Claims processing automation - Modernization of an insurance company internal process

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceDeep learning and text mining are involved in the research. This work includes the project I developed together with my colleagues at SAS Institute during my internship experience. In this project we had to support an Insurance company for the automation of their existing claim processing system. In fact, as of today, the procedure of reading the incoming claim requests, selecting the useful information and extracting it to a data management software, is done manually for hundreds of claims every day. The job required by the insurance company is to substitute the existing procedure with an automated one, by implementing an OCR system to read the raw data contained in the documents sent by the customers and transform it into clean and useful information to be inserted into the data management software. This research will show the investigation on how to deal with this problem and the objective is to automate the classification of the documents for the company, to provide them a system to prioritize the most urgent documents and to execute some technical and administrative checks on the extracted information. The automation is shown to be feasible; the completeness and accuracy of the information extracted are solid, proving that this specific task in the insurance company sector can be realized and help to reduce costs while improving time performance

A Survey of Adversarial CAPTCHAs on its History, Classification and Generation

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, short for CAPTCHA, is an essential and relatively easy way to defend against malicious attacks implemented by bots. The security and usability trade-off limits the use of massive geometric transformations to interfere deep model recognition and deep models even outperformed humans in complex CAPTCHAs. The discovery of adversarial examples provides an ideal solution to the security and usability trade-off by integrating adversarial examples and CAPTCHAs to generate adversarial CAPTCHAs that can fool the deep models. In this paper, we extend the definition of adversarial CAPTCHAs and propose a classification method for adversarial CAPTCHAs. Then we systematically review some commonly used methods to generate adversarial examples and methods that are successfully used to generate adversarial CAPTCHAs. Also, we analyze some defense methods that can be used to defend adversarial CAPTCHAs, indicating potential threats to adversarial CAPTCHAs. Finally, we discuss some possible future research directions for adversarial CAPTCHAs at the end of this paper.Comment: Submitted to ACM Computing Surveys (Under Review

Generation and Use of Handwritten CAPTCHAs

Automated recognition of unconstrained handwriting continues to be a challenging research task. In contrast to the traditional role of handwriting recognition in applications such as postal automation and bank check reading, in this paper, we explore the use of handwriting recognition in designing CAPTCHAs for cyber security. CAPTCHAs (Completely Automatic Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are automatic reverse Turing tests designed so that virtually all humans can pass the test, but state-of-the-art computer programs will fail. Machine-printed, text-based CAPTCHAs are now commonly used to defend against bot attacks. Our focus is on exploring the generation and use of handwritten CAPTCHAs. We have used a large repository of handwritten word images that current handwriting recognizers cannot read (even when provided with a lexicon) for this purpose and also used synthetic handwritten samples. We take advantage of both our knowledge of the common source of errors in automated handwriting recognition systems as well as the salient aspects of human reading. The simultaneous interplay of several Gestalt laws of perception and the geon theory of pattern recognition (that implies object recognition occurs by components) allows us to explore the parameters that truly separate human and machine abilities