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.

Comments

Finding Patterns in Crime

[WDot]

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!