Case Study: Tracking Money Launderers with AVS/Express

Crimefighters in Italy have a promising and highly sophisticated new tool for tracking elusive money launderers: VisualMine, developed using AVS/Express. VisualMine lets financial analysts with Italy's central banking system explore massive datasets to track down the proverbial "needle in a haystack" — a blip, a spike, any anomaly that might suggest illegal activity using the banking system.

VisualMine was created by Artificial Intelligence Software S.p.A. (AIS) of Milan, Italy. AIS's unique approach to data mining, which incorporates AVS/Express's high-performance data visualization technologies, led to its being selected for the project by the Ufficio Italiano dei Cambi (UIC), which together with Banca d'Italia serves the role of Central Bank for Italy. The project was officially known as European Esprit - High Performance Computing (HPCN) - DBInspector and included as partners the UIC, AIS, the Parallel Applications Centre of Southampton, The University of Trento, and the Catholic University of Milano. The project was funded in part by the European Community.

The behavior of hundreds of bank branches is represented in this image. Aggregate monthly values such as total money transfer, total incomes, total value of cash operations, etc., determine the position, dimension and colour of cubes in the space, each cube representing a bank branch.

"Data visualization is most suitable for mining large databases," said AIS Senior Consultant Paolo Stofella, "because the analysts are not aware of what they are looking for. Through data visualization, you detect anomalies by creating new knowledge — visual displays of what is normal and what is not normal," he said.

UIC was already equipped with powerful modern tools such as relational databases, Unix workstations, and statistical analysis and graphing software, but believed it was still not fully exploiting the data. The government sought to automate analysis of monthly transaction data from institutions that were processing more than 20 million lire (approximately $12,000) over a 10-day period.

"With tens of thousands of financial institutions in Italy — banks, insurance brokerages and investment houses -- this is an enormous amount of information to analyze," said Stofella.

To develop VisualMine, "we needed a powerful tool that would let us quickly prototype visualization and give us an interface to the Oracle DBMS. We created a software layer to manage 'agents' to extract, manipulate and prepare data for 3D visualizations," Stofella said. "AVS was the only environment to allow us to quickly develop viewers and object-oriented agents. We chose AVS/Express because of the rapid processing of visual presentations, an environment to develop the agents shell, and a database interface," he emphasized. "We had to build the system to be highly flexible for the users with strong interaction between the agents and viewers. First they select and manipulate the data resulting in a list of columns for interaction. Then, they select a viewer. They can change the parameters of the display and build new visualizations on the fly," he said.

Southern Italian regions are being simultaneously analyzed at the municipality, province and region level in this image. Data aggregations are done automatically.

VisualMine lets users control the data and displays, producing easy-to-view 3D shapes and colors. It uses almost every visualization algorithm shipped with AVS/Express, yet allows analysts to display data as easily as they would produce charts in a popular business spreadsheet program.

VisualMine provides two display modes: geographical or abstract 3D shapes. Users display data on maps of the entire region, by country, even down to any of the 8,000 Italian municipalities. Arrows depict the flow of money between branches or regions, such as between Southern Italy and Panama, for example.

"It's easy to change the analysis, the variables and the graphics," Stofella said. "The user interactively selects the variables and the way they are displayed." This visual analysis replaces thousands of tedious and often fruitless hours of "multivariate analysis" on paper.

AIS products for financial markets include expert systems for credit evaluations. Stofella would like to use data visualization techniques with the company's automatic trading systems in the future, building on the knowledge and experience with the DBInspector project.

"Some 3D viewers, we now can build in only a few days using AVS/Express," Stofella said. "It's so modular, and the visual programming approach lets you build new, complex, 3D presentations in a very short time."