Tucker Balch

Coordinates Associate Professor of Interactive Computing College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology courier address: Tucker Balch 801 Atlantic Drive Atlanta, Georgia 30332 office: CCB 317 telephone: +1.678.523.8685 fax: +1.404.751.0132 email: tucker@cc.gatech.edu facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tuckerbalch blog: http://augmentedtrader.wordpress.com schedule: http://ical.me.com/tucker.balch/TRBWork CV: CV (updated Jan 19, 2011)   recent papers   search google scholar

Some Blog Entries for My Students

• The 8 Elements of Successful Abstracts
• Optimizing Paper Titles: Search Engine Optimization for Your Research Vision
• How to Structure a Research Paper in Experimental Computer Science

Teaching in Spring 2012

I'm available to advise graduate students in independant study projects relating to finance and machine learning, and tracking and analyzing multiple agent behavior.

CS 7631/4632: Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems. In this course we will study methods enabling large scale multi-robot systems to cooperate effectively. We'll use several different simulation systems, including MASON. Previous robotics experience is not expected for this course, but students should have strong programming skills. Visit the website for the course.

For Fall 2012

CS 7646 / MGT 8803 TSL: Machine Learning for Trading. In this course we learn about many of the technical challenges involved in running a machine learning-based proprietary trading operation. It will be a rather intensive coding experience. Learn more about this course.

Other Courses Taught

Other Activities

Director of the Institute for Personal Robots in Education. We design robots, software and curricula for undergraduate CS education. We also develop assessment instruments to measure how well our designs work. This is joint work with Bryn Mawr College.

With Maria Hybinette, created ThinkAI, an intra-day stock price prediction algorithm that runs on thinkorswim's retail client platform. ThinkAI was specifically mentioned in the Barron's article annoucing thinkorswim was the #1 high-tech platform for trading in 2009. Does it work? Yes.

Quantitative analyst at Cerebellum Capital in 2009 on sabbatical. Cerebellum is one of a group of new hedge funds that use AI and Machine Learning techniques as a core technology for trading. Cerebellum was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal (pdf | web).

Vice President of the RoboCup Federation. My key responsibilities as VP are to help design and manage the financial operations of RoboCup, especially for the US branch, and to support the various IT needs for RoboCup, such as the website and email lists.

CEO of Georgia Robotics, a non-profit that manufactures and sells robots for education. So far we have delivered over 3,000 robots to students and schools. That's a record for robots for CS education.

Managing Partner of Lucena Research, LLC, a fund management company.

I author a blog about quantitative finance.

Students

My research has been made possible by a number of fine students:

Current:

• Shang Hai
• Brian Hrolenok
• Pipei Huang
• Misha Novitzky
• Andrew Quitmeyer
• Rahua Sawhney
• YuTing Yang

Advisor for:

• Mert Cosgun
• Adam Feldman, PhD Georgia Tech, now at Google
• Harikrishna Narayanan, MS Georgia Tech, now at Yahoo Finance
• Shreyas Joshi, MS Georgia Tech, now at AQR Capital
• Keith O'Hara, PhD (soon!) Georgia Tech, now at Bard College
• Matt Powers, PhD Georgia Tech, now at CMU NREC
• Sanem Sariel, PhD Istanbul Technical University, now professor at ITU
• Rohit Sharma, MS Georgia Tech, now SVP at Morgan Stanley
• Ashley Stroupe, PhD CMU, now at JPL

Research with:

• James Bruce, PhD CMU, now at Google
• Max Dama, undergrad at UCB
• Rosemary Emery, PhD CMU, now at Google
• Andrew Guillory, PhD student at UW
• Martin C Martin, PhD CMU, now a serial entrepreneur
• Hank Wilde, BS CS Georgia Tech, now at CMU NREC
• Zia Khan, PhD (soon!) Princeton, on job market
• Jinhan Lee, PhD student at Georgia Tech
• Charles Pippin, PhD student at Georgia Tech, and at GTRI
• Ram Ravichandran, BS CS Georgia Tech, now at CMU and Twitter
• Richard Roberts, PhD student at Georgia Tech
• Andrew Stein, PhD CMU, now at Tandent

Please send me email with corrections or updates :-).

Family

		My wife Maria is a professor of computer science at UGA. Gunnar, Tucker and Emmy run around all over the place and study hard for school!
		Photos of family by Maria Hybinette.

Before Georgia Tech

From 1998 to 2001 I was a research professor at the Robotics Institute of CMU. I worked with Professor Manuela Veloso on multi-agent robot teams. I lead the design and programming of the Hammerheads robot soccer team (left) with lots of help from Rosemary Emery, Ashley Stroupe, and Steve Stancliff. We investigated a number of interesting topics with these robots including collaborative localization, behavior-based pushing, and cooperation protocols. My time at CMU is remembered fondly and deeply valued! (photo credit: CMU)

I am honored to have been able to fly F-15s in the US Air Force and the Georgia Air National Guard. I trained in the T-37 and T-38 at Columbus AFB, then transitioned to F-15s at Luke AFB in Phoenix, AZ. I served between wars so I never flew in combat. I led a 2-ship formation over the College of Computing Building, then departed Atlanta nearly straight up in full afterburner. Many Atlantans were surprised that morning. (photo credit: web)

Research group email lists. Follow links below to subscribe: balchgroup for students who work with me at GT. tracking for research on sensor-based multi-target tracking marslab for members of the MultiAgent Robotics and Systems Lab ml4trading-dev for the software for trading development team

 

(c) 2011 by Tucker Balch