Above: To celebrate the partnership, BAE’s Mike Foster, Head of Financial Services, Martin Barber, VP, People & Capabilities and Sugeeta Bhanoo, Head of Capabilities, APAC joined Dr Sarah Metcalfe, Provost and Dr Andy Chan, Vice Provost, University of Nottingham Malaysia for the signing ceremony earlier this month.
Courtesy BAE Systems

 
“In the AML domain, unsupervised machine learning is in its infancy. As a forward-thinking company, we want to stay ahead of the curve and provide our customers additional security against unforeseen and unusual events,” said Martin Barber, VP, People & Capabilities for BAE Systems Digital Intelligence and project sponsor. “By partnering with the University of Nottingham Malaysia, academia and analysts will work side by side to push the boundaries of machine learning for enhanced AML solutions.”
 
Teams from both organisations will work together using BAE Systems existing FinCrime Testing Service (FTS) data for digging out complex signals which are difficult to identify with current traditional rules.

Grounded in customer needs, the team will initially focus on three use cases: detecting human trafficking, crypto risk assessment and uncovering shell companies. Once models are developed, BAE Systems will engage with customers to share the insight and results in order to explore routes for exploitation together.
 
“This partnership will use the university’s experience in other domains and learnings from known research to navigate through the research area and bring the requisite rigour to our analysis,” said Dr Chen Zhi Yuan, Associate Professor, Head of School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham Malaysia. “This agreement will allow us to expand our understanding and insight on unsupervised machine learning and apply it to realistic financial crime dataset to form an initial assessment.”
 
“Our customers want to dig deeper into their data and this partnership allows us to push the boundary on that,” said Dr. David Nicholson, Senior Data Scientist for BAE Systems Digital Intelligence. “New insights from machine learning could assist our customers by spotting unknown risky events in the data and informing better predictable solutions for the future.”
 
“BAE’s continued strategic partnership with University of Nottingham UK and Malaysia demonstrates our ability to work with global partners,” said Sugeeta Bhanoo, Head of Capabilities, APAC, for BAE Systems Digital Intelligence. “The combined efforts to upskill a graduate with supervised guidance both from BAE and University will support the development of machine learning capability in region.”