Skip to content
Founded by three Carnegie Mellon University faculty members
Institute of Algorithmic Tradingand Applied Computational Finance

Who sets the curriculum

Faculty

The Institute was originally founded by three Carnegie Mellon University faculty members who were enthusiastic about algorithmic trading. Between them they cover forecasting and risk, financial technology and market structure, and the design and validation of trading systems.

How the Institute began

The Institute was originally founded by three Carnegie Mellon University faculty members who were enthusiastic about algorithmic trading. They met at Carnegie Mellon and came to the subject from different sides: forecasting and risk, stockbroking and financial technology, and building and validating trading systems. They decided to teach it together.

They wanted the courses they taught to survive and outlast their own university appointments, and to be open to students anywhere in the world, not only to those admitted to one campus. So they founded the Institute and built its courses around algorithmic trading.

Portrait of Prof. Ben Racz

Prof. Ben Racz

Professor of the Practice

Ben Racz taught Advanced Quantitative Finance and Algorithmic Trading to master’s students at the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he held the academic title of Professor of the Practice.

He is the founder and managing director of Algorithmic Sciences, a research and consulting firm, where he is also Head of Quantitative Analysis. The firm develops institutional validation procedures and systems for building and executing portfolios of intraday trading strategies, using statistical analysis and robustness testing.

He has managed complex software projects since 2001. His specialties are the validation of manual, semi-automated and automated trading strategies, distributed research infrastructure, execution and order-management systems, and risk management and monitoring systems.

Before Algorithmic Sciences he co-founded a data-driven business consultancy, a data-science-based wholesale trading company, and an information security consultancy whose work covered security auditing, ISO 27001 auditing and policy, Sarbanes-Oxley compliant infrastructure operations and PCI-DSS vulnerability testing for multinational corporations.

Teaches at the Institute: Algorithmic trading, strategy validation, execution and trading infrastructure.

How the faculty work with the Institute

The founding faculty set the curriculum: which courses exist, what each one must teach and how it is assessed. Assessed projects and examinations are marked against criteria they approve.

Teaching or research partnership enquiries go to the partnerships office, listed on the contact page.