New Center to Examine Impact of Markets on Society

We all know how much fluctuations in the stock market can affect daily life, for the better or worse. Learning to diagnose financial markets and their impact on society will be the work of Rice’s newly formed Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES).

Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the task, the center brings together economists, finance experts, computational scientists, engineers, and others to develop next-generation computational models of financial markets. The center’s research will be of use not only to academics but also to industry and policy-makers.

“Like all of Rice’s academic research centers, CoFES is a bottom-up initiative,” says Katherine Ensor, director of CoFES and chair of the statistics department. “Researchers working on these problems in different disciplines gravitated to one another, and CoFES grew from those collaborations.” A key component of CoFES is the integration of probabilistic and mathematical modeling for complex, multidisciplinary investigations.

CoFES’s first symposium, held last November and titled “Quantitative Advances in Computational Finance and Economic Systems,” was designed to appeal both to practitioners and to researchers in the broad area of computational finance and economic systems. It was sponsored by the George R. Brown School of Engineering, the School of Social Sciences, the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, and the Computer and Information Technology Institute. Symposium funding was provided by William Rapson ’53.

More information about CoFES is available online at http://www.cofes.rice.edu/.

— Jade Boyd