CRAFT Leadership
Steve Yang, CRAFT Director
Dr. Steve Yang holds a Ph.D. in Systems and Information Engineering from University of Virginia with concentration on Financial Engineering. His research has been focused on understanding markets’ irrationality and its impact on trading, portfolio, risk management, and systemic risk using decision science tools such as Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning, and other artificial intelligence (AI) methods.
Mohammed J. Zaki, CRAFT Co-Director
Mohammed J. Zaki is a Professor and Department Head of Computer Science at RPI. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester. His research interests focus novel data mining and machine learning techniques with applications in bioinformatics, personal health and financial analytics. He has around 300 publications and six patents. He served as conference program chair for SDM, SIGKDD, CIKM and ICDM. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for ACM SIGKDD. He is a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator Award recipient. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM and of the AAAS.
George Calhoun, CRAFT Managing Director
Dr. Calhoun has spent 25 years in the high-tech segment of the wireless communications industry. He is a co-founder of InterDigital Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: IDCC), where he was involved in the pioneering development of digital cellular technology, including the first systems based on TDMA technology (the architecture underlying approximately 80% of today's cellular networks). He writes frequently for Forbes.
Gregory Prastacos, CRAFT Director of Strategy
Gregory Prastacos is CRAFT's Director of Strategy and a Professor of Management Science at the Stevens School of Business, where he also served as Dean for 12 years (2012-2024). He holds a bachelor's and a master's in computer science and a doctorate in operations research, all from Columbia University. Before joining Stevens he was Professor of Management Science and Rector of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), Athens, Greece. Prior to AUEB, he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He has held visiting appointments at a number of Universities and Research Institutes in Europe and Asia.
Zachary Feinstein, CRAFT Director of Research and Development
Dr. Zachary Feinstein is CRAFT's Director of Research and Development and an Assistant Professor in the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology. He serves as the Director of the Fintech Certificate and is the Secretary/Treasurer for the INFORMS Section on Finance. He has published numerous works in financial systemic risk, decentralized finance and machine learning. Dr. Feinstein has written multiple articles on financial topics related to popular fiction; these works have been highlighted on Bloomberg TV, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among many other prominent news outlets
CRAFT Academic Leadership
Kristen Bennett, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Professor
Agostino Capponi, Columbia University, Professor
Maggie Chen, Cardiff University, Personal Chair
Darinka Dentcheva, Stevens Institute of Technology, Professor
Andrei Kirilenko, University of Cambridge, Professor
Jeffrey Nickerson, Stevens Institute of Technology, Professor
K.P. Subbalakshmi, Stevens Institute of Technology, Professor