about us
Nicos
Prof NICOS CHRISTOFIDES (1942 - 2019)
Nicos began his lifelong association with Imperial College by winning a scholarship to study Electrical Engineering.
After graduating with First Class Honours in 1964, he stayed in Electrical Engineering to complete a PhD titled ‘The origins of load losses in induction motors with cast aluminium rotors’ under the supervision of renowned scientist and Nobel Prize winner Dennis Gabor, for which he was awarded the Ferranti medal.
In 1968, Nicos started his work in combinatorial optimisation and graph theory, an area where practical problems are often so complex that they cannot be solved optimally.
Nicos, was a pioneer in vehicle routing algorithms. In 1971, Nicos published his first book: ‘Distribution Management: mathematical modelling and practical analysis’.
Nicos is perhaps best known for the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). A classic example of these computationally difficult problems, it is one of the most intensively studied problems in optimisation. Nicos published his seminal and pioneering book, ‘Graph Theory: An Algorithmic Approach’.
Nicos worked on finding upper and lower bounds for an optimal solution for the TSP ‘Worst-case analysis of a new heuristic for the travelling salesman problem’ and called the algorithm related to this bound ‘the three-halves bound’ It is now known as ‘The Christofides Algorithm’, which found a circuit for the salesman that was less than 1½ times longer than the optimal solution. Nicos then went on to develop, and fully commercialize, industrial quality vehicle routing software, that is still used today.
In 1979, Nicos released his third book ‘Combinatorial Optimization’ and in 1982, he became Professor of Operational Research at Imperial College.
During the 1980s, Nicos started his work on the analysis of images, condensing an image to a combination of basic shapes. Over the following decades, he developed algorithms for image compression that allowed images to be stored using a fraction of the memory taken by the raw image. The crucial property of this compression was that the image could be restored with no, or apriori controllable, information loss. As a result, Nicos did consultancy and had contracts with NASA and IBM relating to his Image Compression work and subsequently set up Network Models Research and Development.
In parallel with his academic career, Nicos was always very active in consulting for industry in a wide range of operational research projects. Nicos had a unique ability of explaining elaborate and mathematically complex problems to the layman in a way that made extremely hard solutions sound easy. This skill naturally led him to forge extensive relationships with business leaders and he consulted for a diverse set of industries, including the Oil and Gas sector (BP, ENI, PTT), Government Agencies (NASA, Centre for Disease Control), Telecoms (BT, C&W) and nearly every major multinational bank in the Financial Sector.
In 1990, Nicos set up the Centre for Quantitative Finance (CQF) within the Business School, which he then directed for 17 years. The CQF was one of the largest and most highly respected research groups in finance in the world and was sponsored by a large number of distinguished American, European and Japanese financial institutions and corporates. Nicos’s focus was on supervising PhD students in tackling ‘real world’ problems in financial mathematics
and risk management. Scores of CQF PhD alumni are now spread throughout finance centres worldwide. In total, Nicos was involved in the supervision of over 200 PhD students.
Nicos was Professor Emeritus of Quantitative Finance at Imperial having retired in 2009. During his academic career he had published over 150 papers in quality journals and four books on optimisation and quantitative finance.
Simon
Simon is a resident of Singapore and CEO/founder of Rekiki PTE, a machine-learning research company focusing on credit, asset management, prognosis/diagnosis and drug discovery, and image compression.
Simon is also a co-founder of a quantitative financial research company, SW7 Research Ltd and Chorus Capital, a London-based private debt manager, to which he serves as a non-executive board member.
He worked at leading investment banks in quantitative, strategy, risk and trading roles since 1996 for twelve years. Simon worked for Goldman Sachs International for eight years, where he ran the European credit index (iTraxx) and iTraxx derivatives trading. He was pivotal in the launch of iTraxx and is accredited with the development of options on iTraxx and the recovery market in credit default swaps. Prior to his trading position,
Simon worked for the global strategy group where he helped design and implement the bank's first globally integrated bond and credit-derivatives risk platform. Before joining Goldman Sachs, Simon worked at Bankers Trust International in the quantitative analyst team, where he created both valuation and risk management models for interest rate markets.
Since 2008, Simon has focused on his research in combinatorial optimisation and machine learning, specifically in the use of classification trees and evolutionary learning.
Simon has published in leading academic papers on topics ranging from optimal corporate tax structures to incomplete markets and has been referenced in several professional investment magazines.
Simon holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Finance from Imperial College, a Masters in Statistics from Cambridge University and a BSc in Mathematics from Imperial College.
Alexander
Alexander is the CEO and head of application development at Network Models. Alexander studied Mathematics for an undergraduate degree, Artificial Intelligence for a master’s degree and then obtained a PhD in Mathematical Finance from Imperial College.
His PhD topic was on asset pricing and hedging in incomplete and imperfect markets.
He has published several papers in top academic journals on optimization of corporate tax structures, modelling of asset price dynamics and asset forecasting. During his PhD he also worked at the FX trading desk of a major US bank.
From 1998 to 2008 Alexander was a Senior Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Quantitative Finance (CQF) at Imperial College, London. He was the scientific director responsible for the stochastic asset-price modelling and optimization components of EUROSIGNAL, a 2 million Euro, 3-year project of the European Union on company valuation. He also worked on the valuation of oil field exploration and production projects for a major international oil firm.
Since 2008, Alexander has been working on forecasting and portfolio optimization problems, doing both theoretical work and developing computer software applications in fund management for a number of high tech hedge funds, and both European and US banks.
In 2014, Alexander became a partner in an equity hedge fund and worked in its Research Division. In 2019, he decided to dedicate all his efforts and research experience into Machine Learning applications with Network Models R&D.