Dr Biliana Alexandrova-Kabadjova Mexican Central Bank (Banco de Mexico) Visiting Fellow University of Essex Email@essex.ac.uk: balexa

PhD Studies (October 2002 - July 2007) (thesis 1.4MB)
Biliana Alexandrova-Kabadjova joined the Computational Finance Group at University of Essex in 2002 as a PhD student. She is registered under the Centre For Computational Finance and Economic Agents. She was supervised jointly by Andreas Krause (School of Management, University of Bath) and Edward Tsang (School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex). Benefited from joint supervision, Biliana was able to tackle a very complex computational finance project which demands non-trivial knowledge in both economics and computation.

Biliana passed her viva on 27 July 2007 with minor correction, which she completed shortly. She was examined by Professor Peter Allen (External Examiner, Head of Complex Systems Management Centre, Cranfield University, world authority in modelling) and Maria Fasli (Internal Examiner, author of Agent Technology for E-Commerce -- a thorough and rigorous text in this field).

Research and Contributions
Building on existing work, Biliana has built the most advanced model (in terms of complexity and realism) of credit card payment in the world. She has developed a framework under which one can learn regulatory strategies and individual agent can learn business strategies. Learning is based on Population based Incremental Learning (PBIL), a learning mechanism of which Qingfu Zhang at University of Essex is a world expert.

With this model, Biliana was able to predict market shares and demands. This is useful for wind-tunnel testing Government policies. Banks can also use her model to learn pricing strategies with the view to maximize their market share or profit. Given clear objectives, Governments can use Biliana's framework to evolve policy decisions (evolved policies are hopefully more robust than designed policies).

Post Doctorate
Biliana is now working for the Mexican Central Bank.

Links

• Andrew Martin, How Visa, Using Card Fees, Dominates a Market, The new York Times, 4 January 2010
• Biliana's publications