The world is changing for quantitative researchers in finance. Not long ago, they actually needed to know something about financial services, these days they just need to be...quants.

So said Marcos Lopez de Prado, former head of machine learning at hedge fund AQR Capital Management and currently a professor of machine learning at Cornell University. Speaking at this week's AI and Data Science in Trading Conference in London, Lopez de Prado said the nature of quantitative research in finance is changing as market participants stop employing their own quants and start crowdsourcing their quant research needs instead.

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