Combining Big Social Media Data and FCA for Crisis Response

The use of social media is now prevalent in all aspects of society. Each and every major news event is accompanied by a stream of real-time social media posts, creating a vast and ever changing data supply - a hallmark of big data. The aim of the ATHENA project is to turn this stream of information into a vital resource for the public and first responders during a crisis. ATHENA recognizes that citizens are currently under-utilized in crises and that they are often willing to engage in the response effort. Social media provides a robust platform for this interaction. Due to the volume and fast paced nature of the incoming data streams, the challenges for ATHENA system are how to integrate and process this data and then how to transform it into intelligence to be used by law enforcement agencies and the public alike. This paper introduces potential applications within the ATHENA project, in particular, those based on a technique known as formal concept analysis

A social media and crowd-sourcing data mining system for crime prevention during and post-crisis situations

A number of large crisis situations, such as natural disasters have affected the planet over the last decade. The outcomes of such disasters are catastrophic for the infrastructures of modern societies. Furthermore, after large disasters, societies come face-to-face with important issues, such as the loss of human lives, people who are missing and the increment of the criminality rate. In many occasions, they seem unprepared to face such issues. This paper aims to present an automated system for the synchronization of the police and Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) for the prevention of criminal activities during and post a large crisis situation. The paper presents a review of the literature focusing on the necessity of using data mining in combination with advanced web technologies, such as social media and crowd-sourcing, for the resolution of the problems related to criminal activities caused during and post-crisis situations. The paper provides an introduction to examples of different techniques and algorithms used for social media and crowd-sourcing scanning, such as sentiment analysis and link analysis. The main focus of the paper is the ATHENA Crisis Management system. The function of the ATHENA system is based on the use of social media and crowd-sourcing for collecting crisis-related information. The system uses a number of data mining techniques to collect and analyze data from the social media for the purpose of crime prevention. A number of conclusions are drawn on the significance of social media and crowd-sourcing data mining techniques for the resolution of problems related to large crisis situations with emphasis to the ATHENA system

Creating corroborated crisis reports from social media data through formal concept analysis

During a crisis citizens reach for their smart phones to report, comment and explore information surrounding the crisis. These actions often involve social media and this data forms a large repository of real-time, crisis related information. Law enforcement agencies and other first responders see this information as having untapped potential. That is, it has the capacity extend their situational awareness beyond the scope of a usual command and control centre. Despite this potential, the sheer volume, the speed at which it arrives, and unstructured nature of social media means that making sense of this data is not a trivial task and one that is not yet satisfactorily solved; both in crisis management and beyond. Therefore we propose a multi-stage process to extract meaning from this data that will provide relevant and near real-time information to command and control to assist in decision support. This process begins with the capture of real-time social media data, the development of specific LEA and crisis focused taxonomies for categorisation and entity extraction, the application of formal concept analysis for aggregation and corroboration and the presentation of this data via map-based and other visualisations. We demonstrate that this novel use of formal concept analysis in combination with context-based entity extraction has the potential to inform law enforcement and/or humanitarian responders about on-going crisis events using social media data in the context of the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Keywords : formal concept analysis, crisis management, disaster response, visualisation, entity extraction

The ATHENA Project: Using Formal Concept Analysis to Facilitate the Actions of Responders in a Crisis Situation

The ATHENA project brings together major user communities with world leading experts in crisis management and experts and technology developers of mobile and social media use and development. The goal of the ATHENA project is to deliver outputs that will enable and encourage users of new media to contribute to the security of citizens in crisis situations and for search and rescue actions. ATHENA is a system of software tools to enhance the ability of LEAs, police, first responders and citizens in their use of mobile and smart devices in crisis situations. An emerging semantic technology called Formal Concept Analysis will be used to capture meaning and key facts from the large amount of communication data created during a crisis

