I am happy to announce that I just signed the paperwork to transfer my machine learning software to Altos Research, where my position is now Director of Quantitative Analytics. Altos and I have been working together on a contract basis since last November, when I started forecasting with the Altos data. The software itself (“Miri”) is my professional obsession — a programming library for data mining, modeling and statistics. Miri was the core of the FVM product we released in February (http://www.housingwire.com/2011/02/07/altos-unveils-forward-looking-valuation-model).
Altos Research LLC is a real estate and analytics company founded back in 2005. We are about 15 people in Mountain View, CA who collect and analyze live real estate prices and property information from the web. Altos is not just “revenue positive,” but actually profitable. We are proud to have never taken outside funding.
Altos will continue to develop Miri, but I will also focus on technical sales, business development and my own trading portfolio. We have a serious opportunity to change the way the financial industry’s dinosaurs do modeling. I am still your friendly neighborhood data guy, just now mostly thinking about real estate.
My personal blog is at “http://blog.someben.com/”, where you can read my ramblings. And I talk shop on the Altos blog itself at “http://blog.altosresearch.com/”.