FALCON

Fight Against Large-scale Corruption and Organised Crime Networks

Current evidence suggests that the global fight against corruption faces serious challenges: policy decisions are not well informed, the corruption landscape is complex and enormous, while measuring corruption is so far mostly based on subjective approaches, and there is lack of appropriate technological tools to support anti-corruption. To address these challenges, FALCON is designed and dedicated to support the composition, update and management of comprehensive corruption intelligence pictures, within domains and jurisdictions of interest. This will be accomplished following a multi-actor, evidence-based, data-driven approach, building upon existing assets and prior work of consortium partners. FALCON will, first, develop and validate objective and actionable indicators of corruption that can be used to inform policy decisions. Second, it will design, implement and integrate powerful data analytics tools, data pipelines and applications that support the management of the entire lifecycle of corruption intelligence pictures. These technological components will enable
comprehensive corruption risk assessment, informed policy making, and improved anticorruption law enforcement. FALCON will be piloted in four corruption domains – corruption schemes at border crossings, sanction circumvention by kleptocrats/oligarchs, public procurement fraud, conflicts of interest of politically exposed persons – involving law enforcement experts (police authorities and border guards) and other key actors (e.g., GovTech providers, academia, financial intermediaries). FALCON’s implementation will be incremental and iterative, forming synergies between SSH and technological expertise, and will adhere to the principles of Trustworthy AI and responsible research and innovation.

M4D has a critical role in the project being responsible for the scientific management of FALCON ensuring that the project’s activities align with the project’s objectives. Moreover, M4D leads the task related to the development of appropriate algorithms and tools for trends analysis in corruption phenomena utilising geospatial and temporal information in order to provide deeper insights in the understanding of corruption schemes and to also enable the detection and identification of such phenomena. M4D also leads the design and development of a predictive analytics framework to facilitate the prompt response of Law Enforcement Agencies targeting the prevention of criminal activities linked to corruption. The developed solutions within these tasks will leverage the latest advances in AI-based methods exploiting multimodal information from heterogeneous sources. Finally, M4D contributes to other technical tasks related to the design of the FALCON’s architecture, the deployment and the validation of the developed systems to encounter corruption.