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IBM Watson Now Being Used To Catch Rogue Traders (siliconrepublic.com)
IBM is piloting its Jeopardy-winning Watson technology as a tool for catching rogue traders at large financial institutions, executives said in an interview Monday. From a report: Referred to as Watson Financial Services, the new product will become a monitoring tool within companies to search through every trader's emails and chats, combining it with the trading data on the floor. The objective? To see if there are any correlations between suspicious conversations online and activity that could be construed as rogue trading.
Oh hey Big Brother!
It's only a matter of time before all your emails are mine.
Do the Emails belong to company? If so I see no problem with this. If this becomes common practice then company Email won't used in the future. But if they can catch crooked traders NOW for past deeds...
One of'em goes to market.
This is false advertising: Watson is not used at all to find old and rare edition of Games Workshop's "Rogue Trader"!
Classic example of fake news.
I doubt it.
We're rapidly seeing active trading and management done away with through automation. High frequency trading was just the beginning of this. Now we're seeing it at the lower/slower end, too. Indexed investing and so-called "robo-advisers" are taking away the demand for active traders on the low end. We're starting to see the use of high frequency algorithms creep downward, and consumer-grade index-following approaches and algorithms creep upward. While there will always be some human involvement, it's getting smaller and smaller each year. The market floors were automated away some time ago now. Now the people who were controlling the computers doing the electronic trading are being automated away. So in a decade or so from now, who will this technology be watching? Will it just be watching over other algorithms that are doing the actual trading?
I recently listened to a talk by a Dr. Jeremy Pickens talking about this problem (I'm not his student or employee or associated with him). He argued that this is actually a tough problem to solve because there aren't obvious patterns in criminal activity. Sometimes they use code words, but the code words are different for every criminal. Sometimes they have suspicious conversations after hours, but not always. The people involved in the LIBOR scandal talked openly about their cheating, during work hours. There wasn't anything "unusual" about it to a statistical model, but it was brazen to a human investigator!
Rogue traders do it from behind.
WATSON also needs to have access to the communication of political leaders to avoid their insider trading related to political decision making.
Interesting.
One answer to a corrupt financial system is to have better, more complete laws, and follow them.
Newsflash 04/27/2017: IBM stock plummets.
Allowing, nay, encouraging, surveillance by artificial intelligence to nab the evil high volume stock traders would never be misused against a general public eager to see the practice implemented.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It's too easy to circumvent - use private email, pass notes, take a break and talk outside, etc.
It seems more likely that they're using this project as an opportunity for tuning Watson so it can be developed as a replacement for your average stock analyst.
i find it strange the idea that Watson is going to force the government to do it's job and enforce existing laws against the type of people who caused the 2008 crash.
That bit pusher can't hold a job.
It'll end as a burger flipper.
Not sure if there aint a better purpose for an AI machine else then playing jeapordy and being the next NSA tool. But that exactly points out what it can't do. Watson would be more valuable if it could do the trading but I guess that is just a pipedream.
Let the AI root out the rogue assholes. Ok, I know all of them are corrupt assholes, but Watson could connect the dots to let a good third of them end up in jail.
They aren't going to worry about this. After all, they already have an Imperial Warrant.
The criminal traders will simply find different ways to communicate which are not monitored.
So it doesn't even occur to you that the system can keep track of who knows what, when information spreads, it is relatively straightforward to track down the flow of information even if you don't have logs of the data flows.
Go ahead and think this and don't be too surprised when you end up in prison.
It's time to start coding a trojan that will destroy the Watson Neural Net.
Can it catch Paladin, Barbarian, Wizard, Cleric, or Bard traders too?
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