of Michigan. He is editor of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Shapiro received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Yale in 1979 and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1984. Shapiro's general area of expertise is macroeconomics. He has carried out research on investment and capital utilization, business-cycle fluctuations, consumption and saving, financial markets, fiscal policy, monetary policy, time-series econometrics, economics of aging, economic measurement, and survey methodology. Among his current research interests are modeling saving, retirement, health, insurance, and portfolio choices of older Americans; using surveys to address questions in macroeconomics and individual decisionmaking; modeling how changes in tax policy affect consumption, investment, employment, and output; improving the quality of national economic statistics; and using naturally-occurring data such as account records and social media to measure and understand economic activity. During 1993-1994, Shapiro served as Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers with responsibilities for macroeconomic analysis and the weekly economic briefing of the President. He was also a Junior Staff Economist at the Council during 1979-1980. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1989, Shapiro was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale and a member of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. Shapiro was co-editor of the American Economic Review from 1997 to 2000. He was Chair of the Department of Economics, University of Michigan, from 2003 to 2007. Shapiro is the chair of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC)--the official advisory committee of the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He is also a member of the Academic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Shapiro has served as chair of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics (AEAStat) and as a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) and its Panel on Non-Market Accounts.
Graham Steele
Graham Steele is chief counsel of the Senate Banking Committee. Steele previously covered financial services and housing issues for U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and was policy counsel at Public Citizen. Steele earned his bachelor’s degree in political science and government from the University of Rochester and his JD from The George Washington University Law School.
Peter Swire
Peter Swire is the Huang Professor of Law and Ethics at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. He has appointments by courtesy with the College of Computing and School of Public Policy. He is Senior Counsel with Alston & Bird, LLP. In 2015, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, among its over 20,000 members, awarded him its Privacy Leadership Award. In 2013, he served as one of five members of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology. Prior to that, he was co-chair of the global Do Not Track process for the World Wide Web Consortium. He is Senior Fellow with the Future of Privacy Forum, and a Policy Fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology. Under President Clinton, Swire was the Chief Counselor for Privacy, in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. He is the only person to date to have U.S. government-wide responsibility for privacy policy. In that role, his activities included being White House coordinator for the HIPAA medical privacy rule, chairing a White House task force on how to update wiretap laws for the Internet age, and helping negotiate the U.S.-E.U. Safe Harbor agreement for trans-border data flows. Under President Obama, he served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy. Swire is author of five books and numerous scholarly papers. He has testified often before the Congress, and been quoted regularly in the press. Swire graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and the Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Marisabel Torres
Marisabel Torres is a senior policy analyst of the wealth-building policy project at National Council of La Raza. Her research interests include Latino access to financial products and services, immigrant financial engagement, and Latino homeownership and foreclosure prevention. She received her B.A. in International Affairs from Mary Washington College.
Margaret Varga
Margaret Varga received her PhD in statistical pattern recognition from the University of Cambridge, UK. She is Chairman of the NATO Exploratory Visual Analytics Research Task Group, a Director at Seetru Ltd. and a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research interests are in visual analytics, visualisation, uncertainty analysis, network analysis, big data analysis, provenance analysis and visualisation, Bayesian reasoning, evidential reasoning, decision support, pattern processing, image processing, as well as financial systemic risk and stability monitoring. Dr. Varga also has a major interest in medical image processing, she led the team that developed the world’s first automated breast cancer histopathology diagnosis systems, and holds seven patents for this system. She has over a hundred publications.
