The seventeenth annual Open Source Quantitative Finance conference (osQF, formerly R/Finance) will be held on Friday & Saturday, April 11th-12th, 2025 at the University of Illinois Chicago. The conference focuses on applied finance using open source programming languages and free software systems for statistical computation and graphics.
The two day conference will cover topics including advanced risk tools, decentralized finance, econometrics, high-performance computing, market microstructure, portfolio management, and time series analysis. All will be discussed within the context of using open source programming languages as primary tools for financial model development, portfolio construction, risk management, and trading.
We invite you to submit complete papers in pdf format for consideration. We will also consider one-page abstracts (in txt or pdf format) although more complete papers are preferred. We welcome submissions for full talks (approximately 20 min.), abbreviated “lightning talks” (approx. 6 min.), as well as (1 hr.) pre-conference tutorials. (Scheduling considerations may require requested full talks moved to lightning). Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R and other Open Source programming languages are encouraged.
All slides will be made publicly available at conference time. Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working code to accompany the slides. Ideally, data sets should be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to innovative research or presenters who have released open source packages or software.
Limited financial assistance for conference admission may be available to presenters. As osQF is a volunteer open source effort from which organizers do not profit, resources are derived from registrations and sponsorship alone. Requests for financial assistance must be made at the time of submission, and the presenter should clearly communicate to us why assistance is being requested. We particularly welcome requests from underrepresented minorities in Quantitative Finance/STEM, and anyone researching under economic hardship.
Submissions will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis with a final submission deadline of January 19, 2025. Submitters will be notified via email starting January 26, 2025 of acceptance and presentation length.
Submit your proposal at https://go.uic.edu/osQFCFP.
Please share this link with colleagues and peers. We especially appreciate your help sending the link to people from under-represented groups! And please encourage them to submit a proposal! We also encourage those who were previously unaware of osQF and R/Finance to submit their talk proposals. There are many benefits to giving a presentation at the conference. It makes your work visible to the community, which often leads to interesting conversations with others about your work. A full paper is not required!