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From Building Minebots to Digging for Dirty Money

In 2003, Jamie King was trying to develop machines that could replace humans in dangerous nickel and iron-ore mines. Then a robotics PhD student at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, he used artificial intelligence to interpret the vast data streaming from the robots' sensors, which measured the distance of objects in every direction a thousand times a second. Although mining companies passed on the idea, King later discovered an unlikely new use for his minebot software: catching money launderers.

Banks collect huge data sets on the millions of transactions that move money in and out of their accounts. When university colleagues introduced King to a financial-software entrepreneur, he got a peek at such a pile of numbers and realized it looked "very much like a whole bunch of sensor readings." King co-founded Verafin in 2003 to sift bank data for patterns that could indicate fraud, drug trafficking, or terrorist financing.

At the time most banks used rules-based software that flags transactions if they match a pattern defined beforehand as suspicious, such as several transfers of money overseas in a short period. Verafin compares activity to an account holder's profile and past behavior and assigns each transaction a "probability score" that represents the likelihood it's legitimate. King says that evaluating probabilities lets Verafin discern suspicious patterns that slip through conventional systems. Say a drug lord in Chicago needs to get cash to Mexico. He might make wire transfers and deposits to multiple accounts, buy prepaid debit cards, and send payments to a shell company off-shore. By itself, any one of these actions might look perfectly fine. Verafin identifies the extremely low probability of such a pattern occurring innocuously, says King.

Verafin had C$9 million ($9.3 million) in revenue in 2009, the latest figures King will share. More than 700 banks and credit unions use Verafin's software, most with between $100 million and $20 billion in assets. Even relatively smaller banks, like Beach Business Bank in Manhattan Beach, Calif., with assets of $300 million, have to track "money that's moving around quickly and electronically, where you don't have as much information about where it's ending up," says Melissa Rickabaugh, the bank's anti-money-laundering compliance officer. She says Verafin will automatically flag an account when large deposits are followed quickly by wire transfers out, which the bank's previous software didn't do.

An Ontarian in Newfoundland: Game of Thrones, Episode 1.10: "Fire ...

Chris : Well, I am devastated. I don’t know what I am going to do next Sunday. I think I can however safely say, and I will say this very quietly and only once, WELL FUCKING DONE, HBO. So often is fantasy brought to either the big or small screen completely ruined in the process (I’m lookin’ at you, Earthsea !). Peter Jackson, happily, reversed that trend with the Lord of the Rings trilogy; and HBO has pulled off something magnificent with Game of Thrones . But back to GoT … where to even begin? I think I’ll begin with the huge pleasure I have had these past few days reading people’s Facebook status updates after watching the finale (the winner is my former student Ashley’s blog post . Incidentally, half the images from the episode I’m putting in this post are stolen from hers), and talking to people who have not read the books. SO MANY great moments from the novel translated beautifully into the episode: Robb being hailed as King in the North; Jon’s brothers of the Watch reciting the vow to him; the Lord Commander revealing he knew of Jon’s attempted flight (“Honor set you on the Kingsroad. And honor brought you back.” “My friends brought me back.” “I didn’t say it was your honor.”); Arya facing down the boys with Needle; Tyrion being sent to act as Hand; Sansa finding some steel in her spine; Daenerys killing the shell of Drogo; and of course DRAGONS. Deep sigh. It was all done so well, with such a deft touch. I wondered, going into the episode, how they would begin. And that opening shot with the bloody sword, and Ser Illyn picking up Ned’s head to brandish before the crowd; Sansa fainting; and Yoren cutting Arya’s hair and his repeated insistence that she is now a boy . I had been concerned about Yoren when we first met him—he seemed so different from the novel’s depiction, a hearty and hail-and-well-met kind of fellow. But seeing Ned Stark executed took the good humour out of him, I think, and his tough love where Arya is concerned is much closer to what we see of him in the novel. Of course, the question I want to ask you is about the last moments of the show, but we should probably save that for the end. So let’s begin a little more innocuously: I really, really hope that in season two they continue with the Littlefinger/Varys show.

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