Daniel Q. Naiman
Dan is Professor and Chair of the Applied Mathematics and Statistics Department in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. After receiving his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1982, he joined Johns Hopkins faculty. He teaches courses in probability, statistics, and other areas of applied mathematics including Bioinformatics & Statistical Genetics, Monte Carlo Simulation and Reliability, and Investment Science. He has been involved in the development of an MSE program in Financial Mathematics. In his spare time he plays saxophone and electric bass.
Amanuel Alemu
Amanuel was born in Ethiopia and moved to Zimbabwe at the age of 13. In Zimbabwe he excelled in his academics and sports, winning numerous awards. Though he played almost every sport his high school had to offer he particularly excelled as a track athlete where by the help of his coaches started training to compete in regional competitions and eventually make it to the Olympic games. On his arrival at Hopkins he joined the track team but constant injury and a heart condition ended his dream of going to the Olympic games. It was at this point that he started to look for something to channel all his passion and energy, he found it in finance and business. He spent time reading and learning about the stock market and in the summer of 2007 interned at Stifel Nicolaus, an investment bank located at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.
He became interested in this project when Professor Naiman presented the inequality in a class, it immediately got his attention because it was an opportunity to learn more about the market, and promised to be a challenge. Amanuel has already been the founder of two businesses and is currently working on a third one. He enjoys talking about business and teaching new investors, in the intercession period of 2008 he taught a class for new investors. When he is not studying, or keeping up with the market he enjoys spending time with friends, playing basketball and playing guitar.
With regards to the project, Amanuel wrote part of the intial code that would extract and display stock trading data as well as aided in providing content for the site.
Charles Dean
Charles is a third year Johns Hopkins student double-majoring in Economics and Applied Mathematics, and concentrating in Chinese. Although a diligent student, he also has some important pastimes: hiking, rock climbing, cooking, photography, violin. Despite his regular heavy schedule, this semester (spring of junior year), he was able find time to team up with Professor Naiman and Amanuel. The project required both computation and presentation, and led to the following accomplishments:
On a technical level, he brainstormed and successfully wrote the working bulk of the code to extract data from a given web site (fine-tuning was done by Professor Naiman and Amanuel). This was the first time he used PERL and really the first time programmed for an actual application. In the process, he learned about regular expressions and find out how to identify and extract the data needed from existing web pages. He then decided how to store that information and present it.
On the aesthetic side, he derived the web design and applied it to our academic focus. The web site uses html and css to gain full control of how and where to present data and allow for use interaction. Although it may appear to be a one time effort, the design was by far more challenging. He constantly looked for ways of improving it and maintained the web site, cleaning up redundant code and shaping Professor Naiman's and Amanuel's input.