I moved the white clouds into a bigger pond under the deck in preparation for the onslaught of Canberra winter. Here they are on 11 June. Plus some friends, on the same day. I didn’t see them for most of August, but I kept feeding every few days, hoping somehow they can beat the odds. … More Winter Tales – Part 2
I planted some daffodil seeds in mid June. A little later than recommended, but I was hoping and the seeds didn’t disappoint. By 12 August, we can see evidence of life bursting from beneath the soil. By 19 August, this looks like it’s working. By 2 Sep, one can almost glimpse the flowers. Four days … More Winter Tales – Part 1
I am reading Robert Kuok’s autobiography and these two paragraphs from the chapter Vintage 1963 jumped out at me. “Success in futures depends on your feel for the market, your instincts and rhythm. I would talk to different brokers. Each company had bright, young English traders. One or two would be a little cunning, but, … More Robert Kuok’s Trading Algorithm from 1963
Financial intelligence is not an easy area to get into. There are not that many textbooks on the subject. There are also many information silos, and what one sees is often limited to the immediate surrounds of where one sits in the entire ecosystem. Having spent the last 2.5 years working with practitioners of financial … More The Financial Intelligence Ecosystem
As is well known, the Paillier encryption system supports addition of two encrypted numbers and the scalar multiplication of a constant and an encrypted number. I learned recently one can compare two encrypted numbers and multiply two encrypted numbers in Paillier by making a trip to the private key holder. Let’s first look at comparison. … More Multiplication and Comparison Operations in Paillier
Back in Sep 2015, I wrote this article outlining the investment case for SJM Holdings. The story is simple: the Macau gaming revenue had more than halved by Sep 2015 from a peak in early 2014 because of the corruption crackdown in China, sending Macau gaming stocks crashing more than 70% in some cases; the long-term fundamentals … More SJM Holdings: Hanging On or Cashing Out?
Blind carbon copy (bcc) in emails is one of those dangerous features that has significant potential to cause harm when used inappropriately, either by intention or by accident. There are actually not many good usage patterns for bcc, but one that is definitely good and quite under-utilised is its use in politely letting a person … More Email Etiquette: A Considerate Use of Bcc
A challenge with fraud-detection problems in many cases is the lack of any meaningful collection of labelled data for supervised-learning approaches to work. Two things practitioners do to tackle the problem are statistical profiling, usually via domain-specific business rules, and statistical outlier detection, sometimes augmented with non-trivial models of what constitute “normal” behaviour. There is … More A Framework to Detect Waste and Fraud in Health Insurance
Since starting my part-time appointment as an associate professor at the Australian National University, I have been thinking about spending more time on fundamental research. As Don Knuth counsels, “if you find that you’re spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you … More Large-Scale Distributed Analytics: A Research Program
