Board Of Visitors

Elaine Kant President and CEO, SciComp Inc.

Dr. Elaine Kant is a recognized leader in the field of software synthesis. She is the founder, president, and CEO of SciComp Inc., a technology company whose software synthesis system generates financial modeling codes. Dr. Kant holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. She has been elected a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has written numerous books, chapters, and technical papers on software synthesis, understanding and automating algorithm design, and scientific computing environments.

Dr. Kant is the chief architect of SciComp's software synthesis expert system, used in its flagship product, Sci- Finance®. At SciComp's founding, she obtained funding first via a NIST Advanced Technology Program grant, and then from a small venture capital round. Currently, SciComp sells the SciFinance suite of products to Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds. SciFinance transforms high-level specifications of financial models into efficient C, C++, and GPU-enabled codes that price complex derivatives and option structures. The codes use Monte Carlo and finite difference methods to solve systems of equations, including stochastic and partial differential equations.

Before founding SciComp, Dr. Kant taught computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University and worked for Schlumberger in several computer science research groups as a program leader and senior research scientist. Her major research interests are in understanding and supporting scientific problem solving and in understanding and automating the design, implementation, and analysis of algorithms and programs.