D. Sculley, Kevin Buzzard, Leo de Moura, Lester Mackey and Peter J. Liu appointed to the advisory committee for the Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize.

LONDON, April 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — XTX Markets’ newly created Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize (‘AIMO Prize’) is a $10mn challenge fund designed to spur the creation of a publicly shared AI model capable of winning a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

XTX Markets is delighted to announce the appointment of five further advisory committee members. This group brings great expertise in machine learning, including D. Sculley, the CEO of Kaggle; Lester Mackey, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Macarthur Fellow; and Peter J. Liu, a research scientist at Google DeepMind.

Prolific mathematicians Kevin Buzzard, who achieved a perfect score in the International Mathematical Olympiad, and Leo De Moura who is the Chief Architect for Lean, the automated reasoning tool, also join the advisory group.

They join the existing advisory committee members Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers, both winners of the Fields Medal, as well as Dan Roberts, Geoff Smith and Po-Shen Loh.

The AIMO Advisory Committee will support the development of the AIMO Prize, including advising on appropriate protocols and technical aspects, and designing the various competitions and prizes.

Simon Coyle, Head of Philanthropy at XTX Markets, commented:

“We are thrilled to complete the AIMO Advisory Committee with the appointments of D., Kevin, Leo, Lester and Peter. Together, they have enormous experience in machine learning and automated reasoning and are already bringing expertise and wisdom to the AIMO Prize. We look forward to announcing the winners of the AIMO’s first Progress Prize soon, and then publicly sharing the AI models to support the open and collaborative development of AI.”

Further information on the AIMO Prize

There will be a grand prize of $5mn for the first publicly shared AI model to enter an AIMO approved competition and perform at a standard equivalent to a gold medal in the IMO. There will also be a series of progress prizes, totalling up to $5mn, for publicly shared AI models that achieve key milestones towards the grand prize.

The first AIMO approved competition opened to participants in April 2024 on the Kaggle competition platform. The first progress prize focuses on problems pitched at junior and high-school level maths competitions. There is a total prize pot of $1.048m for the first progress prize, of which at least $254k will be awarded in July 2024, There will be a presentation of progress held in Bath, England in July 2024, as part of the 65th IMO.

For more information on the AIMO Prize visit: https://aimoprize.com/ or the competition page on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/ai-mathematical-olympiad-prize/

Advisory Committee member profiles:

D. Sculley

D. is the CEO at Kaggle. Prior to joining Kaggle, he was a director at Google Brain, leading research teams working on robust, responsible, reliable and efficient ML and AI. In his career in ML, he has worked on nearly every aspect of machine learning, and has led both product and research teams including those on some of the most challenging business problems. Some of his well-known work involves ML technical debt, ML education, ML robustness, production-critical ML, and ML for scientific applications such as protein design.

Kevin Buzzard

Kevin a professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, specialising in algebraic number theory. As well as his research and teaching, he has a wide range of interests, including being Deputy Head of Pure Mathematics, Co-Director of a CDT and the department’s outreach champion. He is currently focusing on formal proof verification, including being an active participant in the Lean community. From October 2024, he will be leading a project to formalise a 21^st century proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Before joining Imperial, some 20 years ago, he was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he had previously been named ‘Senior Wrangler’ (the highest scoring undergraduate mathematician). He was also a participant in the International Mathematical Olympiad, winning gold with a perfect score in 1987. He has been a visitor at the IAS in Princeton, a visiting lecturer at Harvard, has won several prizes both for research and teaching, and has given lectures all over the world.

Leo de Moura

Leo is a Senior Principal Applied Scientist in the Automated Reasoning Group at AWS. In his spare time, he dedicates himself to serving as the Chief Architect of the Lean FRO, a non-profit organization that he proudly co-founded alongside Sebastian Ullrich. He is also honoured to hold a position on the Board of Directors at the Lean FRO, where he actively contributes to its growth and development. Before joining AWS in 2023, he was a Senior Principal Researcher in the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, where he worked for 17 years starting in 2006. Prior to that, he worked as a Computer Scientist at SRI International. His research areas are automated reasoning, theorem proving, decision procedures, SAT and SMT. He is the main architect of several automated reasoning tools: Lean, Z3, Yices 1.0 and SAL. Leo’s work in automated reasoning has been acknowledged with a series of prestigious awards, including the CAV, Haifa, and Herbrand awards, as well as the Programming Languages Software Award by the ACM. Leo’s work has also been reported in the New York Times and many popular science magazines such as Wired, Quanta, and Nature News.

Lester Mackey

Lester Mackey is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he develops machine learning methods, models, and theory for large-scale learning tasks driven by applications from climate forecasting, healthcare, and the social good. Lester moved to Microsoft from Stanford University, where he was an assistant professor of Statistics and, by courtesy, of Computer Science. He earned his PhD in Computer Science and MA in Statistics from UC Berkeley and his BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University. He co-organized the second place team in the Netflix Prize competition for collaborative filtering; won the Prize4Life ALS disease progression prediction challenge; won prizes for temperature and precipitation forecasting in the yearlong real-time Subseasonal Climate Forecast Rodeo; and received best paper, outstanding paper, and best student paper awards from the ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, and the International Conference on Machine Learning. He is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the COPSS Leadership Academy, and the recipient of the 2023 Ethel Newbold Prize.

