Prof. Drona Kandhai is head of the Quantitative Analytics department of Financial Markets in ING Amsterdam. He is professor in Computational Finance at the Computational Science Lab and the Stochastics group of the University of Amsterdam. Drona has been active in the financial industry for close to 20 years where he has worked on pricing and risk model validation, development and integration in IT systems. Kandhai has  extensive experience in a broad range of financial products and has worked in several departments of  ABN AMRO and ING Bank.  He holds a PhD in Computational Physics from the University of Amsterdam on the subject of numerical modelling and simulation of complex fluid flows.

His primary research interests are on the use of data-driven microscopic simulations as a way to understand the complex behaviour of financial markets, and how to include the driving mechanisms in multi-scale models for derivatives pricing and risk management. Kandhai has published extensively in various scientific journals.

Sander Klous has a background in high energy physics and worked for over 15 years on the experiments at CERN in Geneva. After that, since 2013, he combined his industry position at KPMG with a professorship in Big Data Ecosystems at the UvA.

Recently he accepted a combined position between the Informatics Institute and the Amsterdam Business School as professor in AI & Audit.

Dr. Erman Acar is an assistant professor of explainable AI (XAI) for finance, with a joint appointment shared between Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems (SIAS) group at Informatics Institute, and the Cognition, Language and Computation (CLC) lab at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation. His current research focuses on integrating machine learning systems with causal and logical symbolic components to extend their capabilities in reasoning and explainability.

Erman completed his PhD in automated decision making using knowledge representation in single-agent and multi agent settings in 2018 at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and later worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Reinforcement Learning group at Leiden University. During his career, he has been publishing his research in major AI journals and conference, and he has done research visits to various institutes including Free University of Bolzano, University of Calabria, University of Amsterdam and University of Oxford.

Erman Acar's profile on the website for the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

Dr. Sven Karbach is an Assistant Professor for data-driven mathematical modeling and computational finance, a joint appointment with the Informatics Institute and the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. After earning his PhD in mathematics from the University of Amsterdam in 2022, he undertook a postdoctoral position at the University of Hamburg before returning to Amsterdam.

Sven's current research is primarily geared towards the development of non-parametric models in the realm of sustainable finance. His work encompasses modeling electricity forward markets, analyzing volatility structures, and assessing renewable energy production in the context of weather-related risks. As the course coordinator for Portfolio Theory at UvA, Sven has also expanded his research interests to include portfolio optimization, with a particular focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria and climate-related risks.

Dr. Fernando Santos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, at the Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems (SIAS) group. He has an ICAI joint appointment position with ING Bank, developing research on fairness, transparency, and strategic dynamics in AI. Fernando received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering in 2018, from Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal).

Fernando’s research lies at the interface of AI and complex systems: He is interested in understanding collective dynamics in multiagent systems and in designing fair/pro-social AI. Before joining UvA, Fernando was a James S. McDonnell postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University (Levin Lab). He was a visiting student at Princeton, Université Libre de Bruxelles and TU Delft.

Simon Trimborn (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Econometrics and Data Science at the Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam. Before joining the UvA, Simon was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Management Sciences at City University of Hong Kong and a Research Fellow at National University of Singapore.

Simon’s research focuses on high-dimensional data analysis to tackle specific problems in the cryptocurrency market, blockchain and social networks. For his research Simon is developing and using network methods, text analysis methodologies, and investment techniques. Simon’s work introduced the CRIX index family which is owned by Royalton Partners and computed by S&P Global: https://www.royalton-crix.com/ . Simon serves on the Scientific Board for the CRIX index and is an Associate Editor for the journals Digital Finance and Annual Review of FinTech.

Prof. Marc Salomon is program co-director of AI4Fintech, Dean of the Amsterdam Business School (ABS), Professor in Decision Sciences and Program Director of the MBA in AI, Data and Analytics. 

His main teaching and research interests are in Business Analytics: using statistics, mathematics, and IT to solve business problems. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, Marc was Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Rabobank (1996-1998). COO and Director of Research at McKinsey & Company (1998-2004) and COO at law firm Stibbe (2004-2013). From 1996 to 2005 he had a part-time appointment at Tilburg University as a professor in Operations Research. Marc holds a Master of Science (MSc) in Econometrics from VU Amsterdam University, and he obtained a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam. He published numerous articles in leading academic journals, such as Operations Research, Management Science and Transportation Science

Prof. Marcel Worring is program co-director of AI4FinTech, a full professor in the Informatics Institute and leading the MultiX group. With his group he focuses on AI based techniques which extract rich information from the data and support the interaction with the user in a hybrid intelligence setting. Advanced visualizations make the interaction intuitive and explainable. A focus of the group is hypergraph based methods which we are now developing into tools for Anti Money Laundering. Worring has a long history in working in interdisciplinary research and was the initiator of the AI4Fintech program.