Lunch webinar Illicit Trade

Dear relation,

Mark Thursday 16 December in your calendar! Together with The Illicit Trade Group (ITG) we are organizing the lunch webinar: 'A data-driven approach for the detection of illicit accounts on the Ethereum blockchain'. In this webinar George Azzopardi will elaborate on his research on the detection of illicit accounts on the Ethereum community.

The recent technological advent of cryptocurrencies and their respective benefits have been overshadowed with a number of illegal activities operating over the network such as money laundering, bribery, phishing, and fraud, among others. In this talk I will describe a data science pipeline which we have used for the detection of illicit accounts on the Ethereum blockchain. For our experiments we have curated a data set of more than 2000 accounts that was labelled as illicit or not illicit by the Ethereum community. The proposed approach used decision-tree based model and also provides insight on the importance of each input variable. All technical details can be found in our publication: S Farrugia, J Ellul, G Azzopardi, "Detection of illicit accounts over the Ethereum blockchain”, Expert Systems with Applications 150, 113318

To watch the live stream of the D&G Lunch Webinar on 16 December 2021 send an email to sustainablesociety rug.nl

George Azzopardi
George Azzopardi is tenure track assistant professor of computer science at the Information Systems group, Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen.

His research interests include the application of data science for the detection of illicit activity on blockchains, as well as the integrity protection of the chain of digital custody in forensics, an ongoing research line which is financed by a grant from the Gratama foundation. Moreover, he was leader of a work package in the recently completed EU-funded 4NSEEK project, which concerned the development of forensic image analysis tools to help in the investigations against child sexual exploitation.

He is associate editor of two Elsevier computer science journals and has (co-)authored more than 70 peer-reviewed papers. He has co-promoted 4 PhD candidates and is the co-promoter of another 4 ongoing PhD students. More information can be found in his personal website: www.cs.rug.nl/~george