Ali Hirsa

Columbia University

Professor Ali Hirsa joined IEOR in July 2017. He has been associated with Columbia University as an Adjunct Professor since 2000. He is also the Chief Scientific Officer ASK2.ai and Managing Partner at Sauma Capital, LLC, a New York Hedge Fund. Previously Ali was Managing Director and Global Head of Quantitative Strategy at DV Trading, LLC, and a Partner and Head of Analytical Trading Strategy at Caspian Capital Management, LLC. Prior to joining Caspian, he worked in a variety of quantitative positions at Morgan Stanley, Banc of America Securities, and Prudential Securities. Ali was also a Fellow at Courant Institute of New York University in the Mathematics of Finance Program from 2004 to 2014. Ali’s research interests are algorithmic trading, machine learning, deep learning, data mining, optimization, and computational and quantitative finance. His focus has been on machine learning applications in finance, specifically in asset management, and also on developing learning algorithms for signal extraction from data.Ali is the author of “Computational Methods in Finance,” Chapman & Hall/CRC 2012 and co-author of “An Introduction to Mathematics of Financial Derivatives”, third edition, Academic Press, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Investment Strategies. He has several publications and is a frequent speaker at academic and practitioner conferences.Ali is a co-inventor of “Methods for Post Trade Allocation” (US Patent 8,799,146). The method focuses on the allocation of filled orders (post-trade) on any security to multiple managed accounts, which has to be fair and unbiased. Current existing methods lead to biases, and the invention provides a solution to this problem. He is currently a member of the Board of Visitors of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland College Park since June 2016 and was on the Board of Visitors at A. James Clark School of Engineering from 2008 to 2018 and served as a trustee on the University of Maryland College Park Foundation from 2011 to 2016. Ali received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland at College Park under the supervision of Professors Howard C. Elman and Dilip B. Madan.