Seminar by Dr. Noah SILVERMAN from The Director of Helios.ai, Light.CX, Excellent Liquidity Inc. and the CEO of Innovest Energy Fund

Bitcoin was introduced to the world in 2009. Initially, it was a curiosity for computer scientists, cryptographers, and anarchists. In the past few years, we have seen the meteoric rise of Bitcoin, leading to the birth of an entirely new industry and asset class. Today we have thousands of cryptocurrencies, dozens of different blockchains, NFTs, governments adopting Bitcoin, and governments banning cryptocurrency. And, this landscape changes every week!

This environment has created the perfect storm of disruptive technology, innovative entrepreneurs, charlatans, criminals, overnight billionaires, overenthusiastic media, and confused regulators.

The core innovation was the marriage of “blockchain” technology and modern cryptography. One area of particular interest to the Statistics Department is the rich data available. As all blockchains are public ledgers, all data from every party and transaction are easily available. This gives rise to a variety of potential time series, graph models, and economic models. For students and researchers, this new industry is ripe with potential projects.

In this short lecture, we will cover the basics of how cryptocurrency works, review the fundamental concepts behind a blockchain, discuss the boom of ICOs, and civer the latest bubble of NFTs. Discussing the entire industry is impossible in this short time, but my goal is to leave the audience with some basic tools to help understand this new world. (Hopefully, we’ll have time to delve deeper in future lectures.)

Noah Silverman holds a PhD in statistics from UCLA, and has worked with data and technology for over 20 years. The focus of Dr. Silverman’s research was on developing probabilistic models for complex and stochastic system. His research involved artificial intelligence, machine learning, hierarchical Bayesian models, Gaussian processes, classifiers, support vector machines, and textual analysis.

Currently Dr. Silverman works on a multitude of business involving the intersection of technology, mathematics, risk, finance, and cryptocurrency. He has developed successful solutions in Finance, Digital Advertising, Sports Betting, Crypto-currency, Education, Medical, and other industries.

Dr. Silverman is currently the Director of Helios.ai a consulting firm in Hong Kong, Director of Light.CX derivatives exchange, Director of Excellent Liquidity Inc., and the CEO of Innovest Energy Fund.