Senior Software Engineer, Szymon Kobalczyk, recently won the Lab49 WPF in Finance Innovation Contest 2008
Lab49, a consulting firm that specializes in building advanced technology applications for the financial services industry, hosted a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Contest to find developers capable of delivering revolutionary applications for the financial services industry.
Using Microsoft WPF, contest participants were challenged to develop applications showcasing new and original ways to present and interact with financial data. With WPF luminaries Josh Smith, Rob Relyea and Charles Petzold serving as judges, participants were judged on the originality of their application, the quality of the code, performance, appearance, and overall functionality.
Szymon's final entry-Stock Information Boids
"Because I started working late on this project, initially I wanted to create only a charting control capable of displaying the line and candlestick plot of stock prices. But after the contest deadline was extended I started thinking of a better way to visualize the stock prices for a given day – something that goes beyond a simple listbox or a datagrid. The next option I considered was to create a heatmap – i.e. use color gradients to denote the change in stock prices relative to the previous day. But in all samples I’ve seen these symbols were placed on a regular grid and the placement didn’t correspond in any particular way with the data. I started thinking about how to sort the symbols so that those that experienced similar data change would be close to each other, and those with different data change remain further apart. This finally led me to the idea of applying Craig Reynolds’ flocking algorithm to perform this clustering."
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