NUS Computing Students and Professor Secure First Place at ICAIF’24 Competition

NUS Computing's Team Just-in-Time.AI secured first place at the 5th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF’24), competing against over 90 global teams from prestigious institutions such as Columbia University, ETH Zurich, and Tsinghua University.

Their victory was powered by the innovative CMS-VAE model, a groundbreaking approach to simulating realistic cryptocurrency price dynamics. This model addresses critical challenges in the financial industry, including market volatility, inter-asset dependencies, and non-stationary behaviour. By leveraging advanced techniques like dilated Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and the Ensemble Financial Performance Loss (EFPL) function, the CMS-VAE offers practical and scalable solutions for risk management and algorithmic trading.

The team comprised Yihao Ang, a PhD candidate and team leader, Yifan Bao and Qiang Wang, both MComp students, Dr. Qiang Huang, a Senior Research Fellow, and Professor Anthony Tung. Yihao Ang also presented their research at ICAIF’24, highlighting the model's potential to transform AI applications in finance.

This outstanding achievement underscores the team’s technical excellence and the practical impact of AI in addressing complex real-world financial challenges, reaffirming NUS Computing’s position as a leader in innovation.