Jiri Pik is a finance and business intelligence consultant working with major investment banks, hedge funds, and other financial players. He has architected and delivered breakthrough trading, portfolio and risk management systems, and decision-support systems across industries.
His consulting firm, WIXESYS, provides their clients with certified expertise, judgment, and execution at the speed of light. WIXESYS' power tools include revolutionary Excel and Outlook add-ons available at http://spearian.com.
Loucas Papayiannis was born and raised in Cyprus, where he graduated from the English School in Nicosia. After completing his mandatory military service at the Cyprus National Guard, Loucas left for the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained a BSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. While at Berkeley, he had the opportunity to work for the Bosch Research Center in Palo Alto, where he developed a strong interest in computer-human interface.
In an unexpected turn of events, an opportunity to work for Bloomberg LP in London came up, after he completed his studies. Despite the fact that financial software was a sharp change of direction from where Loucas was heading at the time, he moved to London and seized the opportunity. He quickly grew to enjoy this new field and consequently enrolled in an MSc program in Financial Mathematics at King's College, London while still working full time, completing this degree in 2011.
In 2010, he started at Goldman Sachs, and in August 2012, he joined Barclays Capital, where he is currently employed. His work is focused on developing an FX Options application, and he mainly works with C++. However, he has worked with a variety of languages and technologies through the years. He is a Linux and Python enthusiast and spends his free time experimenting and developing applications with them.
Mourad MOURAFIQ is a software engineer and data scientist. After successfully completing his studies in Applied Mathematics, he worked at an investment bank as a quantitative modeler in the structured products market, specializing in ABS, CDO, and CDS. Then, he worked as a quantitative analyst for the largest French bank.
After a couple of years in the financial world, he discovered a passion for machine learning and computational mathematics and decided to join a start-up that specializes in software mining and artificial intelligence.