The Center for Business Analytics and Performance (CBAP) at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, invites you to a Webinar by Dr Tom Zougas.

Fraud Detection and Prevention – Webinar January 28th, 2pm-3pm

Dr Tom Zougas PEng PhD, VP Worldwide Data Analytics Consulting, Altair Canada

Fraud detection and prevention is both an interesting and important topic because fraud costs everyone money, from the individual consumer to large corporations.

Traditional rules-based systems may have been effective in the past in identifying fraud, but they become ineffective and stale as fraudsters learn how to bypass those rules. It becomes even more challenging due to the large volumes of data that need to be processed and examined to detect fraud, in addition to the constantly changing tactics for committing fraud – those activities are usually hidden in large volumes of data.

Data-driven methods of detecting fraud leverage machine learning techniques that have been developed over the past few years and have become effective in detecting fraud with the advances in data systems (e.g. big data, streaming data) and computational systems (e.g. high performance computing, GPU). As a result, it is possible to leverage the data that is constantly being captured during our day to day activities, to identify patterns of behaviour that are associated with fraudulent activity. In addition, it is feasible to address the challenge associated with fraudsters changing their tactics.

In this presentation, we will review what fraud is and how machine learning can help detect and prevent it. We will explore fraud use cases to describe the mechanics behind applying the machine learning techniques.

About the Speaker

Dr Tom Zougas manages the global consulting services team for data analytics at Altair. His team consists of consultants and specialists who deliver business and engineering focussed data science engagements, data engineering projects (installations, configurations, data processing workflows), customer success and technical support for our data analytics clients.

He has over 25 years of experience in technical consulting, in the areas of data science and custom database development. He has led numerous projects in marketing, CRM, credit risk for Fortune 500 companies around the globe. Dr Zougas has worked at: TransUnion Canada as Senior Manager for Data Science; Angoss as Director of Analytics; IBM Global Business Services as Senior Managing Consultant; RIM as Manager for Advanced Analytics; SAS as Principal Consultant; and Procase as Team Lead on custom Oracle based applications. He obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto in Mechanical Engineering in the field of software implementation of nonlinear finite element analysis.