Teaching

My teaching interest centre on 'industry-based' courses which attract 400-600 students per year, and use industy speakers to enrich the content. The three courses are: Financial Computing - with lectures from Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Reuters and the FSA; Introduction to Business & Entrepreneurship - PWC, leading lawyers and VCs; and MultiMedia Computing - with speakers from Microsoft, mBlox and video games companies.

COMP6006: Financial Computing

The financial services industry and investment banking is the career of choice for many of the best UCL and London University students. This highly popular 30-lecture course (taught at 8.00 in the morning) attracts students from across the University of London. It covers the financial services industry, financial instruments, computational finance, financial IT and compliance. It is largely taught by industry professionals from Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Reuters, Anvil and the FSA. Deutsche Bank provide a prize of £1,000 for a single piece of course work. Recently the Sunday Telegraph devoted an article to this course.

COMP6005: Introduction to Business & Entrepreneurship

This is the UCL foundation course in entrepreneurship. It comprises 30-lectures covering preparing business plans, market research, company law, electronic commerce, intellectual property, marketing, virtual companies, venture capital and fund raising, etc. Like COMP6006 and COMP6008, the course uses many industry professionals as lecturers, and is highly practical, with extensive course work. The aim of this course is to encourage students to start their own high-tech business, and also to consider entrepreneurship as a career.

For this course I have a complete 'elecronic' set of Lecture Notes, Slides, Course Work and model Exam Questions, and will make them available to other universities interested in launching a similar course.

COMP6008: MultiMedia Computing

This 30-lecture course is targetted at Arts & Humanities students seeking a career in the Creative Industries. It covers all the important types of digital media such as the Web, 2D images, 3D graphics, Audio, Video and Character Animation, and the associated packages such as DREAMWEAVER, PHOTOSHOP, FLASH, MAYA etc. The course uses many industry professionals as lecturers, and is highly practical, with extensive course work.

Masters Programme in Financial Computing

Based on the popularity of the Financial Computing course, I (and Chris Clack) have setg up a whole Financial Computing Masters programme in conjunction with a consortium of Investment Banks (Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Reuters). As part of this Financial Computing Initiative the banks and Reuters are funding a Financial Computing Lab (trading room) at UCL.