algorithmic trading

Optiver's Carl Cook explains how to build high-frequency trading systems in C++, where the critical path runs rarely but must be extremely fast. He covers techniques for low and predictable latency, including avoiding main memory and cache misses.

Yaron Minsky explains how Jane Street moved from mainstream languages to developing almost entirely in OCaml. He covers trading systems, research infrastructure, tooling and hiring.

Chris Stucchio presents the ethical principles behind algorithmic decision making and shows with examples from lending, criminology and education that they cannot all be satisfied at once. The talk frames AI fairness as a set of quantitative tradeoffs.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the machine-learning systems used to serve ads also decide what political and social information people see. She explains how opaque algorithms can nudge, segment and manipulate users, and warns that the real danger is powerful people using AI to control populations.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

A PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

Donald Knuth explains at Stanford's CCRMA the constraint-based methods he is using to compose a major work for pipe organ.

Lawyer and musician Damien Riehl argues that music is math with a finite number of melodies, and describes how he and programmer Noah Rubin generated every possible melody and released them under CC0 to avoid accidental infringement claims.

Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman argue that the 'genius programmer' ideal harms collaboration. They advocate trading ego for growth, sharing work early, and understanding how tools shape social behavior.

Yaron Minsky of Jane Street shows how the OCaml Incremental library lets trading UIs express data transformations that are easy to read and efficient on streaming data. It includes a live table demo.

Tom Scott's Royal Institution discourse on science communication in the age of social media, how recommendation algorithms shape popularity, and why view counts can matter more than truth. It includes a segment on parasocial relationships.

Eli Pariser's TED talk argues that personalized web services trap users in filter bubbles, limiting exposure to challenging information. He says this is bad for individuals and for democracy.

Writer and artist James Bridle shows how strange and disturbing children's videos on YouTube, from surprise eggs to algorithmic mashups, are produced for ad revenue. He argues they reveal problems in a data-driven internet.