Image: Professor Éric Moulines delivers his lecture “Divide-and-Conquer Posterior Sampling for Denoising Diffusion Priors”, May 2024
The Centre for Investing Innovation (CII), a research centre based at Edinburgh Futures Institute, is excited to welcome Jacob Choi, co-founder and CEO of LinqAlpha, for its upcoming Prominent Scholars Lecture Series on 11 June, 10am – 12pm.
The CII is a strategic partnership between global asset management company, aberdeen, and the University of Edinburgh, which addresses challenges facing the investment and asset management sector.
The upcoming Prominent Scholars Lecture with Jacob Choi will take place at Edinburgh Futures Institute and online, and is open to the public, university students, researchers, and professionals working across financial services, fintech, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and data.
Choi’s talk, “A Portfolio of AI Agents: From Asset Specialists to Cross-Asset Intelligence in Institutional Investment Research,” looks at a major change happening in how large investment organisations do research.
Instead of relying on slow, manual processes spread across different tools and teams, more firms are starting to use AI to pull information together and analyse it quickly. The shift is moving from AI as something that simply helps analysts, to groups of AI “agents” that can work alongside them—finding relevant material, questioning assumptions, and summarising key insights across different markets.
Based on several years of work with major global investors, Choi will share what he’s learned from actually building and using these systems. He won’t present them as perfect solutions, but as real-world signs that this new approach is developing quickly—even faster than the academic or industry theory needed to fully explain it.
Building dialogue between research and practice
At the heart of CII’s mission is a commitment to reimagine the future of investing—developing innovative, responsible, and data-driven approaches that generate long-term improvements for both investors and society.
The CII Prominent Scholars Lecture series is one of the ways the centre contributes to Edinburgh Futures Institute’s vibrant interdisciplinary research environment, a platform for discovery and dialogue, featuring renowned researchers and rising stars whose work challenges assumptions, advances understanding, and opens new pathways for collaboration and impact.
“Our Prominent Scholars Lecture series is about bringing cutting-edge thinking into dialogue with the researchers, practitioners and the public and opening fresh perspectives on the future of investing. This lecture exemplifies this: it explores the growing role of AI in institutional research while highlighting the real-world challenges that test our skills; challenges that must be addressed for innovation to advance with purpose and accountability.”
– Professor Sotirios Sabanis, Director, Centre for Investing Innovation
Previous speakers reflect the series’ breadth across AI, data-intensive methods, and frontier research, including Dr Sahra Ghalebikesabi (Research Scientist, Google DeepMind), and Professor Éric Moulines (Centre de mathématiques appliquées de l’École Polytechnique, and member of The French Academy of Sciences).
Register for the event