Competition in financial services

In the financial services sector, the failure of a single institution can have a compounding effect on the sector, and on national and global economies. In particular, there is systemic risk from inter-institution lending, and this effect is more complex in Australia due to the small number of major players. In retail banking in Australia, following a similar practice in most developed countries, if an unsecured creditor is a retail depositor, their deposit is insured by the government. That is, if a retail bank fails, the Federal Government will make the depositors whole. The regulatory system, particularly the prudential regulatory system, is designed to protect depositors’ and borrowers’ interests, and this protects the interest of the government. The effect is that regulatory policy on banking has prioritised stability in consideration of the sovereign risk associated with the risk of retail bank failure. However, this approach also creates a policy dilemma. The dilemma concerns the extent to which the retail banking sector can attain the benefits of the vigorous rivalry from effective and efficient competition, without unduly risking stability and the potential of a devastating call on the public purse. Specifically, in the context of effective and efficient competition, there is limited competitiveness in retail banking in Australia. This is reflected in the static state of market share between the four major banks, and very slow and marginal improvements gains even by strong second tier competitors. Furthermore, the retail banking sector’s capacity for product and service innovation is limited. Although the absence of vigorous rivalry is conducive to stability within the retail banking sector, it is likely to detract from the welfare of retail banking consumers. Furthermore, the level of innovation may not be as high as is feasible and barriers, including prudential regulatory barriers to entry or expansion, mean that the extent of rivalry is unlikely to change without some form of promotion of competition. The paper consequently makes a four-point recommendation for the removal of the ‘four pillars’ policy:  The four major banks are protected by an implicit government guarantee that impacts market operation with little observable benefit to consumers, and may be a source of consumer disutility.  The four pillars policy has prompted increased vertical integration within the sector, particularly in the area of mortgage products.  There are sufficient merger protections provided by Part IV of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth).  Competition and contestability arise when there are reasonably low barriers to entry and exit from the sector. It is not clear that low barriers to entry exist in Australia, and evidence to support this view comes from the failure of international banks to gain a significant toehold in the retail banking sector in Australia. One deterrent to entry is the regulatory focus on the four pillars. The authors recognise that this position is at odds with the view of the Financial System Inquiry. However, the rationale in the report of the Inquiry was to prevent mergers, and the current competition law achieves this objective. The paper recommends two specific policies to promote competition in retail banking without the structural intervention that would otherwise be required to improve the intensity of competition in the retail banking sector:  Introduce bank account number portability. This would use ‘know your customer’ and central database systems in a similar form to those that have been used for mobile number portability in Australia for the last decade and a half.  Introduce customer access to data held by banks to allow third parties to compare bank offerings across all banks.  Significantly, these two recommendations are consistent with the productivity proposals issued by the UK Government in July 2015. The research paper also examines crowd equity funding as a disruptive force in the banking sector, and recommends that crowd equity funding be permitted with the following safeguards:  ASIC should take an active role in monitoring crowd equity funding and be willing to sue in case of fraudulent action.  Any intermediary online platform should have a financial services licence with limited duty of care.  There should be a cap for business raisings through crowd equity funding of $2 million in a 12-month period.  Crowd equity funding is a social phenomenon. Through its use of social media, it has attracted people who have previously never been interested in investing in companies. Instead of being feared, this interest should be nurtured through the promotion of investors’ financial education

Dialectic tensions in the financial markets: a longitudinal study of pre- and post-crisis regulatory technology

This article presents the findings from a longitudinal research study on regulatory technology in the UK financial services industry. The financial crisis with serious corporate and mutual fund scandals raised the profile of compliance as governmental bodies, institutional and private investors introduced a ‘tsunami’ of financial regulations. Adopting a multi-level analysis, this study examines how regulatory technology was used by financial firms to meet their compliance obligations, pre- and post-crisis. Empirical data collected over 12 years examine the deployment of an investment management system in eight financial firms. Interviews with public regulatory bodies, financial institutions and technology providers reveal a culture of compliance with increased transparency, surveillance and accountability. Findings show that dialectic tensions arise as the pursuit of transparency, surveillance and accountability in compliance mandates is simultaneously rationalized, facilitated and obscured by regulatory technology. Responding to these challenges, regulatory bodies continue to impose revised compliance mandates on financial firms to force them to adapt their financial technologies in an ever-changing multi-jurisdictional regulatory landscape

The CUBIST Project: Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies

As a preface to this Special 'CUBIST' Edition of the International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies IJIIT, this article describes the European Framework Seven Combining and Unifying Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies CUBIST project, which ran from October 2010 to September 2013. The project aimed to combine the best elements of traditional BI with the newer, semantic, technologies of the Sematic Web, in the form of the Resource Description Framework RDF, and Formal Concept Analysis FCA. CUBIST's purpose was to provide end-users with "conceptually relevant and user friendly visual analytics" to allow them to explore their data in new ways, discovering hidden meaning and solving hitherto difficult problems. To this end, three of the partners in CUBIST were use-cases: recruitment consultancy, computational biology and the space industry. Each use-case provided their own requirements and problems that were finally addressed by the prototype CUBIST visual-analytics developed in the project

Exploring a new incubation model for FinTechs: Regulatory sandboxes

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