Industry Day and Welcoming New Industrial Partners

by Amy Ambrose (Simons Institute)

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing is delighted to announce that our sixth annual Industry Day will take place online on Thursday, November 5th. The goal of the day is to foster exchange and collaboration between the Institute’s Industry Partners and graduate students, postdoctoral research fellows and senior researchers at the Institute and on the broader Berkeley campus. Participation is open to the Simons Institute's Industry Partners, and to others by invitation. Learn more about Industry Day here. 

We are also pleased to announce the latest additions to the Institute's Industrial Partners network. In light of the expanding role of artificial intelligence, machine learning and cryptography in financial services and the insurance sector, two leading firms, JP Morgan and Swiss Re, have joined the Simons Institute as our newest Industrial Partners. 

Fraud prevention and cybersecurity are key concerns for both companies, and AI can be used to analyze and identify irregularities in patterns on a global scale. Some financial service firms apply deep learning to a range of customer data — to identify fraudulent customers and detect money laundering, for example. For reinsurance, AI that is designed to curate increasingly disparate sources of data helps identify global and local risks more efficiently. This, in turn, can lead to better products and services to clients. 

Both new partnerships were championed by scientists leading teams of researchers within their firms: Sumitra Ganesh (Berkeley PhD, EECS ‘09) and Manuela Veloso in the case of JP Morgan, and Jeff Bohn (Berkeley PhD, Business ‘99) for Swiss Re. Partnership with the Institute provides each firm with an extension of their internal research efforts, a sounding board for current challenges, and insights into future directions in technology. 

NTT Research, a part of the Japanese global technology firm NTT, joined the Simons Institute’s Industrial Partner community in 2019, simultaneously with the launch of their new research park in Palo Alto. NTT Research is guided by a mission to “upgrade reality” through research and development in quantum information, neuroscience and photonics; cryptographic and information security; and medical and health informatics. Their partnership is championed by CEO Kazu Gomi and scientist Tatsuaki Okamoto.

As the world’s leading venue for collaborative research in theoretical computer science, the Simons Institute is strengthened by industry partners and their communities of scientists from around the world. These three organizations join our current partners, VMware, Microsoft Research, Facebook/Novi and Google Research, in support of the theory of computing. All will be present at Industry Day.