Roberto Castañeda Lozano is the proud winner of the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society (SAIS) Master’s Thesis Award 2010. Roberto has done his master’s work at Cinnober resulting in the thesis: “Constraint Programming for Random Testing of a Trading System” and is now employed at Cinnober.
Roberto studied to become an engineer at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain when he decided to go to Sweden as an exchange student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology two years ago.
Roberto’s examiner and supervisor has been Christian Schulte at KTH, with co-supervisors Federico Barber at Polytechnic University of Valencia, and Lars Wahlberg, Test Strategist at Cinnober.
Roberto successfully defended his thesis on January 28, 2010 and was nominated for the award by his examiner. From SAIS motivation:
“Roberto is awarded the prize for his excellent thesis that shows how constraint programming, a classical AI technique, can be used to allow automated random testing of a trading system. The thesis combines a strong theoretical foundation with a thorough empirical evaluation.”
Lars is impressed by Roberto’s work. “Today’s marketplace systems use complicated functionality for trading”, he explains. “Roberto’s thesis has expanded the oracle design to also find defects in complex functionality, which is new in the finance industry to my understanding. The thesis has also shown that it is possible to define the functionality in an exact and formalized mathematical way. Formal specification methods are used for instance within the aerospace industry.”
Roberto got the idea of applying the technique of constraint programming to the verification of financial systems during his internship at Cinnober. ”Large financial systems – like a stock exchange – MUST work: they cannot go down or fail to deliver the expected functionality. If they do it will cost money as well as trust,” Roberto explains. “This method will help to make the software even more reliable and gives a way to mathematically prove that a system acts as expected.”
The cooperation with KTH is an important part of Cinnober’s research and development work, and each year several students do their master’s work and internships at Cinnober.
Christina Jacobsson, Head of HR at Cinnober says: “We have a good relationship with KTH. Apart from the valuable results of our interns’ work, it’s a great way to build relationships and find talented people such as Roberto, with a passionate interest in complex financial technology. We’re very proud of Roberto’s work and the well-earned award he has received.”
About SAIS
The Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society, SAIS, is a society promoting research and application of Artificial Intelligence. Members are Swedish universities, organizations, researchers, professionals and students active in, or interested in the area of Artificial Intelligence. SAIS is also part of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) a European network of AI societies.