5th MC meeting

October 28, 2021, 9:30- 12:30 CET

Report

Annual Meeting of the Management Committee of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action Fintech and AI in Finance On October 28 and October 29, 2021, the Annual Meeting of the Management Committee of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action Fintech and AI in Finance took place for the first time at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (Romania), in a mostly online format, with 10 colleagues also meeting physically in Bucharest. Management Committee members representing more than 35 partners have attended the event and have discussed and agreed on key aspects for the next grant period. Over the two days of the event the participants have attended the management meeting of the action and also several events focused on research and innovation-related topics. Each of the working groups of the project convened in several parallel working meetings planning for the future of the action. The participants have also had the pleasure to attend 15 invited talks, covering a broad array of research topics connected to the Cost Action.

On the 28th of October, the participants were invited to attend the section entitled Statistics of Machine Learning in Finance co-chaired by Professor PhD Wolfgang Karl Härdle from Humbolt University Berlin and by Professor PhD Codruta Mare from Babes Bolyai from Cluj-Napoca. The event included 9 invited talks from both members and non-members of the action. The Guest talks that have been presented were the following: Variational inference for financial modelling, Speaker - Martin Magris, Deep Generation of financial data, Speaker - Joerg Osterieder, Interest rate fairness for retail loans. A ML approach, Speaker - Darie Moldovan, Modelling efficiency of various ML models for prediction of taxpayers' Trust using sentiment, Speaker - Ioana Coita, Securing ML models using Blockchain, Speaker - Claudia Antal, Bankruptcy Prediction of Privately Held SMEs Using Feature Selection Methods, Speaker - Ranik Raaen Wahlstrøm, A Machine Learning-Based Regulatory Risk Index for Cryptocurrencies, Speaker - Xinwen Ni, Data Analytics Driven Controlling: bridging statistical modelling and managerial intuition, Speaker - Kinat Khowaja, Heding cryptocurrency options, Speaker - Jovanka Lili Matic.

On the 29th of October, the participants had the pleasure to attend the second section of the event entitled AI in Finance, from Black-Box to Explainable Models, co-chaired by Professor PhD Petre Lameski from the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje and Professor PhD Daniel Traian Pele from Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The event included 7 invited talks from both members and non-members of the action. The Guest talks were the following: Key Roles of Crypto-Exchanges in Generating Arbitrage Opportunities, Speaker - Audrius Kabasinskas, Tracking Speculative Trading, Speaker - Dominik Boos, Robustifying Markowitz, Speaker - Alla Petukhina, A hybrid system for electricity price forecasting: complexity or efficiency?, Speaker - Souhir Ben Amour, Understanding Smart Contracts: Hype or Hope?, Speaker - Raphael Reule, Understanding jumps in high frequency digital asset markets, Speaker - Danial Saef.

More details about the participants to the event and also visuals are present on our LinkedIn. A short presentation of our entire Action is available here and an updated version of our calendar including future events is available on our meetup channel. Also, for more details about our Cost Action please reach out to: vasile.strat@bbs.ase.ro.

Agenda - Day 1

Session I: 9:30 – 10:15

• Welcome and Warm-up (5 mins)

• Action Chair Update (20 mins): Current membership status, Current activities, Review Grant Period 1, Outlook Grant Period 2

• COST UPDATE

• Working Group Updates (20 mins)

Break: 10:15 – 10:30

• Get-to-know break-out session I

Session II: 10:30 – 11:15

• Country updates I (30 mins)

• Diversity update (5 mins)

• Science communication update (5 mins)

• Technical coordinator update (5 mins)

• Updates on Website, STSM, ITC (5mins)

• SAB and research funding (5 mins)

• Virtual Networking Tools (10 mins)

Break: 11:15 – 11:30

• Get-to-know break-out session II

Session III: 11:30 – 12:15

• Country updates II (30 mins)

• Decisions to take (10 mins)

• Group Photo (5 mins)

Cool-down : 12:15 – 12:30

• AOB

• Small-talk

• Closing of the meeting

Agenda - Day 2

Welcoming I: 9:30 – 09:40

• Recap Day 1 https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/68024868580

• ESOF2022 - Call for Session Proposals

Part I – 4 parallel Sessions: 9:40 – 10:20

• Working Group 1 https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/63316726880

• Working Group 2 https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/67103886473

• Working Group 3 https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/67009409685

• Science Communication https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/64071373684

• Stakeholder Engagement https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/61735866863

• Diversity Group https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/64715307584

• The Second Grant Period of COST FinAI https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/69754455482

Break: 10:20 – 10:40

• Get-to-know break-out session

Part II – 4 parallel Sessions: 10:40 – 11:30

• Working Group 1 https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/63316726880

• Working Group 2 https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/67103886473

• Working Group 3 https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/67009409685

• Science Communication https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/64071373684

• Stakeholder Engagement https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/61735866863

• Diversity Group https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/64715307584

• The Second Grant Period of COST FinAI https://zhaw.zoom.us/j/69754455482

Collecting Inputs, Documents and Links

• All Information (Agenda, Slides, ...)

• Collecting Inputs

• Padlet - Each Country One Event

• Zoom Links for Parallel Sessions
  • Working Group 1
  • Working Group 2
  • Working Group 3
  • Diversity Group
  • Science Communication
  • Stakeholder Engagement
  • The Second Grant Period