Although financial markets might seem to be ruled by emotion and speculation, there are ways to take a scientific approach to investing, particularly with the help of high-performance computers. Indeed, the fields of computational finance and financial engineering are becoming valuable tools on Wall Street.

With this in mind, two Cornell University professors will travel to New York City's financial district Monday, Nov. 1, to launch the Financial Industry Solutions Center (FISC) Seminar Series at 55 Broad St., third floor, from 5 to 7 p.m.

FISC is a joint venture of the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) dedicated to working with the financial community on solving challenging computational problems in risk management, financial engineering and business intelligence. The introductory session in the FISC series will feature Thomas F. Coleman, CTC and FISC director and professor of computer science, and Robert A. Jarrow, the Ronald P. and Susan E. Lynch Professor of Investment Management at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Coleman will focus on computational methods to improve computer programs used to hedge against large-scale variability in futures portfolios. Jarrow will present a new method for using market prices to estimate recovery rates and default probabilities, essential inputs for quantifying credit risk and for pricing corporate debt and credit derivatives.

FISC offers the financial community the latest parallel computing and visualization technologies from SGI combined with leading financial modeling and computational finance expertise from Cornell. FISC provides global financial services, investment, mortgage, insurance and banking firms with an environment to develop and test their own proprietary solutions and optimize software with the help of on-site hardware systems engineers and software engineers.

A list of FISC Seminar Series programs can be seen at http://www.fisc-ny.com, which also provides advance registration. CTC is a high-performance computing and interdisciplinary research center focused on making parallel computing a usable tool for computational science and engineering. SGI is a market leader in technical computing, offering the world's most powerful servers, supercomputers and visual work stations.

For further information, contact the SGI/Cornell Financial Industry Solutions Center at (212) 363-2915.