Rising star award and finance app: News from the College

Blanka Horvath and Aitor Muguruza (credit: Geraint Roberts)

Here’s a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

From Imperial success at the Risk Awards, to a new app to help homeowners, here is some quick-read news from across the College.

Risk and reward

Risk Magazine have announced their Risk Awards 2020, with an Imperial-associated team scooping the Rising Star award. Honorary Lecturer Dr Blanka Horvath, MSc alumnus and current PhD student Aitor Muguruza, and MSc alumnus Mehdi Tomas, all from the Mathematics and Finance Section of the Department of Mathematics, have been recognised for their work modelling pricing volatility.

The team’s paper – ‘Deep learning volatility: a deep neural network perspective on pricing and calibration in (rough) volatility models’ – won the highest score from Risk.net’s selection committee members thanks to the wide applicability of its method, the dramatic improvement in calibration speed and the open source nature of the solution.

Read more at Risk.com.

Battle for Cattle

A new game has players in a race against time to save cows from the scourge of antibiotic resistance, by developing a new vaccine. Over the course of several levels, players must take control of the design of a synthetic biology vaccine and save the lives of as many cows as possible.

‘Battle for Cattle’ was developed as part of the EU-funded MycoSynVac project, which aims to solve antibiotic resistance in agriculture by designing vaccines against bacteria using synthetic biology. The game has been developed in close collaboration with Imperial researchers and other world-leading scientists in Spain, Austria, Denmark, Germany, France, Netherlands and the UK.

Read more and download Battle for Cattle.

Home finance app

Two MBA graduates from the Business School have launched a new app which is designed to help homeowners better manage their finances.

The company, Track, is an early seed stage startup founded by Henry Oakes and Byron McCaughey, who met whilst studying on the Full-Time MBA at the Business School. The Track app is aimed at homeowners aged 25 – 39 years, offering them one place to manage all their home finances – from the value of their property and mortgage through to the weekly shopping. The business has been funded by Europe’s leading PropTech VC, Pi Labs.

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