Unite Ideas Winner: Preventing the Financing of Terrorism by Engineering an ML Model with Financial Crime Data

The Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) and the Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) announced the winner of the recent Unite Ideas / Financial Crime Data Challenge, which sought a model for financial crime data correlation. The winning solution titled “Preventing the Financing of Terrorism by Engineering an ML Model with Financial Crime Data” was provided by Omdena—a collaborative platform to build innovative, ethical and efficient AI solutions to real-world problems. Their proposed solution aims to establish models to correlate data from financial, criminal, and other open data records to identify, prevent and counter the financing of terrorism. It will enhance goFintel (government office Financial Intelligence) capabilities as the next-generation software platform developed within the framework of UNOCT.

The challenge was issued through Unite Ideas—a crowd-sourcing platform developed by OICT that mobilizes data scientists and software developers globally, fostering collaboration with civil society and United Nations offices to create open-source technology solutions in support of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Omdena has a strong track record in delivering innovative projects and has successfully mobilized dozens of highly skilled AI and machine learning volunteers that are embarking on a journey to develop a new solution for tracking the financing of terrorism. According to Omdena founder, chairman and CEO Mr. Rudradeb Mitra, “This project, along with many other projects we did, demonstrates the power of using bottom-up global collaboration in solving major social, environmental, and health challenges. This is a win for the global community”.

For more information, please visit ideas.unite.un.org