Who is haystack?
Haystack Systems is owned and operated by Jeff Hemingway in Vancouver BC.
After studying Engineering Science and Aerospace at the University of Toronto, Jeff joined Canada’s best known space company, MDA, as a Junior Software Engineer working on control software for the Canadarm 2. Over a decade later, as a Principal Systems Architect, he led the team that launched and commissioned Canada’s flagship satellite constellation. In between, he worked on problems in robotics, radar, flight dynamics, planning optimization, and high-bandwidth radio communications, while collaborating with (and learning from) organizations like the Canadian Space Agency, Magellan Aerospace, the University of Calgary, RUAG, SpaceX, NASA, and INCOSE.
For more information, see Jeff’s full CV on LinkedIn.
Past projects
Covid-19 modelling
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, it quickly became clear that the models being used to forecast its effects and inform critical government decision-making had some serious problems. To try and understand and address some of these problems we built our own model, and found its predictions to be consistently as good or better than the IHME model used to inform the US government’s response to the pandemic. We continue to produce daily updates of this model.
Financial forecasting
Haystack Systems got its start in financial forecasting, developing a machine learning algorithm to predict the daily price movement of ETFs based on a collection of economic indicators. Despite the inherent difficulty of predicting a so-called “level two” chaotic system, initial backtesting gave promising results, and several months of live evaluations demonstrated a meaningful correlation (r=0.25, p-0.0002) between predicted and actual price movement in ZQQ, a NASDAQ-100 index fund.