This center was established in 2017 with a generous gift by Mr Bill Nie, a financial investment entrepreneur. It is a sister center of the Oxford—Nie Financial Big Data Lab at the University of Oxford, UK.
The research of the Center focuses on the exploration of theoretical underpinnings and modeling strategies for financial asset management with reinforcement learning and big data analytical techniques. The Center's research combines modern portfolio theory, behavioral finance, machine learning and data science to study core problems including optimal asset allocation and risk management; and the research of the Center sits at the crossroads of financial engineering, computer science, psychology, statistics, and finance, aiming at providing innovative and intelligent investment solutions. The Center not only engages in scholarly inquisitions, but also embraces practical relevance, especially in an era when a new industry of AI-powered investment advisors is emerging and thriving.
One of the highlights of the Center's research since its inception is the development of a continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) theory. It establishes a rigorous mathematical foundation and develops interpretable RL algorithms. They have been applied to dynamic asset allocations and achieved outstanding performance compared with traditional model-based and existing RL-based strategies. The theory has also been employed to the latest diffusion models for generative AI that is potentially instrumental for intelligent auto-generations of both data and investment strategies.