COOPERATION BETWEEN EDHEC-RISK INSTITUTE AND KAIST
Presentation of the Partner
KAIST, a research university established in 1971, has served as the gateway to advanced science, technology, and innovation for Korea. To meet the growing demand for young, competent global leaders, KAIST has developed itself as a global arena for interdisciplinary education and research opportunities.
With 1,112 faculty members working with 11,176 students, KAIST focuses on creating an atmosphere for interdisciplinary communication and collaboration for its academic units in all of its four campuses in Daejeon and Seoul to stimulate the innovative leadership and entrepreneurship needed to develop technology for the advancement of the world and for sustainable economic growth. KAIST also endeavors to strengthen its network to provide its constituents with collaboration opportunities with prominent partners from academia and industry. KAIST will continue to foster innovation and creativity for the future generation of global leaders; students who are no longer bound by the limits of specific disciplines, departments or the national borders and are dedicated to research excellence for the betterment of all mankind.
The KAIST Center for Wealth Management Technologies (KAIST WMT Center) was founded in 2016, to foster the interdisciplinary research for wealth management technologies. Under the core agenda of “enabling customized wealth management service for everyone”, the center is conducting various researches to provide innovative technologies which can ultimately shift the high cost service structure of wealth management industry into scalable and affordable one. Currently, the center has 11 members from academia, industry, and regulatory agencies.
Point of contact:
Woo Chang Kim is associate professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Head of KAIST Center for Wealth Management Technologies. He serves on the editorial boards for several journals, including Journal of Portfolio Management, Optimization and Engineering, and Quantitative Finance Letters. He is an expert on financial optimization and portfolio management, and has published many papers in leading academic and practitioner journals in the related fields as well as a textbook on robust portfolio management. He is a member of voting rights committee for Korea’s National Pension System and an advisor for Samsung Asset Management. He was a visiting professor in Department of Economics and Finance at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome in 2014, a visiting fellow in Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University in 2013-2014, and a guest researcher for Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics at University of Bonn in 2013. He has earned doctoral degree from Princeton University’s Operations Research and Financial Engineering Department, and master’s and bachelor’s from Industrial Engineering at Seoul National University.
Presentation of the Partnership
In the context of the fourth industrial revolution, the digital revolution, which is likely to have a dramatic impact on the investment industry, four prominent academic institutions renowned for the quality and relevance of their educational and research programmes in finance and technology – EDHEC-Risk Institute, KAIST, Princeton and Tsinghua Universities – have partnered for the first time. Together, they will host an international series of rotational conferences on financial technologies and offer a forum that will facilitate discussion among all interested parties (academics, practitioners and regulators) around the world.
The conferences will be held annually and the 1st edition was launched on 26 April 2017 with the Four-University Rotating FinTech Conference: Wealth Management Systems for Individual Investors, which took place on the Princeton campus, and was jointly organised by EDHEC-Risk Institute and the Princeton University ORFE department.
The second edition “State of the Art in Robo-Advising Systems: Financial Technologies for Enhanced Social Security Conference”, organised by KAIST, took place on 12-13 April 2018 in Seoul. The audience – which consisted of top executives from investment and wealth management companies, banks, institutional investors and academics – overwhelmingly appreciated the good balance between academic insights and practical applications. It proved to be a nice opportunity to interact with experts on financial technologies, includin, John Bogle (Founder of The Vanguard Group, and President of the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center), Woo Chang Kim (Professor and Head of KAIST Center for Wealth Management Technologies), Giorgio Consigli (Professor of Applied Mathematics at University of Bergamo), Michael Dempster (Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University), Lionel Martellini (Director of EDHEC-Risk Institute), John Mulvey (Professor and founding member of the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University), and Wei Xu (Professor at Tsinghua University). Download the full programme of the 12-13 April 2018 Conference.
The third edition, organised by EDHEC-Risk, took place in Paris on 2 April 2019. The next conference will be held in China in Spring of 2021.
About EDHEC
Operating from campuses in Lille, Nice, Paris, London and Singapore, EDHEC is one of the world’s top 15 business schools. Fully international and directly connected to the business world, EDHEC commands a strong reputation for research excellence and the ability to train entrepreneurs and managers capable of breaking new ground. EDHEC functions as a genuine laboratory of ideas and produces innovative solutions valued by businesses. The School’s teaching is inspired by its research work and a focus on “learning by doing”, all with the aim of equipping people with the skills to succeed in business.