Peter J. Liu

Peter J. Liu is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in the San Francisco Bay area, doing machine learning research with a specialisation in language models since 2015 starting in the Google Brain team. He has published and served as area chair in top machine learning and NLP conferences such as ICLR, ICML, NEURIPS, ACL and EMNLP. He also has extensive production experience, including launching the first deep learning model for Gmail Anti-Spam, and using neural network models to detect financial fraud for top banks. He has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

About XTX Markets:

XTX Markets is a leading financial technology firm which partners with counterparties, exchanges and e-trading venues globally to provide liquidity in the Equity, FX, Fixed Income and Commodity markets. XTX has over 200 employees based in London, Paris, New York, Mumbai, Yerevan and Singapore. XTX is consistently a top 5 liquidity provider globally in FX (Euromoney 2018-present) and is also the largest European equities (systematic internaliser) liquidity provider (Rosenblatt FY: 2020-2023).

The company’s corporate philanthropy focuses on STEM education and maximum impact giving (alongside an employee matching programme). Since 2017, XTX has donated over £100mn to charities and good causes, establishing it as a major donor in the UK and globally.

In a changing world XTX Markets is at the forefront of making financial markets fairer and more efficient for all.

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BEIJING, April 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — A news report from China Daily:

Greater efforts are needed to strengthen international cooperation in science and technology, explore ways of jointly solving important global issues through technological innovation, and develop new quality productive forces, said officials, experts and company executives on Thursday in Beijing.

Addressing the opening ceremony of the 2024 Zhongguancun Forum, Vice-Premier Ding Xue­xiang said China is willing to work with the international community to practice the concept of open, fair, just and nondiscriminatory international sci-tech cooperation, and to jointly build a global sci-tech community.

The country will explore a new model regarding mutually beneficial global cooperation in sci-tech innovation, and will break down barriers restricting the flow of knowledge, technology, talent and other innovative factors, to jointly create an open innovation ecosystem.

Yin Li, secretary of the Communist Party of China Beijing Municipal Committee, said the capital will ramp up efforts to improve its innovation capacities, accelerate the building of world-leading science and technology parks, increase investment in basic research and make breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields.

Data from the Ministry of Science and Technology showed that China’s research and development investment exceeded 3.3 trillion yuan ($455.4 billion) in 2023, up 8.1 percent year-on-year, and the spending on fundamental research reached 221.2 billion yuan, an increase of 9.3 percent over the previous year.

China’s strength in scientific and technological innovation has taken a major leap in recent years. Marco Aleman, assistant director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, said China is a powerhouse of innovation that contributes to global growth and sustainable development.

According to WIPO, the country stands as a global innovation leader, ranking 12th in the Global Innovation Index 2023, and it owned 24 of the top 100 science and technology clusters globally by the end of last year, ranking first in the world for the first time.

Quarraisha Abdool Karim, president of the World Academy of Sciences, said ensuring a sustainable future through partnership and cooperation creates an opportunity for all participants to explore new pathways toward achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Chinese tech company Xiaomi Corp, said the company will continue to step up investment in R&D and strive for breakthroughs in core technologies.

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PASAY CITY, Philippines, April 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The SM group continues to expand its presence nationwide to serve more Filipinos and communities.

“We will continue to invest in growth in the Philippines and we are committed to being a catalyst for responsible development. We have a young, dynamic, higher-earning population who will help support and drive economic activity,” said SM Investments Corporation President and Chief Executive Officer Frederic C. DyBuncio.

There are many areas in the country which have yet to benefit from access to modern retailing, formal financial services and integrated property developments.

“Our strategy is to continue to expand coverage nationwide to create new markets that improve access to these sectors,” he added.

SM Prime Holdings, Inc. is opening four new malls, one in Metro Manila and three in the provincial areas in 2024.

SM Development Corporation (SMDC) is planning to roll out 8,000 to 10,000 residential units this year in the northern part of the Philippines and across Visayas and Mindanao.

SM Hotels officially launched its first Lanson Place property at the Mall of Asia Complex, Pasay City.  

Alfamart, SM’s minimart grocery format, is set to increase its store expansion by at least 400 stores in 2024.  

BDO also continues to expand coverage nationwide with BDO and BDO Network Bank planning to increase branches by a combined 100 to 120 this year.

Following its acquisition of the Philippine Geothermal Production Company (PGPC), SM is set to explore new steam fields with the aim to double the company’s current steam production of 300 megawatts within the medium-term.

These projects are set to generate around 2,000 jobs during exploration and development, which will boost livelihood in each respective locality.

2GO Group, Inc. added two new ships and will have 11 ships in its fleet, serving 19 ports of call.

Airspeed, another SM-owned logistics company, is also keen on expanding its distribution facilities in key cities in the regions along with opening more kiosks and collaborations with service providers to offer better customer options, wider network, and quicker delivery times.

About SM Investments Corporation

SM Investments Corporation is one of the leading Philippine companies that is invested in market-leading businesses in retail, banking, and property. It also invests in ventures that capture high growth opportunities in the emerging Philippine economy.

SM’s retail operations are the country’s largest and most diversified, consisting of grocery stores, department stores and specialty retail stores. SM’s property arm, SM Prime Holdings, Inc., is the largest integrated property developer in the Philippines with interests in malls, residences, offices, hotels, and convention centers as well as tourism-related property developments. SM’s interests in banking are in BDO Unibank, Inc., the country’s largest bank, and China Banking Corporation, the fourth largest private domestic bank.

For more information, please visit www.sminvestments.com

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