
First Special Day on Artificial Intelligence for Financial Crime Fight
The Special Day on AI for Financial Crime Fight (AI4FCF) is an event within ECML PKDD 2023 with the goal of discussing, sharing and presenting recent developments in the field of AI-based financial crime detection. We aim to bring together researchers and stakeholders to ignite engaging conversations and discuss the future frontiers for the field in its entirety.
The event hosts keynotes from world-renowned speakers, whose contributions to AI and financial crime fighting have fundamentally changed the paradigm in which the entire field is now regarded. Regulators, policy makers and experts from banking industry will set the scene, share their pain points, and present the state of the art of FCF as currently in place. We will learn about recent advances in FCF, identify challenges and opportunities, and discuss future directions with speakers from both industry and academia.
The discussion will transition to a more informal setting as we move to the Welcome Reception of the ECML PKDD 2023.
Please note that registration is mandatory!
Sponsor

The First Special Day on Artificial Intelligence for Financial Crime Fight is sponsored by the AFC Digital Hub (Anti Financial Crime Digital Hub), a consortium to fight digital financial crime through the use of new technologies and artificial intelligence.
Keynote speakers
When & where
Monday, September 18, 2023

🕝 From 14:30 to 17:30
🔧 Workshop
🌆 Auditorium of Renzo Piano’s Intesa Sanpaolo tower
📍 Google Maps
🕠 17:30 onwards
🍸 ECML PKDD 2023 Welcome Reception
🚂 OGR, the new hub of innovation and art in Turin
📍 Google Maps

Agenda
- Introduction
- Piero Boccassino (Chief Compliance Officer, Intesa Sanpaolo)
- Guido Saracco (Rector, Politecnico di Torino)
- Enzo Serata (Director, Unità di Informazione Finanziaria)
- The financial industry strategy
- Anti Financial Crime detection models: challenges and opportunities in using AI — Raffaele Cosimo (Intesa Sanpaolo), Richard Wild (UniCredit Group), Domenico Marchetti (Unità di Informazione Finanziaria)
- Anti Financial Crime Digital Hub initiative — Valerio Cencig (Intesa Sanpaolo)
- Coffee break
- The role of data science
- Keynote 1: Graph Deep Learning for Anti-Money Laundering — Mark Weber (IBM Research)
- Keynote 2: Graph Machine Learning for Financial Networks — Jiaxuan You (Kumo AI)
- Projects presentations
- Closing
- Francesco Bonchi (Co-founder and Research Director, CENTAI)
Keynote speakers
Jiaxuan You – Kumo AI | Ph.D. in Computer Science, Stanford University
Graph Machine Learning for Financial Networks
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. Webpage: https://cs.stanford.edu/~jiaxuan.

Mark Weber – IBM Research
Graph Deep Learning for Anti-Money Laundering
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 from IBM Research will review work done in this space, including but not limited to his own papers.
Bio
Mark Weber is the Senior Lead of Business Innovation at IBM Research, where he leads a global team of designers, engineers, and strategists supporting lab-to-market impact for clients and partners. As a researcher, Mark has published peer-reviewed work in blockchain technology for supply chain finance, graph deep learning for anti-money laundering, and algorithmic fairness in lending, as well as a thought-leadership pieces such as “The Scientific Method for Business” with IBM Consulting. Prior to his current role, Mark led Strategy & Operations and ran the membership program at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Mark is a former Fellow at the MIT Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship, and actively serves as an advisor to the Harambe Alliance of African Entrepreneurs. He earned an MBA in finance from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he also worked as a graduate researcher and corporate membership manager in the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. Mark earned his bachelors at the University of Notre Dame’s classical great books program and began his career producing documentary films on political economy and international development, most notably the award-winning and internationally distributed documentary Poverty, Inc. In his personal life, Mark is an ultramarathon trail runner, free diver, back country skier, and adventure motorcyclist who enjoys books, chess, and cooking.

Domain experts speakers
Valerio Cencig – Head of Compliance Digital Transformation (Intesa Sanpaolo)
Anti Financial Crime Digital HUB
Bio
Valerio Cencig is the Head of Compliance Digital Transformation at Intesa Sanpaolo SpA.
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.

Raffaele Cosimo – Group Head of Anti Financial Crime (Intesa Sanpaolo)
Scenarios in the field of Anti-Financial Crime
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.

Organizers
- General Chairs
- Marco Mellia – Politecnico di Torino
- André Panisson – CENTAI
- Valerio Cencig – AFC Digital Hub
- Local Chair
- Alfredo Verolino – AFC Digital Hub
- Web and Publicity Chair
- Flavio Giobergia – Politecnico di Torino
Supporters

