2009 SXSW Interactive Panel Picker

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As of September 2, Panel Picker voting is closed. You can, however, still leave comments on the proposals you find interesting. We will announce the first set of accepted panels on Thursday, October 2. Stay tuned to the SXSW Interactive Festival website for these announcements, or e-mail us if you have questions.

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Title:

Banking 2.0 - Algorithmically Fixing the Sub-Prime Mess

Your vote:

Level:

Intermediate

Type:

Solo

Category:

Human / Social Issues

Presenter:

Christopher Hughes, PennyMac

Description:

Sub-prime debt may be causing the collapse of the worldwide economy. Speculators, investors, banks, mortgage brokers, honest home-owners have all been duped into believing that that the real estate market was a "sure thing". Can a solution be found with a computing cluster, open source software, and a semi-complex algorithm? Yes.

One of the overarching problems with sub-prime lending was the lack of oversight; We look to solve the problem by doing a vast amount of computing to look for patterns in borrower and lender behavior. Then we use those data points to calculate what the loan and home are really worth and in effect re-sell the loan to the borrower. Our goal is to stop the erosion of neighborhoods and stem the tide of falling home prices.

Oh, one more thing. Yes, this sounds like a really nerdy talk for SXSW but it's more of a talk about the social problem that is our current economic slump and how it's tied to sub-prime lending.

But don't worry you don't have to be a math or banking nerd to take part in the discussion; if you rent or use a credit card you've been affected by the global credit squeeze, understand how this may affect your future and what steps you can take to ride this financial storm out.

Cool trivia about this speaker.
In my spare time I'm a robotics nerd.

WiiRoomba - The Wii Remote controlled vacuum cleaner.
http://spazout.com/roomba/

I'm one of the first hackers of the first-gen iPhone
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/12/video-hints-at-customized-iphone-ringtones/

Thank you Henry. To answer your question I'm PennyMac's "Solutions Architect", which is just a fancy way to say math nerd that can write code.

I work in the Portfolio Strategies Division and we pretty much look at loans throughout the modification process.

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