Palo Alto, Calif., April 04, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hazelcast, Inc., the company that enables instant action on all data, announces Dr. Stephen Weston as its chief scientist, bringing deep ML and AI expertise to Hazelcast’s leadership in AI application and data infrastructure. Leading Hazelcast’s AI research and development, Weston will be instrumental in guiding the company’s strategy and application of AI within the Hazelcast Platform and the product roadmap that supports the needs of our Global 2000 customers.
Weston, a Ph.D. in mathematical finance, brings 30 years of experience to the role in areas such as AI, risk management, and mathematical modeling. He has built and led teams of up to 100 developers powering the front office of investment banks with algorithmic design, high-performance computing, and low-latency trading. Previously, Weston was managing director in global credit trading at JPMorgan Chase. Most recently, as a partner in the Risk Advisory practice at Deloitte LLP, he managed the transition to machine learning and agent-based models for risk management, model development, and model validation.
“Steve's expertise and vision enhance our ability to deliver innovative AI-based solutions that drive value for customers across industries, including financial services, where AI functionality is rapidly making inroads,” said Adrian Soars, Hazelcast chief technology officer. “Our goal is to simplify and speed up our customers’ AI innovation, enabling their applications to take real-time intelligent action with the performance and scale required by more sophisticated models for AI/ML. Steve’s AI expertise will prove critical in meeting that goal.”
Today, 99% of financial services leaders are either already using or planning to use AI functionality specifically within their organization, according to the 2023 Financial Services GenAI Survey (Ernst & Young LLP). As organizations chart the path to GenAI integration, those surveyed revealed that 40% lack the proper data infrastructure, and 35% lack the proper technology infrastructure. Organizations that are investing in application modernization now ready for this wave of AI will reap the benefits, including enhanced customer experience, higher revenue growth, improved operational efficiencies, and differentiation for competitive advantage.
To support its customers’ AI initiatives, Hazelcast’s AI strategy is organized around three overarching principles:
- data driven,
- innovation led, and
- product focused.
“Simplicity dominates everything, especially in this AI era. Simplicity or ease of use also means ease of learning and building the best possible solutions for customers,” Weston said. “My goal is to work closely with our customers to deliver the AI features they require to simplify and accelerate application modernization and extract the maximum value from their data for improved operations and competitive advantage.”
Weston is also a distinguished researcher and author of peer-reviewed articles showcasing advanced research and work in areas such as agent-based modeling, spiking neural networks, ordinal pattern encoding of financial time series, and bilateral and multilateral competition in financial markets. In addition to his position as chief scientist at Hazelcast, Weston supervises academic research in the department of computing at Imperial College London, where the research group develops models that integrate technology, science and finance.
Weston’s appointment follows the recent addition of CTO, Adrian Soars to the Hazelcast leadership team. Soars, a 25-year veteran in high-performance data architectures and payment processing, joined Hazelcast in November. He and Weston are leading a deep bench of fintech and AI experts at Hazelcast.
“Hazelcast leads the industry in enabling applications to take advantage of event-driven architectures with distributed compute which provide the foundation of real-time and AI-driven applications,” said Kelly Herrell, Hazelcast CEO. "Steve's contributions will be instrumental in supporting Hazelcast customers' mission-critical workloads, unlocking revenue, boosting efficiency, and reducing risk."
Delivering Value to Customers
Trusted by many Global 2000 brands, two-thirds of the world's transactions pass through Hazelcast-powered applications. With its market-leading technology and rapid adoption of real-time and AI applications, the Hazelcast Platform enables companies to simplify and accelerate application modernization and innovation at a lower total cost of ownership.
Today, customers such as JPMorgan Chase, New York Life, Target, and Volvo use the Hazelcast Platform – often to support AI/ML deployments – for their real-time applications, such as payments, fraud detection, trade monitoring, in-game betting, IoT edge computing, real-time offers, and customer 360. Customer results include:
- boosting loan conversion rates by 400% through personalized offers in the moment of need,
- avoiding losses of $100 million a year with improved fraud detection,
- reducing operational costs by 30% by optimizing the use of equipment and resources in real-time,
- and processing more than $1 billion (USD) per minute for a global financial institution
Hazelcast Platform stands out from other data platforms by enabling durable transactions in the same platform as streaming analytics and processing. By taking instant actions on streaming data without leaving the platform, enterprises can achieve the lowest possible latency.
Additional Resources
About Hazelcast
The world’s leading companies trust Hazelcast and its unified real-time data platform to take instant action on all data. Its platform uniquely combines a distributed compute engine and fast data store integrated into a single solution businesses can simplify event-driven architectures for real-time and AI/ML applications to drive new revenue, mitigate risk, and operate efficiently – at a low TCO.
Customers such as JPMorgan Chase, Volvo, New York Life, Target, and Domino’s use Hazelcast to underpin their business-critical and real-time applications, such as payments, fraud detection, trade monitoring, in-game betting, IoT edge computing, customer 360, real-time offers, and AI/ML deployments.
Hazelcast is named in the Gartner Market Guide for Event Stream Processing and a leader in the GigaOm Radar Report for Streaming Data Platforms. To join our community of CXOs, architects, and developers, visit www.hazelcast.com.
