Close+up
FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT Bad guys can’t hide from UA Artificial Intelligence Lab
T
he day’s events capped by the fall of the World Trade Center signaled an introduction to the dark side for Hsinchun Chen. “I didn’t imagine the world could become so nasty, become so volatile after Sept. 11, 2001,” he recalls. “Then all bets were off.” But like an old time western, the actions of the outlaws signaled the rise of the men in white. In this case, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at The University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management has become the stronghold for good. As founding director of the lab, Chen and his researchers have turned to data mining as their weapon of choice. The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or AI lab, actually was born a year after Chen’s arrival at the university in 1989. By chance, a year before 9/11 occurred Chen began leading a research project that came to be known as COPLINK. The crime intelligence application began with data from Arizona and California police, and early on was adopted by more than 7,000 different police agencies and almost all NATO countries, he says. When the system used to connect the dots of crime data became commercialized, Chen as founder ran the company for five years before hiring a manager to take over those duties. IBM Government Solutions ultimately bought the system in 2011 for $500 million. “It was probably one of the top three commercialization success stories at The University of Arizona,” Chen says.
08
AZTECHCONNECT.COM FALL 2017
Hsinchun Chen
COPLINK was one of more than a half-dozen companies Chen founded over the past two decades after starting them as research to extract intelligence from raw data. Various projects include such timely endeavors as tracking Isis members on social media and getting on the trail of hackers around the world, and often with support from government agency grants. “The Web has been used for more than 20 years now by the good guys,” he says. “Now it is heavily used by the bad guys.” He explored the topic in his book “Dark Web: Exploring and Data Mining the Dark Side of the Web” published in 2011. And sometimes the AI lab finds solutions for issues closer to home. For example, Chen has done research to help develop mobile devices that detect the risk of senior citizens’ falling based on data collected from their everyday lives. Helping are the students whose first challenge is getting accepted into the lab. Of the 100 doctoral students who made the cut, only a third have celebrated graduation day, with some becoming professors and top researchers in the AI field. Even those who don’t graduate still have found consolation working in research labs for companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.