“It’s a bit like CERN where scientists worked together to discover the Higgs particle," Iqbal said about Winton, the $31.5 billion quantitative firm. “The reason that it was successful is because thousands of people came together and each person did their thing to a very, very high standard. Similarly, we think of Winton as a collective project."

Two Sigma, which was co-founded by David Siegel, a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and John Overdeck, who has a master’s degree in statistics from Stanford University, has many trappings of a college. The $41 billion computer-driven firm, which produces scientific papers and encourages staff to teach classes, will soon actually move onto campus. In September, Two Sigma will take over “The Bridge,” a space on the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York, where engineers and entrepreneurs will work.

Joining Cornell

The hedge fund staff will collaborate with Cornell students and professors on machine learning and data science projects, creating a pipeline of academic talent to the firm. Job candidates will put on virtual-reality glasses to watch a video that explains how the hedge fund sees the world awash in data.

Two Sigma is following Man Group, which started the Oxford-Man research center on the university’s campus in 2007 and revamped it in August to focus on artificial intelligence, creating a hunting ground for recruits.

“By having our employees able to sit in the same room, share the same coffee with the academics, we find that there’s a fantastic osmosis," Ellis said. "It’s very good for being able to recruit people, it’s very good for getting new and innovative ideas, which we have been able to turn into the real world, practical, money generating things."

Intellectual Property

Igor Tulchinsky, the founder of WorldQuant, is pitching a perk that breaks the tradition of hedge-fund secrecy. The $5 billion firm is hiring at least 15 teams of quant managers for its Accelerator platform, offering them the right to keep their intellectual property. The quant hedge fund has also opened more than 20 offices in 15 countries, including emerging markets like Russia and Romania, to find engineers. Talent is distributed around the globe, Tulchinsky said at the Milken conference, “but opportunity is not.”

At the Citadel datathon last month, teams of students were given multiple large and complex economic data sets and told to come up with a hypothesis and test it with advanced models. Students huddled over laptops for a grueling six hours as they strove to write a technical paper to impress judges and win. Bursts of laughter and chit-chat, flavored with Russian, Chinese and Israeli accents, punctuated the studious silence.

Citadel Interview