Page 52 - Forbes - USA (December 2019)

CONTRARIAN INVESTING

By William Baldwin Photograph by Tim Pannell for Forbes

Connecting a Million Dots

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

formation to be found in annual reports and news Artificial Intelligence:
articles. Chida Khatua
at EquBot’s San
For most of their history on Wall Street, com- Francisco office.
puters have been strictly quantitative—dividing, Maybe computers
are chauvinistic:
say, prices by earnings and ranking the results. But His software
that is destined to change. A dramatic demonstra- made a timely
recommendation to
A computer can recognize tion of silicon’s verbal potential came in 2011, when buy shares of Zendesk,
a software developer
a cat. Can it spot a bargain stock? an IBM system called Watson bested two human located nearby.
Sitting in a business school lecture on hedge champions at Jeopardy! To accomplish this feat the
funds four years ago, Chidananda Khatua got computer had to grasp not just numbers but genea-
the inspiration to answer this question. A veter- logical relationships, time, proximity, causality, tax-
an Intel engineer working on a nights-and-week- onomy and a lot of other connections.
ends M.B.A. at UC Berkeley, Khatua imagined that Put that kind of artificial intelligence to work and
something powerful might come out of the ability it could do a lot more than win TV game shows. It
to blend precise financial data with the fuzzier in- might function as a physician’s assistant, as a rec-

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