IMI BIGDataAIHUB announces winners of the 2024 Competition at the Fighting Crime with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Conference

Claire Westgate

Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - 11:13

On March 23, some of U of T’s most brilliant student minds in artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning competed for $30,000 in prize money in the finals of the 2024 IMI BIGDataAIHUB Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Competition. The winning team was announced at the end of the second annual Fighting Crime with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Conference, which attracted an audience of two hundred industry professionals, community members, students, staff and faculty.

In partnership with Scotiabank, the annual IMI BIGDataAIHUB Competition creates an opportunity for students interested in big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to dive deeply into complex data sets and tackle real-world case scenarios. The culmination Conference enables competitors, industry partners, the local community, staff, faculty and students an opportunity to learn from industry experts about how these technologies are being used to advance global solutions to wicked problems. The theme of the 2024 Competition and Conference was the illegal wildlife trade, a USD $20 billion problem that not only has a devastating impact on the environment, but that also funds criminal activity around the world.

conference attendees in a large round room — Conference Chair Prof. Kevin Yousie speaks to delegates

“The annual Competition began five years ago with the goal of providing what we hoped would be the best experiential learning and development opportunity University of Toronto students with an interest in data science could possibly have”, says Professor Kevin Yousie, Chair of the Competition and Conference. “Through our close collaboration with Scotiabank and other partners, we have continued to make further enhancements, [including the addition of] the Fighting Crime With Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Conference. This is a wonderful opportunity to hear real-life case studies and learn how, in addition to traditional intelligence, investigation, and law enforcement activities, new capabilities utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise are being effectively deployed to identify bad actors. These AI tools combined with traditional methods, are having a meaningful impact”, he noted.

group of staff sitting together — Scotiabank's team of partners and delegates, with Scotiabank's Competition lead Duncan Smith-Halverson (1st row, second from right), Panel Moderator Alai Lalani (first row, right), and EVP & CCO Nicole Frew (first row, third from right)

"The competition has benefits to both sides”, says Gail Towne, Vice President and Global Head of AML Modeling & Analytics at Scotiabank. “Students get a real glimpse...[and] hands-on experience with end-to-end large data science tasks”, she says, while Scotiabank “gets to put its finger on the pulse of what top-tier AI talent looks like, what up-and-coming tools we should consider using, and how different approaches could potentially be leveraged to strengthen work already being done in-house". The 2024 Competition drew over 300 interested students, and 70 teams. Running from November to March, competitors worked tirelessly to craft innovative solutions to the case challenge and utilized the incredible capabilities of IMI’s new JupyterHub to power their data analysis work. Ultimately, the final five teams presented their solutions to a team of judges from Scotiabank, who were deeply impressed by the proposed solutions. "The quality of the students signing up for the competition seems to get better every year”, says Duncan Smith-Halverson, Senior Manager, AML/ATF Models and Analytics at Scotiabank. “The quality of their submissions continues to impress the judges, and it’s really one of those things where the more students put into it, the more everyone gets out of it – from the students, to the bank, to the society in which it takes place”.

IMI is delighted to congratulate Alexandre Granzer-Guay, Muhammad Maaz and Jesse Ward-Bond on their first-place finish. The second-place team of Safwat Khan, Zekai Li, Ernest Namdar, Tushar Raju, Pin-Chien Wang and Steven Zhang, and third place team of Renzo Benavides Valdiviezo, Grace Hu, Katia Ossetchkina and Nirmal Pol both had members returning for a second year in the competition, and new members. Made possible by Scotiabank’s partnership and sponsorship, these teams receive cash prizes enabling them to take their ideas forward, support further education, and move to the publishing of future work.

“I chose to participate... to use my machine learning skills [on] an interesting case challenge”, says Maaz, whose future career goals are in the application of AI to healthcare, and advancement of medical technology. Says Ward-Bond of a year ago, when the competition first piqued his interest, the competition is “heavily practical, lots of direct interaction with stakeholders, and focused on social problems... I was really drawn to all of these”.

Ossetchkina’s team, formed “quite by chance” (as each had registered for the competition individually), was keen to apply their “skills across several domains including data engineering, supervised machine learning, natural language processing and graph theory”, she says. The experience pushed their learning in the field rapidly; “we not only refined our expertise in machine learning techniques, but also gained valuable insights into managing large datasets, working on collaborative coding projects, and understanding our results in the context of a financial domain”, she notes. Says Ward-Bond of the 2024 experience “the thing I think gave us the biggest edge in the competition was [aligning] what we were delivering with what (we thought) the judges/stakeholders were expecting. In this case, we realized that human experts would always be a necessary part of the wildlife-trafficking-detection process, so this meant focusing on making our results explorable, interpretable, and open to expert input, rather than focusing on using the fanciest state-of-the-art AI methods”.

woman speaking at a podium — Nicole Frew, Executive Vice President & Chief Compliance Officer, Scotiabank, speaks at the Conference

Beyond the Competition, Scotiabank’s partnership is also instrumental in the delivery of the growing Fighting Crime with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Conference. One of the featured speakers at the 2024 Conference was Ofir Drori, author of the Last Great Ape and activist. Drori spoke about creating The Last Great Ape Organization, and his tireless work supporting wildlife and fighting drug smuggling, sharing both the stark realities of this criminal activity and heartwarming hope for the future. The Conference also featured experts from FINTRAC, Environment and Climate Change Canada and Scotiabank, discussing the challenges and innovations in halting illegal wildlife trafficking, tracking of illegal funds from these activities, and the societal, regulatory and enforcement measures being taken to battle animal and human abuses. Nicole Frew, Executive Vice President & Chief Compliance Officer at Scotiabank, shared powerful opening remarks, speaking about the shared responsibility of tackling this monumental global challenge. Frew’s dedication to this work, and appreciation of the role that delegates and competitors play in this challenge, rang clearly through the audience; “not on my watch”, she said, “and not on our watch”.

Conference panelists sit on a stage — Conference Panelists (L to R): Alai Lalani (Scotiabank), Sebastian Rodriguez Ordonez (Scotiabank), Patrick Moreau (FINTRAC), and John Miller (ECCC)

"The half-day conference...really does a compelling job integrating everything, and we hope to keep making it bigger and better”, say Towne and Smith-Halverson. “Some topics, such as the illegal wildlife trade, don’t receive much attention from the media”, they note, “but are still examples of lucrative illegal activity that can be exploited by international criminal organizations”.

The case competitors agree; says Ossetchkina “the [conference] stands out as an enriching and profound experience. Presentations by officials from enforcement agencies [and] industry experts... not only demonstrate how data is changing the way we stop crime, but also affirm the direct impact... of the case competition to addressing real-world issues”.

Ultimately, says the Scotiabank team of the partnership with the IMI BIGDataAIHUB, events like these “spur creativity on potential solutions to combat illicit activity, and practitioners can then harness that creativity to fight crime through unexplored avenues”.

“Dive in with an open mind”, says Ossetchkina. “Be prepared to learn continuously, and not be deterred by challenges”.

To learn more about the BIGDataAIHUB, the 2025 Competition and Conference, and access the BIGDataAIHUB’s recorded and upcoming seminars, please visit: https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/bigdataaihub/

2024 IMI BIGDataAIHUB Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Competition: Results