Support for Open Source AI from Financial Firms
August 31, 2017
Financial tech reporter Ian Allison at the International Business Times finds it interesting that financial services firms are joining tech companies like Google and Microsoft in supporting open source AI solutions. In his piece, “Finance and Artificial Intelligence Are Going ‘Fintech’ and Open Source,” Allison points to one corporate software engineer as instrumental to the trend:
QR Capital Management was probably patient zero when it came to opening up their code around data storage – and this move, shepherded by software engineer Wes McKinney, kickstarted the popular Pandas libraries project. Now he has returned to open source work at Two Sigma. We have also seen open source data storage offerings coming out of Man AHL in the form of Arctic. Taking part in a panel on open source infrastructure, McKinney said investment in an open source project yields dividends later: data storage underlies other verticals, and when other people use the software and build libraries on top of it, that makes in-house systems more compatible.
See this link for more about the panda’s library. In the same panel Allison cites above, participants were asked how best to sustain the open source community. McKinney gave this advice:
I feel a compulsion not to let open source projects die. But without sponsorship it can become hard to sustain. So when commercials ask me how they can help, I say sponsor an individual – to triage issues, do patches; that goes a long way.
So, what industry will be next to throw its weight behind open source projects?
Cynthia Murrell, August 31, 2017
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