Raschid Co-Organizing Financial Datasets Challenge

Louiqa Raschid, a professor in the Smith School of Business with an appointment in UMIACS, is coordinating the Financial Entity Identification and Information Integration (FEIII) Challenge.

The FEIII Challenge is a multi-year program to improve the methods of identifying and linking information about financial counterparties contained in complex datasets. The first-year challenge is a record linkage or entity reconciliation/resolution problem across four sets of disparate entity identifiers.

UMD is coordinating the challenge under a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Office of Financial Research (OFR).

Raschid, along with co-organizers from UMD, NIST and OFR, have been collaborating with a team of domain experts from the financial industry and federal regulatory agencies, as well as computer and information scientists, to identify FEIII Challenge problems.

The task guidelines and the data researchers will be working with was released Nov. 15. The deadline for participants to submit their results is March 15, 2016.

A workshop for challenge participants will be held on July 1, 2016 in San Francisco in conjunction with the 2016 Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Management of Data/Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (ACM SIGMOD/PODS) Conference.

More information about the challenge is available here.