Proseminar: Life-Cycle of Model Development in Financial Services

At this week’s proseminar Dr. Dickerson (SVP, Chief Data Scientist) and Dr. Kulkarni (Vice President, Data Science) at Discovery Financial Services will walk us through the life cycle of model development in financial services.

This session is open to everyone in the department.

Life-Cycle of Model Development in Financial Services

Bios:

Steve Dickerson:

Steven S. Dickerson is the SVP, Chief Data Scientist for Discover Financial Services. Steve has spent over 20 years using data and analytics to solve a wide-ranging set of problems in the financial services industry while holding leadership positions in Credit Risk, Collections & Recovery, Marketing Analytics, Operations, and AML. Prior to joining Discover, Steve held several analytic focused positions with American Express where he started as an Econometrician. Recently, he and his team have been focused on explainable AI to support credit decisioning under Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) requirements and Deep Learning/Graph Theory based fraud detection modeling. Steve holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Arizona.

Raghu Kulkarni:

Raghu Kulkarni, Vice President, Data Science, manages enterprise Machine Learning (ML) modeling for Collections, Fraud, AML and Compliance for Discover Financial Services. He also manages AI/ML research team with focus on explainability and bias detection. He holds PhD in Applied Economics and Masters in Industrial Engineering from Texas Tech University. In the recent times, Raghu and his team have been working with industry peers around ML definitions

Below are a couple of references to their team recently published papers on ML

1. https://www.h2o.ai/resources/white-paper/machine-learning-considerations-for-fairly-and-transparently-expanding-access-to-credit/
2. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03156