Brandeis International Business School

Video Transcript

Professor Ahmad Namini: I like the fact that the students walk out of it going, ‘Wow this is kind of a neat technology. I’ve never even heard about this.’

In a semantic web, everything is just basically known as a triple — which is a noun, a verb and an object.

Okay — Ahmad eats food. Ryan eats food. Now you multiply that times all the people in the world. What’s the most popular food?

Kelly Zhang, MBA’21, Senior Business Analyst, FCAT: For example, you can think of a pizza. What is the structure? You need to think about what the toppings are, like a thin crust or a thick crust. Then we build some points to connect these things together to really understand the relationship of these words.

Seth Brooks, SVP, FCAT Incubator: One of the things we’re interested in is trying to identify more, the connections between decentralized finance networks, as a way of tracing and identifying patterns within really smaller sets of data. Understanding what’s history telling us.

Gengchen Zhang ’23, MSBA’24: Brandeis always pursues innovation and various collaborations with international firms and organizations.

Sharon Botwinik, Director of Program Management: This is our 11th semester and it’s something that we’ve built on each semester. The first couple of semesters we focused on compliance-related topics and we brought in some of the experts at Fidelity to join the Brandeis students.

Kelly Zhang: I came to Brandeis for my MBA journey, got a chance to work with FCAT and luckily I got hired by Fidelity after this semester as a business analyst.

Botwinik: We’re bringing the outside in by working with these students. They may bring different perspectives and we bring some of the Fidelity knowledge and industry experience to the students.

Dmitry Bisikalo, VP of Data Science and Analysis: We explore new ways of helping ordinary customers with their financial lives.

Namini: That turned into, ‘How can we harness and actually model financial things that are done here and see if there’s some kind of commitment that should be made by the firm to actually adopt that technology.’

Bisikalo: It’s almost like a TV series because we know from project to project to project, if you’re lucky you could be in charge of creating a product that will actually create new data, which is the best kind.

Brooks: Every one of the semesters working with Brandeis, we’ve really been blown away by how quickly they learn new businesses and apply these new technologies. That is what really makes a successful university engagement.