Applications of Computing in Industry

Tuesday 20th October

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 311
Title: Building trusted research systems around untrusted AI
Speaker:  Tim Mace - Head of AI

AI can now read everything a hedge fund receives and write the code to test any idea. The hard part is trusting what it produces. In this talk we discuss how to build research systems in which AI proposes and the platform verifies, and why a system that says "no" convincingly is worth more than one that says "yes".

Thursday 22nd October

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 311
Title: Inside Bending Spoons: How to improve a world-class product
Speakers:  Caterina Cecchetti, Musab Guma'A & Matei Apolzan

At Bending Spoons, we’re striving to build one of the all-time great companies. A company that serves a huge number of customers. To achieve this objective, we execute the following strategy: We acquire a digital business with untapped potential and make it as successful as we can by leveraging our platform—which comprises our expertise, technologies, data, brand, talents, and company culture. Then, we invest the proceeds into making our platform more powerful, and into acquiring new businesses. Thus, our strategy sees us combine an investor’s attention to capital allocation with the hands-on approach of an operator. Join us to see how this strategy comes to life through the example of WeTransfer. We’ll share how different perspectives, from software engineering to growth, contribute to improving a global digital product and shaping the decisions behind its evolution. The talk will also offer an introduction to life at Bending Spoons, including how our teams collaborate, how people develop professionally, and the career opportunities available within the company.

Tuesday 27th October

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 311
Title: How to build a Y Combinator company to run data centers?
Speaker:  Shapol M. | founder and CEO of Entangl

Most startups start by asking what software they can build. Entangl started with a stranger question: what would it take for a data center to understand itself, diagnose what is happening, and eventually operate itself? In this talk, Shapol, founder and CEO of Y Combinator-backed Entangl, will tell the story of building a company at the intersection of AI, software and physical infrastructure. From getting the first customers and surviving the early days of YC, to deploying software inside real data centers, reaching profitability and building toward autonomous infrastructure. But this will not be a polished “startup journey” presentation. It will be about the problems that are still unsolved: how you give AI an understanding of a physical system, how you reason over thousands of interconnected assets, how you build software people can trust when mistakes have physical consequences, and what it feels like to build a company while the category itself is still being invented. The bigger idea is simple: the physical world is becoming programmable. Data centers are where Entangl is starting. Power, cooling, factories, energy systems and other critical infrastructure come next. And for a small number of engineers, this is the unusually early moment where joining the right team can mean helping define how an entire industry works.

Thursday 29th October

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 311
Title: QRT: Breaking into Quantitative Finance from University
Speakers:  Orry Gooberman (Quantitative Technologist)

How can your academic interests lead to a career in quantitative and systematic trading? Join Qube Research & Technologies (QRT) for a look at the transition from university to the workplace and the opportunities to begin your career with us.

One of our Quantitative Technology Analysts will share their experience of joining QRT, from their internship through to graduate life, and explore how he put the skills developed during his studies into practice. Our campus recruiter will also introduce our internship programmes, offer an insight into QRT’s culture, and explain the application process. Come along to hear first-hand experiences, ask questions, and explore where a career at QRT could take you.

Wednesday 30th September

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 308
Title: An introduction to quantitative finance and blockchain analytics
Speaker:  Polina Vertex

This talk provides a foundational overview of modern quantitative finance and its convergence with decentralized, blockchain-based financial ecosystems. It begins by contrasting traditional financial structures—characterized by centralized intermediaries, traditional order books, and delayed settlement—with alternative finance models built on permissionless ledgers, peer-to-peer protocols, and automated market makers. Next, it introduces the fundamentals of blockchain analytics, showing how raw on-chain data can be transformed into actionable market signals. Finally, the talk bridges classical mathematical modeling with the unique quantitative frameworks required for decentralized finance.

Wednesday 30th September

Time: 2.00pm Location: HUX 308
Title: Want to found a start-up? Work at one first!
Speaker:  Lawrence Jones - Founding Engineer

Startups compress careers. Lawrence has lived it at incident.io, owning problems far above his pay grade, shipping under pressure, and learning in months what takes years elsewhere. This is a first-hand account of the highs, the lows, and what happens when you dive straight into the deep end.

Hear from Lawrence Jones, our founding engineer at incident.io. He's the driving force behind our Investigations product helping companies to autonomously conduct root cause analysis of incidents and reduce downtime. Prior to this, Lawrence was an early intern at GoCardless (now a unicorn) where he climbed to Principle Engineer.

Tuesday 6th October

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 311
Title: Engineering Leverage: How AI allows small firms to get ahead
Speakers:  Kaamil Jasani, Senior Developer and Adrienne Gauldie, Director of Operations 

Arctic Lake builds trading software for financial institutions, competing with vendors many times our size. AI has changed how we do that. Our engineers now direct agents through much of the work of writing, testing and reviewing code, which shortens the path from an idea to working, tested software. We'll show a couple of examples of what that has let us build.

Speed only matters if what you ship can be trusted. So we treat the process our agents follow as software in its own right, and we version, review and test it like any other code. We'll look at what testing actually means when the thing under test is non-deterministic, including the time a model went looking for a way around our sandbox. We'll finish with what this means for the engineering you'll do after university, and why the fundamentals you're learning now matter more, not less.

Thursday 8th October

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 311
Title: The Journey to Become the Biggest Fintech in the UK
Speakers:  Karen Rossi (Enterprise CIO, Lloyds Banking Group), Elijah Zadok (Engineering Lead, Credit Platform) & Adeola Olalere (Engineering Lead, Prudential & Analytics Platform)

• We will cover:
  • An overview of Lloyds Banking Group & its journey to become the biggest fintech in the UK
  • Bring to life how technology is driving innovation across the Bank, including agentic AI
  • Highlight how Imperial students can join LBG through industrial placements & our graduate schemes

Tuesday 13th October

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 311
Title: An Introduction to Squarepoint: applying Technology to Quant Finance
Speaker:  Miles Roper

Squarepoint is a global investment management firm that harnesses a diverse portfolio of systematic and quantitative strategies to deliver high-quality, uncorrelated returns for our clients. We don't just use technology - we build it, engineering everything from blazing-fast trading platforms to massive data analysis and compute farms. Join this talk to discover the cutting-edge technologies that power our success in quant finance, and how we put them to work.

Thursday 15th October

Time: 1.00pm Location: HUX 311
Title: HTTP: a 30-year arms race against latency
Speaker:  Maurizio Abba - Senior Engineering Manager

HTTP runs almost every app and website, and it has changed a lot in 30 years. This talk follows that change: from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, through connection management, and on to streaming protocols like gRPC and WebSockets. It covers the engineering trade-offs behind each version and what goes wrong when you run them at global scale.