This open access book presents how cutting-edge digital technologies like Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain are set to disrupt the financial sector. The book illustrates how recent advances in these technologies facilitate banks, FinTech, and financial institutions to collect, process, analyze, and fully leverage the very large amounts of data that are nowadays produced and exchanged in the sector. To this end, the book also describes some more the most popular Big Data, AI and Blockchain applications in the sector, including novel applications in the areas of Know Your Customer (KYC), Personalized Wealth Management and Asset Management, Portfolio Risk Assessment, as well as variety of novel Usage-based Insurance applications based on Internet-of-Things data. Most of the presented applications have been developed, deployed and validated in real-life digital finance settings in the context of the European Commission funded INFINITECH project, which is a flagship innovation initiative for Big Data and AI in digital finance. This book is ideal for researchers and practitioners in Big Data, AI, banking and digital finance.
John Soldatos holds a PhD in Electrical& Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (2000) and is currently Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, UK (2014-present). He was Associate Professor and Head of the Internet of Things (IoT) Group at the Athens Information Technology (AIT), Greece (2006–2019), and Adjunct Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2007–2010). He has significant experience in working closely with large multi-national industries (e.g., IBM Hellas, INTRACOM S.A, INTRASOFT International) as R&D consultant and delivery specialist, while being scientific advisor to high-tech start-up enterprises, such as Innov-Acts Limited (Nicosia, Cyprus). Dr. Soldatos is an expert in Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and applications, including applications in smart cities, finance (Finance 4.0), and industry (Industry 4.0). Dr. Soldatos has played a leading role in the successful delivery of more than seventy (commercial-industrial, research, and business consulting) projects, for both private & public sector organizations, including complex integrated pro-jects. He is co-founder of the open-source platform OpenIoT. He has published more than 200 articles in international journals, books, and conference proceedings. He has also significant academic teaching experience, along with experience in executive education and corporate training. Dr. Soldatos is regular contributor in various international magazines and blogs, on topics related to Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Industry 4.0, and cybersecurity. Moreover, he has received national and international recognition through appointments in standardization working groups, expert groups, and various boards. He has recently coedited and co-authored six edited volumes (books) on Artificial Intelligence, BigData and Internet of Things related themes.
Prof. Dimosthenis Kyriazis is an Associate Professor at University of Piraeus (Department of Digital Systems). He received his diploma from the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2001 and his MSc degree in “Techno-economics” in 2004. Since 2007, he holds a PhD in the area of Service Oriented Architectures with a focus on quality aspects and workflow management. His expertise lies with service-based, distributed and heterogeneous systems, software and service engineering. Before joining University of Piraeus, he was a Senior Research Engineer at the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of NTUA, having participated and coordinated several EU and National funded projects (e.g. INFINITECH, STAR, BigDataStack, MATILDA, 5GTANGO, ATMOSPHERE, Crowd HEALTH, MORPHEMIC, LeanBigData, CoherentPaaS, VISION Cloud, IRMOS, etc.) focusing his research on issues related to quality of service provisioning, fault tolerance, data management and analytics, performance modelling, deployment and management of virtualized infrastructures and platforms.
