Data Science

What can Inka Quipus teach us about data management

If, as it is most probable, you are a typical person, chances are that your knowledge of ancient Peruvian culture is a bit rusty!

Maybe you have some vague high-school memories of an extensive but somewhat “backward” empire (as seen by the then European peoples) that was conquered and then asset-stripped by a handful of aggressive Spanish conquistadors.

Or maybe your best preserved memory is the excitement of reading von Daniken’s rampant speculations about the Nazca lines and ancient extraterrestrial spaceports. But unless it happened that at some point later in life you heard about the work of Prof. Urton and his collaborators, most likely you have no idea what an Incan Quipu is (see image).

Open source software is all the rage those days in IT and the concept is making rapid inroads in all parts of the enterprise. An earlier comprehensive survey by Gartner, Inc. found that by 2011 more than half of organizations surveyed had adopted open-source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy. This percentage may have currently exceeded the 75% mark according to open source advisory firms.

If you work in financial risk management you will most likely recognize where the following sentence is coming from:

One of the most significant lessons learned from the global financial crisis that began in 2007 was that banks information technology (IT) and data architectures were inadequate to support the broad management of financial risks. This had severe consequences to the banks themselves and to the stability of the financial system as a whole

Open Risk White Paper 3: Introducing the Open Risk API

We develop a proposal for an open source application programming interface (API) that allows for the distributed development, deployment and use of financial risk models. The proposal aims to explore the following key question: how to integrate in a robust and trustworthy manner diverse risk modeling and risk data resources, contributed by multiple authors, using different technologies, and which very likely will evolve over time.

Risk modeling is as much art as it is science

The Zen of Modeling aims to capture the struggle for risk modeling beauty