Page 72 - Forbes - India (January 2020)

Cross Border

Connecting

a Million Dots

EquBot is on a quixotic quest to prove that computers
can outsmart human stock pickers

By William BaldWin
A Sitting in a at UC Berkeley, Khatua imagined But that is destined to change. A

computer can
recognise a cat. Can it
dramatic demonstration of silicon’s
that something powerful might
come out of the ability to blend
spot a bargain stock?
verbal potential came in 2011, when
an IBM system called Watson bested
precise financial data with the
business school
annual reports and news articles.
To accomplish this feat the computer
lecture on hedge funds four years fuzzier information to be found in two human champions at Jeopardy!
ago, Chidananda Khatua got the For most of their history on Wall had to grasp not just numbers but
inspiration to answer this question. Street, computers have been strictly genealogical relationships, time,
A veteran Intel engineer working quantitative—dividing, say, prices proximity, causality, taxonomy
on a nights-and-weekends MBA by earnings and ranking the results. and a lot of other connections.
72

Tim Pannell for forbes

Chidananda Khatua at EquBot’s San Francisco office. Maybe computers are chauvinistic: His software made a timely recommendation to
buy shares of Zendesk, a software developer located nearby

forBEs india • january 31, 2020