LCE-EU 2015

In this talk, Sean Gourley looks at the limitations of human cognition. He helps your team to understand what the brain can and cannot do and see how these limits create niches for algorithms to exploit. Gourley takes the audience on a journey through understanding the world of high frequency trading, from quote stuffing to how the speed of light allows for relativistic arbitrage and perhaps trading platforms on oil rigs in the atlantic, and how a single tweet can move a market. The financial markets are a world dominated by algorithms: but these same types of algorithms also define the world that we humans live in, from the things we read, to the price of our insurance and the friends we connect with. Algorithms are a big part of our lives, and its unclear if we are creating them or they are creating us. The talk is broad and accessible, it covers a range of topics from predatory algorithms to machine readable news to the lessons we can learn from studying ecological networks in the high Sierras.