Welcome to my website

I am a Reader in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex, and Faculty Dean (Postgraduate) for the Faculty of Science and Health. My research applies machine learning to finance and economics, and I am particularly interested in evolutionary algorithms and financial forecasting.

I lead a research group of ten PhD students. Eight more have completed their PhDs with me, six at Essex and two at Kent, my previous university.

Alongside my research, I lead industry and public-sector projects that apply machine learning to all kinds of business problems: around 30 since 2020, including 10 Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.

News

  • Nov 2026New paper in Proceedings of the IMPACT-SPEECH Workshop: Identifying, Measuring, Preventing, and Assessing Consequences of Bias in Speech LLMs: Pruning for Efficiency, Paying in Fairness: Demographic Disparities in Pruned Speech-LLMs.
  • Oct 2026New paper in 2026 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Financial Engineering and Economics (CIFEr): Large Language Quant: Cross-Domain Mathematical Trading Strategy Generation with an Agentic LLM.
  • Oct 2026New paper in Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track: FINSTRUCT: LLM-Based Logical Structure Recovery for Financial Filings.
  • Oct 2026New paper in Applied Soft Computing: Strongly-typed genetic programming with an active trading operator for algorithmic trading using fundamental, sentiment, and technical analysis.
  • Sep 2026Sirui Zhu joined the research group as a PhD student.

Research

All research

Genetic programming for trading

Trading strategies built from technical, fundamental and sentiment signals.

Directional changes

Event-based price data for spotting trend reversals and for trading.

Deep RL for high-frequency trading

Trading agents that account for their own position and for costs.

LLMs for finance

Financial filings, sentiment and trading strategies generated by LLMs.

Financial forecasting

Weather derivatives, real estate and company fundamentals.

Latest publications

All publications

  1. Kolluri, G.P.K.B., Kampouridis, M., Shekhar, R. (2026). Pruning for Efficiency, Paying in Fairness: Demographic Disparities in Pruned Speech-LLMs. Proceedings of the IMPACT-SPEECH Workshop: Identifying, Measuring, Preventing, and Assessing Consequences of Bias in Speech LLMs.

    Conference paper PDF DOI BibTeX

  2. Clayman, A., Kampouridis, M., Papastylianou, T. (2026). Large Language Quant: Cross-Domain Mathematical Trading Strategy Generation with an Agentic LLM. 2026 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Financial Engineering and Economics (CIFEr).

    Conference paper PDF DOI BibTeX

  3. Ahmed, M.M.N.M., Long, Y., Kampouridis, M., Tattersall, R., Clague, K. (2026). FINSTRUCT: LLM-Based Logical Structure Recovery for Financial Filings. Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track.

    Conference paper PDF Link BibTeX

Industry and consultancy

All projects

Healthcare, ESNEFT, 2022 to 2024

Helping the NHS cut waiting lists

With East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, we used machine learning to predict how long operations will take, so theatre lists can be planned more accurately.

Best Partnership: Public Sector, Essex Innovation Awards 2024

Read the case study

Maritime, GLA and Trinity House, 2021 to present

Detecting lighthouse faults with machine learning

Since 2021 we have worked with the General Lighthouse Authorities on machine learning and machine vision that help spot faults in lighthouses and other aids to navigation early.

Six projects and a KTP since 2021

Read the case study

Organisations I have worked with

General Lighthouse Authorities, Trinity House, ESNEFT, Cooper Parry, Centerprise, Horus Security, IFE Global Logistics, Hivedome, Betascore, DOCME Technologies (now 360Me), Fingerpost Consulting, Footprint Digital, Iceni Projects, Otters.ai, PFE Express, R&B Switchgear Services, Shepherd Compello, Voono.

Working with me

Prospective PhD students

Machine learning for finance: trading, forecasting, directional changes and LLMs for financial text. See what to send me.

Join the group

Industry and public sector

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, consultancy projects and sponsored PhDs, on business and public-sector problems of any kind.

Work with me

Media and events

Comment and talks on AI in finance, algorithmic trading and applied AI in industry.

Media and talks