| Notes |
Harnessing AI and blockchain to build a better financial system
Mark Weber (@markrweber) is a research scientist at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a $240 million academic-industry partnership for the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence. Trained in finance, economics, and integrated thinking, Mark’s expertise is connecting dots across disciplines to bridge academic research with real-world applications.
Scalable deep learning for anti-money laundering (AML)
Mark’s current MIT-IBM research involves an emerging sub-field of AI - graph convolutional networks - and builds on the breakthrough work of Jie Chen (IBM Research) with FastGCN. Teaming up with Charles Leiserson’s high performance computing group at MIT CSAIL, Mark and company aspire to create new AI tools for anti-money-laundering (AML) to fight financial crime, such as the $40 billion human trafficking industry.
b_verify: a blockchain protocol for supply chain finance
While doing his graduate work in finance at MIT Sloan, Mark worked as a researcher at the the MIT Media Lab with the Digital Currency Initiative. There he led the development of b_verify, an open-source protocol for supply chain finance utilizing public blockchains and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The project grew out of an engagement with the Mexican government and the Inter-American Development Bank, receiving funding from the latter as well as from the MIT Legatum Center for Entrepreneurship and Development.
Focused on warehouse receipts in agricultural supply chains as an informing use-case, the b_verify protocol presents innovations in both computer science — scalable non-equivocation using public blockchains — and management science — predicted improvements in credit access via inventory transaction signaling and asset-backed lending (among other benefits). View the b_verify code on Github. Contact Mark if you are interested in utilizing the protocol. |