7 Chord’s appliance of science boosted with new hires

Dan Barnes
1565

7 Chord, the provider of predictive analytics for sovereign and corporate bond prices to fixed income traders, issuers, and institutional investors, has appointed Andrew Sundstrom as its chief science officer. Sundstrom will lead the new phase of development and innovation of BondDroid, 7 Chord’s proprietary machine learning engine, designed to deliver bond prices, credit spreads, and yields in real-time.

Sundstrom is a seasoned engineer and researcher with 28 years of cross-disciplinary scientific and industry experience at Nortel Networks, IBM Research, Morgan Stanley, and recently at Nanotronics, where he developed artificial intelligence methods to make factories smarter and more resilient to errors and sophisticated cyberattacks. He has a BA in computer science from Cornell University, an MS in computer science, and a Ph.D. in computational biology from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.

“We are excited to welcome Andrew to 7 Chord’s leadership team. The breadth of his applied AI experience across disciplines such as computational biology, computer vision, natural language processing, cybersecurity, and smart manufacturing gives him a fresh perspective on the analytical problems we encounter while bringing pre-trade transparency to fixed income. As we expand our AI pricing to corporate bond markets globally, his out-of-the-box thinking will be invaluable,” said Kristina Fan, 7 Chord’s CEO and Co-Founder.

BondDroid is designed for the live trading environment by adapting its behaviour in real-time in the face of unexpected events such as a global pandemic or a sudden change in the default risk of an issuer.
“I was always fascinated with the problems inherent in predicting market prices: representing human judgment and intuitive decision making, signalling games and revealed preference, causal inference, and concept drift away from stationary distributions. I see tremendous potential for adaptable AI beyond finance and am excited to take BondDroid to a new level,” said Sundstrom.

Joining him is Tinatin Nikvashvili, a 2021 graduate of NYU’s Center for Data Science MSc program, who was an intern at 7 Chord during the previous academic year. “I am excited to be solving cutting-edge problems related to financial time series alongside Andrew and learning from his experience in deploying machine learning in a real-world setting,” said Nikvashvili.

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