Workshop on AI in Finance

The importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in today’s society is now well established. An increasing number of companies, both large and small, are investing in AI research laboratories. In recent years, this interest has also extended to the financial services sector, with major companies setting up research departments to explore the potential of AI within their operations. Against this backdrop, the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) hosted the Workshop on AI in Finance, an event that brought together researchers, academics and industry professionals to share and discuss the progress and challenges involved in applying AI within the financial sector.

Among the speakers at the workshop was Marco Piazza, a PhD student in the 39th cohort at the Department of Computer Science, Systems and Communication at the University of Milan-Bicocca and a member of the ReGAInS project.

We had the opportunity to speak with him and ask him a few questions to find out more about the objectives, the topics covered during the event and his personal perspective as a speaker.

Could you briefly tell us what the workshop was about and what its aim was?
“The workshop was part of the ECAI programme and aimed to analyse and present the latest developments in AI as applied to the financial sector”

Marco told us how the event provided an important opportunity to foster dialogue between academia and industry, united by the common goal of understanding the potential of Artificial Intelligence in the financial sector. Moving on to a more specific topic, we explored how artificial intelligence represents a key strategy in the financial sector and what the main challenges are that might be encountered.

Why do you think the use of AI in financial systems is so important today?
“I would cite two reasons: the first is that AI today is far too powerful and promising not to be studied and applied in every sector, including the financial sector. The second is that artificial intelligence models work well when trained on large amounts of data, and in the financial sector, vast quantities of diverse data are generated every day; therefore, I would say that the two aspects complement each other well.”

What are some of the challenges encountered when trying to develop AI solutions in the financial sector?
“There are certainly plenty of challenges when it comes to the proper application of AI in the financial sector, but I would like to highlight the one most closely related to my research interests, namely that concerning the ethics and explainability of AI. In fact, current AI systems, whilst high-performing, do not allow us to understand the reasoning behind the answers they provide. This means we cannot tell whether the models are based on biased data or, more generally, what data the models relied on to make their predictions.”

We then asked Marco to tell us about his experience as a speaker at the workshop.
What was your experience like as a speaker during the workshop?
“It was one of my first talks, so I was quite nervous, but I was also very pleased with how I managed to explain my work.”

Could you tell us what your presentation was about?
“During the workshop, I presented the very first results of a project aimed at predicting a company’s profitability based on its financial statement data, which I will be developing over the next two years of my PhD. As well as demonstrating the feasibility of the application in the context of the Italian market, we also incorporated an explainable AI method to identify the most important variables used by the model for classification.”

What were your impressions of interacting with the audience?
“I’d say it was fairly positive, although every now and then some questions left me wondering whether I’d managed to explain my work properly. On the other hand, I also received some feedback and interesting suggestions on how to improve my work.”

The ECAI 2024 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Finance provided a forum for discussion on the opportunities that AI can offer the financial sector. The participation of young researchers such as Marco Piazza represents an important opportunity for growth and exchange of ideas, helping to shape future prospects in a constantly evolving sector.