7 Chord, Inc., an independent provider of predictive sovereign and corporate bond prices to fixed income traders, issuers, and institutional investors, announces the appointment of Andrew Sundstrom as its Chief Science Officer. Andrew will lead the new phase of development and innovation of BondDroid®, 7 Chord’s award-winning proprietary machine learning engine, that nowcasts bond prices, credit spreads, and yields in real-time.
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Andrew is a seasoned engineer and researcher with 28 years of cross-disciplinary scientific and industry experience at Nortel Networks, IBM Research, Morgan Stanley, and recently at Nanotronics, where he developed artificial intelligence methods to make factories smarter and more resilient to errors and sophisticated cyberattacks. Andrew has multiple peer-reviewed publications and issued patents. He has a BA in computer science from Cornell University, an MS in computer science, and a Ph.D. in computational biology from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.
“We are excited to welcome Andrew to 7 Chord’s leadership team. The breadth of his applied AI experience across disciplines such as computational biology, computer vision, natural language processing, cybersecurity, and smart manufacturing gives him a fresh perspective on the analytical problems we encounter while bringing pre-trade transparency to fixed income. As we expand our AI pricing to corporate bond markets globally, his out-of-the-box thinking will be invaluable,” said Kristina Fan, 7 Chord’s CEO and Co-Founder.
In contrast to most machine learning systems trained on historical data and best suited for academic studies, BondDroid® is optimized for the live trading environment and designed to adapt its behavior in real-time in the face of unexpected events such as a global pandemic or a sudden change in the default risk of an issuer. The idea to build such an adaptable AI engine was born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and was pioneered in the dissertation research of Roy Lowrance, Co-Founder of 7 Chord and former CTO of Reuters, among his 40 years of industry experience.
“I’ve worked with Andrew off and on for about a decade, starting from when we were computer science doctoral students at New York University. Back then, he attended the lab sessions where I discussed my work on auto-correction of concept drift, so he witnessed the origins of BondDroid®. I look forward to working with him more directly as he further develops our predictive pricing and analytics engine. Welcome aboard, Andrew,” said Lowrance.
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“I was always fascinated with the problems inherent in predicting market prices: representing human judgment and intuitive decision making, signaling games and revealed preference, causal inference, and concept drift away from stationary distributions. I see tremendous potential for adaptable AI beyond finance and am excited to take BondDroid® to a new level,” said Sundstrom.
Joining Andrew is Tinatin Nikvashvili, a 2021 graduate of NYU’s Center for Data Science MSc program, who was an intern at 7 Chord during the previous academic year. “I am excited to be solving cutting-edge problems related to financial time series alongside Andrew and learning from his experience in deploying machine learning in a real-world setting,” said Nikvashvili.
