Richard Gardner is the Founder and CEO of both Modulus Global, Inc. and Modulus Financial Engineering, Inc. based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Modulus provides advanced financial technology products and services to professional traders, brokerages, trading firms, and educational, governmental, and non-profit institutions, throughout 94 countries. The company’s products and services reach over 2.7 million traders and investors around the world.

Charged with leading his firm’s world-class team, he is a renowned professional trader, software engineer, inventor, and thought leader within the industry.

Richard immersed himself in financial markets at a very young age when he began trading futures under a custodial account. After obtaining an education in computer science, he developed software for top-tier financial institutions in the 1990's. In 1996, he developed a commodity trading system that used A.I. to analyze crop reports and weather data.

On the heels of success, he founded an A.I. software company in the late 1990s. Focusing on new types of neural network algorithms, the company was later acquired by a Fortune 500 corporation.

In 2010, Gardner developed a system which used Natural Language Processing to read tens of thousands of social media messages each second, extracting the meaning and emotion, including love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear, behind each message. Since then, the system has been running uninterrupted, having become largest global sentiment database in the world, which was later used in the IBM Watson SharpeMind project (www.sharpemind.com).

Richard is also the founder and co-founder of a number of other successful technology startups outside of finance.

Specialties: markets, computational finance, software engineering, artificial intelligence.