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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.
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 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!
You answered your own question. You can get rid of the manual review. Plus, if you can just point a big-ass data stream at Watson and it can actually ferret out malfeasance, you can also get rid of the folks who program those "other forms of automation".
Instead, you'll be replacing them with a smaller number of people who can choose training sets and interpret Watson's output. You'll also see savings in your programming costs, as you've replaced several fraud detection systems with a single, unified system. So you get a smaller workforce.
You also get a more bifurcated workforce, with a small number of jobs being up-skilled (and more-highly paid), while a larger number of jobs are down-skilled or eliminated altogether. Whether this works when translated to a large portion of the white-collar, service-sector workforce as a whole is left as an exercise to the reader.
That is all.
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
Of course they do, anything you do on your employer's network (including this /. post) is legally inspectable by your employer.
Anything I don't want my employer to know isn't done on their network. If I was a rogue trader and colluding with others you better believe we'd all have burner phones and using something out of band.
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They are the very definition of 'middle-men'. They are the gatekeepers because they're the gatekeepers, not because they're adding value.
Because if they really were adding value, they'd simply enrich themselves with their knowledge instead of hedging their bets by taking a commission off of others.
They're glorified shamans and bookies, offering betting advice based on sheep entrails. But they get lots of coke and hookers, so they have that going for them.
Can it catch Paladin, Barbarian, Wizard, Cleric, or Bard traders too?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.