AI4FCF

Machine learning has been widely used in financial crime detection, including fraud detection and anti-money laundering. However, traditional transaction-based approaches often overlook the contextual information of transactions. In this talk, Dr. Jiaxuan You will introduce graph machine learning and graph neural networks-based approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of such techniques in general benchmarks and detecting financial crimes.

Bio
Jiaxuan You received his CS Ph.D. from Stanford University. His research investigates scientific and industrial problems through the lens of graphs and develops graph AI methods to solve these problems. He has published many widely recognized papers in NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, KDD, and WWW, with over 6,000 combined citations. He has created or co-led multiple open-source software with over 20,000 combined GitHub stars. Jiaxuan has received multiple prestigious awards, including a JPMorgan Chase Ph.D. Fellowship, AAAI Best Student Paper Award, and World Bank Best Big Data Solution. He was the lead organizer of NeurIPS New Frontiers in Graph Learning Workshop, a co-organizer of the Stanford Graph Learning Workshop, and a program committee member at numerous top-tier AI conferences and journals. His Ph.D. research further leads to a startup Kumo AI which demonstrates significant real-world impact. He is currently an Incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Webpage: https://cs.stanford.edu/~jiaxuan.

Illicit industries like drugs, human trafficking, and terrorism cause intense human suffering around the world. Human trafficking, for example, is estimated to be a $150 billion industry enslaving some 40 million people. These nefarious industries rely on sophisticated money laundering networks to operate. These networks are obscure by design, but recent advancements in graph deep learning offer new opportunities to extract the complex relational information needed to identify criminals without punishing the innocent. In this talk, Mark Weber (now Tectonic Ventures, previously IBM Research) will review work done in this space, including but not limited to his own papers.

Bio
Mark Weber is a researcher, strategist, and investor. He has published peer-reviewed works in blockchain technology for supply chain finance, graph deep learning for anti-money laundering, algorithmic fairness in lending, and development economics, as well as a thought-leadership pieces such as “The Scientific Method for Business.” Today, Mark is a Principal at Tectonic Ventures investing in and supporting early stage startups, with a specialization in AI. He also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Harambe Alliance of African Entrepreneurs. In his personal life, Mark is an ultramarathon trail runner, free diver, back country skier, and adventure motorcyclist who enjoys books, chess, cooking, and quality conversation. Read his full bio here.

Bio

Valerio Cencig is the Head of Compliance Digital Transformation at Intesa Sanpaolo SpA and General Director of the Anti-Financial Crime Digital Hub.

Graduated in Economics and Business in 1989, he started his career in Intesa Sanpaolo, playing several roles in the Information Technology area and then in the Chief Financial Office area. After being the first Data Officer of the Intesa Sanpaolo Group, since 2020 is the Head of Compliance Digital Transformation at Intesa Sanpaolo SpA and since 2022 General Director of the Anti-Financial Crime Digital Hub Scarl.

Bio

Domenico J. Marchetti is the Head of the Information Exploitation and Technological Innovation Directorate at Financial Intelligence Unit.

He graduated with honors in 1990 in Economics and Business from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and completed a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in Economics at Cornell University (USA). In 2018 he was granted a Master in Economic Security, Geopolitics and Intelligence from SIOI (Rome).

After working as consultant at the World Bank in Washington, in 1995 he joined Banca d’Italia where covered various roles of responsibility in the fields of macroeconomic analysis and monetary policy. In 2011, he proposed to bring the quantitative approach to the prevention of money laundering, becoming Head of the Financial Flow Analysis Division in the Bank’s Anti-Money Laundering Unit. Since 27 February 2023 he has been Head of the newly established Information Exploitation and Technological Innovation Directorate.

He is the author of numerous publications in the fields of macroeconomics, credit supply and anti-money laundering in international scientific journals.

Bio

Raffaele Cosimo is Group Head of Anti Financial Crime at Intesa Sanpaolo since 2020. Prior joining Intesa Sanpaolo he worked at Promontory Financial Group with the role of Chief Operating Officer of the EMEA practice, CEO of Promontory Italy and Board member of some European companies of the Group. Before working in the consultancy business, Raffaele Cosimo was at Banca Nazionale del Lavoro SpA covering various managerial roles within the Corporate Division.

Raffaele Cosimo has obtained M.B.A. certification at the Bocconi University in Milan and a B.A. in Political Sciences-Economics and Statistics at the Università degli Studi in Milan.