RAM Active Investments enhances its research capabilities by adding Natural Language Processing expertise

Geneva, 23 January 2020 - RAM Active Investments SA ("RAM AI"), a systematic asset manager based in Geneva, strengthens its research capabilities with Natural Language Processing (NLP) expertise by appointing Tian Guo as a Senior Data Scientist.

Tian Guo joins from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH*) Zürich university where he was a post doc scientist from 2017 until 2019 working on projects related to interpretable deep learning, natural language processing, automated machine learning, multi-task learning and transfer learning. Prior to this, from 2015 until 2017, Tian was a Doctoral research assistant at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL*) working on neural networks over temporal data, streaming data mining and distributed machine learning. In 2015 Tian supported NEC Laboratories Europe as part of the Network Data Analytics Research Group. Tian graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and the East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) and he holds a doctorate in Computer Science from EPFL. Tian can reference various publications for some of the most important conferences across Machine Learning, Big Data and Data Mining.

NLP is a branch of computer science and artificial intelligence that enables computers to extract meaning from unstructured text, like news, analyst research reports and earnings call transcripts. Although NLP has been around for decades, the recent and rapid rise of deep learning algorithms together with the increasing availability of massive amounts of text data are creating new and appealing opportunities for this technology across many industry sectors, including in the investment world. Although we're still a long way from machines that can understand and speak human language, NLP has become pivotal in many applications that we use every day, including digital assistants, web search, email, and machine translation. The combination of NLP and machine learning will enable us to gain insights from massive unstructured data for several purposes, like sentiment analysis, key aspect extraction, etc. as well as enriching the information machine learning models can consume. Meanwhile, from the qualitative point of view, the application of NLP is helping asset managers pinpoint interesting events from vast amounts of data quicker than ever. For example, it can automate the incorporation and analysis of public filings and flag changes in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) related sentiment that a research analyst can focus on: this is an example of machines complementing the human process instead of replacing it.

Emmanuel Hauptmann, Senior Systematic Equity Fund Manager and Founding Partner of RAM AI commented: "At RAM AI research plays a pivotal role in informing our investment approach, we conduct it in house with the support of passionate and talented professionals. I am pleased to welcome Tian to our research team, his background and expertise represent an ideal complement to our ongoing efforts in integrating state-of-the-art technology to our investment process, I wish Tian every success in his new role.”

^{* ETH and EPFL are ranked in the top 20 most relevant universities in the overall global ranking by QS.}