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The Third Meeting of The World Bank Group's International Corruption Hunters Alliance

Poster Session on Data Science Driven Investigations

http://www.dataengineering.org/ichaposter/

December 9th, 2014
The World Bank Group, Washington, DC, USA
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Theme
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The World Bank aims to reduce poverty by promoting sustainable development through loans, guarantees, risk management products, and analytical and advisory services to its clients around the globe. The World Bank also seeks to ensure that the funds designated for development projects are used responsibly and for their intended purpose of reducing poverty, and are not lost to fraud, corruption or collusion.

The World Bank Group's International Corruption Hunters Alliance (ICHA) brings together more than 200 heads and senior officials of corruption investigating bodies and prosecuting authorities, anti-corruption experts, academics, and representatives of international organizations from over 130 countries. The 2014 meeting of the Alliance will focus on fighting corruption - and the vast illicit outflows generated by corruption - by sharing know-how and experiences in the use of both traditional and alternative corruption fighting approaches.

The 2014 ICHA meeting will focus on ending impunity for corruption by sharing know-how and experiences in the use of both traditional and alternative corruption fighting approaches. “Ending impunity” is intended to capture the objectives of both enforcement and accountability measures, through sharing ‘out of the box’ solutions.

One of the sessions will be devoted to Data Mining. A range of practitioners will share tools and tips on using disparate data sets to find indications possible indicators of fraud, corruption and collusion in government contracts and in donor funded projects.
In addition to the panel discussion on data mining, the World Bank Group is hosting a half-day poster session featuring the work of data professionals and data scientists with an interest in addressing the problems faced by corruption fighters around the world.

All participants in the poster session will most definitely be welcome to attend the session. With that in mind we will make sure that the poster session comes right after the panel. Panel session will be in the morning of December 9 (right before lunch).

Poster Session
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Where: World Bank Atrium
When: December 9 from 12-4 pm (set-up in the am from 8 am onwards)

Topics
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Papers submitted to the poster session are solicited in all areas of data mining, knowledge discovery, and large-scale data analytics, especially where applicable to identifying fraud, corruption, and collusion. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Identifying red flags of fraud, corruption, collusion
* Procurement data
* Text mining
* Database development
* Semi-supervised and unsupervised learning and clustering.
* Graph and link mining, rule and pattern mining, dimensionality reduction and manifold learning.
* Relational and structured learning.
* Classification and regression methods.
* Efficient and distributed data mining platforms and algorithms.
* Systems and software for large-scale data analytics of textual and graph data.
* Distributed computing (cloud, map-reduce, MPI)

Registration (free!)
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There will be no registration fee for participants presenting posters.

Panel: Using Disparate Data Sets to Find Indications of Fraud, Corruption and Collusion
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Panelists:
Marina Walker Guevara, Deputy Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Dr. Mihaly Fazekas or Istvan Toth, Corruption Research Center Budapest
Dr. Eric Rozier, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computing Systems, University of Cincinnati

Panel Description:
The audience will be looking for help finding answers to questions about using disparate data sets to find indications of fraud, corruption and collusion in their home countries and in donor funded projects. Each of the panelists will speak to a unique way of accessing, analyzing and presenting data in the service of detecting illicit activity and increasing transparency.

Ms. Walker Guevara has led the ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks Database project (offshoreleaks.icij.org), allowing the public to search more than 100,000 secret companies, trusts and funds created in offshore locales. Dr. Fazekas / Istvan Toth are the founders of the Corruption Research Center Budapest (www.crcb.eu) and winners of the 2014 U4 Proxy Challenge for identifying proxy indicators of institutional corruption by analyzing large volumes of public, administrative data. Dr. Rozier has been working with the Integrity VP of the World Bank to develop data analytic techniques to proactively identify areas of risk to the Bank’s donor funds, and has been recognized by the National Academy Engineering for his work in Big Data.

Submission instructions
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Abstracts for the poster session must be submitted through EasyChair by November 19th. Submitted abstracts will be assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, and clarity. Abstracts will be reviewed by members of the ICHA program committee and decisions will be emailed to all authors by November 26th, 2014. Note that there will not be an author response phase between submissions and decisions.

Camera ready versions of accepted posters must be submitted for final approval by December 3rd, 2014.

All deadlines are by 11:59pm Eastern Standard Time.

Poster abstracts should be submitted to EasyChair using the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icha14

PC
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Eric W. D. Rozier (University of Cincinnati, USA) (co-chair)
Andrew Means (University of Chicago, USA) (co-chair)
Elisabeth Wiramidjaja (World Bank Group)
Alexandra Habershon (World Bank Group)
Joe Walsh (University of Chicago)
Varun Chandola (University at Buffalo)
Jeff Alstott (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
Mohammed Abdel-Mottaleb (University of Miami)
John Thompson (Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, Informationstechnik & System-Management)