Michael Aitken

Dr Michael Aitken AM has experience in the science and surveillance of markets and exchanges, innovation and commercialisation, as well as a career in academia.

Dr Aitken had a career at the nexus of building businesses as part of introducing postgraduate students to entrepreneurial industry mainly in financial markets. Much of this work was conducted under the auspices of Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre - CMCRC. He is chief scientist of the Rozetta Institute (formerly CMCRC).

Early in his career, he designed courses and computer programs to support the curriculum for fourth year honours and PhD programs. Along with "Trading and Dealing in Securities Markets" and "Broking and MarketMaking", he designed "REPLAY", a program that enables the dynamics of any automated security market to be replayed in its entirety, providing access to the working dynamics of securities markets for research and training purposes. Dr Aitken also designed the software program "SPREAD", which is a time-series visualisation of stock market trading behaviour. Both programs became part of SMARTS, the software for market surveillance which he designed and sold to NASDAQ in 2010. NSXA operates SMARTS as part of its surveillance operations sourced from NASDAQ.

Dr Aitken is also involved in insider trading, market manipulation and had worked on cases in the UK, Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, the UAE and Australia.

He has won numerous awards including the Prime Minister's Prize for Innovation in Science in 2014 for his work on SMARTS.

In 2014, Dr Aitken was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his significant services to the business and finance sector, particularly to market surveillance and fraud detection technologies, and to education.