All the information that is needed to find and stop bad actors from entering our financial system already exists and is available to you today; it’s just buried in terabits of messy, unstructured data all over the internet. For those performing investigations and evaluating risk, this needle in a stack of needles problem is huge and growing: Unstructured data already dominates the web (growing exponentially year over year), and the traditional technology these departments use cannot keep up. Recent developments in natural language processing technology (NLP), the field of AI that focuses on human language, have, for the first time, made it possible for automated systems to find and deliver identity-relevant intelligence hidden in unstructured textual data. In this talk, I will share some of the common patterns, common mistakes, and opportunities that I see in the field.

1. Chris Mack
MAY 1, 2019
AI FOR GOOD
Bad Guys, Messy Data, & NLP

2. LIQUID TRAVEL BAN
2AI FOR GOOD ● BASIS TECHNOLOGY

3. LIQUID BOMB PLOT
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4. JIHADI BRIDES TRAGEDY
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Image Sources:
- Bethnal trio: Mirror
- Article: Independent

5. ALL THE EVIDENCE EXISTS
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Scotland Yard Report
ID
Social Activity
Image Sources:
- Tweet: : ISD Global

6. WHAT’S AT STAKE
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FINANCIAL STABILITY
Global Money Laundering Operations
1% of Illegal Funds Captured
PUBLIC SAFETY
Deaths from Terrorist Attacks in Europe
11,288 from 1970-2017
Sources:
- Terrorism: Washington Post
- Money laundering: Wall Street Journal

7. UNPACKING THE AI SYSTEM
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8. THE PROPOSED SOLUTION: NLP/NLU
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9. COMMON PATTERN
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80% of data is
unstructured
Join Processed and
Structured Data into
Knowledge Graph
1) Natural Language
Processing Extracts Facts
2) Scored for confidence
& relevance
Mine Graph
For Patterns
& Changes
People
Organizations
Locations
Relationships
Searching
Alerting
Anomaly Detection
Reporting

10. CHALLENGES AT EVERY LEVEL
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● Domains
● Languages
● Training Data
● Data Salad!
● Data Access
● Duplication
● Variation
● Ambiguity
● Semantics
● Honey Pots
● Training Data
● GIGO
● Data Overload
● Alert Bombs
● Privacy
● Trust

11. ... government officials were
convicted of corruption.
ABC Company saw a drop in
sales as …
CHALLENGES AND ANTI-PATTERNS
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Identifying Context
1) Reliance on Keywords
2) Naive Rules
Leads to False Positives
and False Negatives

12. CHALLENGES AND ANTI-PATTERNS
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Identifying Proper Names
3) Name Variants
4) Name Parts (common keys)
Leads to False Positives
and False Negatives
abdul rashid
abdal rashide
abdal-rasheed
abdul-rashiyd
abdul-rachid
abd-errshiyd
abd-errchide
abd-errcheed
abd-errchiyd …
Abdul-Rasheed ➔

13. BOSTON BOMBING
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14. Challenges & Anti-patterns
3) Failure to match variants
4) Failure to disambiguate
5) Failure to model what matters
6) Monolingual design
“Operation Hairball”
CHALLENGES AND ANTI-PATTERNS
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15. CROSS-LINGUAL SEMANTIC MODELING
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16. CROSS-LINGUAL SEMANTIC MODELING
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Mapping
algorithm
Arabic
English
Chinese
Multilingual
embeddings
space

17. CROSS-LINGUAL SEMANTIC MODELING
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Machine Learning
‫חישובית‬ ‫למידה‬Eagle
Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Eagle
Drugs, Co.
Tesla
Energy Storage
‫טסלה‬
AI
‫ﻣوﺗورز‬ ‫ﺗﯾﺳﻼ‬
計算学習
‫אנרגיה‬ ‫אחסון‬

18. AI BUILDING BLOCKS: Algorithms & High Quality Data
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● NN NER
● NN CLASS
● NN RELAX
● SVM
● TEXT
EMBEDDINGS
● NNs
● NL SEARCH
● CLASSIC ML
● ANOMALY
DETECTION
● HMM
● SEMANTIC
MODELING
● GRAPH
SIMILARITY
● Data Filtering
● Classification
● Deduplication
● High Quality
Annotations
● Language & domain
combos
● Active Learning
Feedback
● High Quality Name
Pairs in every
language pair
● Confidence Modeling
● Semantic Model
● Baseline
“normal”
● Queries
● Visualizations

19. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
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People
Organizations
Locations
Relationships
Searching
Alerting
Anomaly Detection
Reporting

20. ##AI FOR GOOD ● BASIS TECHNOLOGY
THIS TECHNOLOGY IS ALREADY AT WORK

21. CAPTURING EL CHAPO
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Source: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

22. CAPTURING EL CHAPO
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Source: El Chapo recaptured in gun battle

23. KEY DOMAINS OF IMPACT
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National Security Financial ServicesLaw EnforcementIntelligence

24. THANK YOU
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Chris Mack
● Basis Technology
● I design & implement NLP / NLU solutions for good
● Please reach out!
@cgmack

25. ##AI FOR GOOD ● BASIS TECHNOLOGY
Thank You