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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

http://www.vice.com/read/colombia-corruption-ai-819 [vice.com]

Eduardo was paid by the Colombian government to uncover organized crime. This was no easy task in a country with a long history of ingrained corruption, sparked in part by Pablo Escobar in the mid to late 1980s. Eduardo was faced with witnesses being murdered before he could speak to them and the daunting task of unraveling the web of corruption that allowed individual paramilitary commanders to orchestrate literally thousands of assassinations.

To help unravel that web, he created computer software that uses complex AI to map connections between legitimate authorities and organized crime groups. His technique has achieved some impressive results, and he's been labelled a rising star of crime fighting. I got in touch with him to find out how his methods could be used in Britain, and how he coped with the risks involved in investigating corruption in Colombia.

Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán: [...] Since the end of the 90s, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia [a Colombian drug trafficking and paramilitary group] supported local campaigns and even created local political parties. In 2002 they supported around 35 to 40 percent of the elected legislators at the National Congress of Colombia, as well as several mayors, governors, and municipal legislators. The legislators who were supported by them actually legislated between 2002 and 2006. You can imagine the perverse effects when laws are proposed and approved by people who were supported by a criminal group.

How has your system helped to bring serious corruption like this to light?

Some types of crime are really complex, especially cases involving hundreds or thousands of people interacting. Understanding those situations requires computational tools, because it's impossible for the human brain to make sense of thousands of names, dates, places, and facts. That's why, at Vortex Foundation [scivortex.com], the anti-corruption organization I founded, we created protocols, tools, and processes to analyze high volumes of information and understand the structure of complex criminal networks.

http://www.scivortex.com/vortex/showcase.html [scivortex.com]

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