Algorithm by QUB student a '˜game-changer' in fraud fight

Jiawen Sun, a PhD student in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technologies has been working for the last three years to create a software system which can efficiently analyse graph-structured data.

In sifting through an organisation’s data, the software can rapidly detect insurance fraud.

“Organisations are collecting increasing amounts of data, which is usually represented by graphs and can be useful for detecting fraud,” said Jiawen who comes from Tianjin in China.

“However, as data sets grow into the trillions of bytes and beyond, this creates problems in in high-performance computing, making it very hard to use the computer at full capacity.

“The algorithm I have created means that we can now process this information quickly and efficiently, enabling organisations to tackle issues such as insurance fraud.”

Through her research, Jiawen studied how to lay out the data in a computer’s memory and how to assign parts of the computation to different processors.

Dr Hans Vandierendonck, who was supervisor of the project, says the findings will have a positive impact for many organisations across the globe.

“Jiawen’s work is extremely valuable for many organisations who are processing large volumes of data. These techniques accelerate graph analytics up to 10-fold, which is a game changer for many organisations, allowing them to tap into analysis that they have never used before and at a much faster pace.”