Michael Wellman selected to serve on Financial Research Advisory Committee

Prof. Michael P. Wellman, the Lynn A. Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has been selected to serve on the Financial Research Advisory Committee (FRAC) for the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR). The OFR helps to promote financial stability by looking at the financial system to see where risks are going, assess how much of a threat they might pose, and provide policymakers with financial analysis, information, and evaluation of policy tools to mitigate them. The FRAC provides advice to the OFR, informing OFR’s research-and-data agendas, and helps the OFR to fulfill its mission.

As the only academic computer scientist on the FRAC, Professor Wellman brings expertise on algorithmic trading and other computational techniques that are transforming financial markets and the financial system. He has joined the working group on Financial Innovation, which will be addressing the impact of new financial instruments and new technologies on financial stability.

Prof. Wellman currently serves as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the College of Engineering. He has been a member of the CSE faculty since 1992, when he joined Michigan as an Assistant Professor in after completing his studies at MIT and serving for four years as a research scientist at the United States Air Force Wright Laboratory.

Prof. Wellman is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, as well as the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2012, his foundational work was recognized with the IFAAMAS (International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems) Influential Paper Award for his 1993 paper describing a market-oriented programming approach to distributed problem solving, which was originally published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. In 2014 he was recognized by ACM/SIGAI with the Autonomous Agents Research Award. At the University of Michigan, Prof. Wellman has been a recipient of the Faculty Recognition Award, and of awards from the EECS Department for Teaching Excellence and Outstanding Achievement.