The artificial intelligence (AI) systems that helped Las Vegas casinos to keep away tricky gamblers may soon come to help Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in its crackdown on insider trading, a media report said on Tuesday.
According to the Economic Times report, Sebi is in talks with a top US-based AI provider to purchase such a system.
"The company has given a live demonstration to Sebi a few weeks ago as to how the software will work and about the customisations possible on the platform," the ET quoted a person in the know. If the deal goes through, the firm will customise the software as per Sebi requirements.
The casino AIs come with superior risk management systems compared to the traditional data analytics that regulators use, because the margin of error for these AIs is very thin, the ET report said, adding the failure to detect even one rogue gambler could cost a casino in seven figures.
Not just India, but several global financial regulators are considering such AI programmes to nail securities law violators.
In the past few years, Sebi has been investing in a major way to upgrade its technology to boost its capability for market surveillance, investigations, and policymaking.
Until recently, the market regulator mostly relied on tips and information to investigate white-collar crimes, but they have been found wanting to build water-tight cases against insider-trading violations.
In its annual report for 2020-21, Sebi said it will be implementing major information technology projects, which are critical to its day-to-day operations and its mandate.
‘High-risk’ traders could come under Sebi’s scrutiny if the casino AI platform is implemented. In the case of casinos, high-risk clients are the ones who are over leveraged, or have a trend of placing erratic bets.
A much-vaunted first wave of mini nuclear power stations may produce more radioactive waste than traditional large-scale ones when generating the same amount of power.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) have been mooted by their developers and proponents as a cheaper and faster way to build new nuclear power capacity, with UK prime minister Boris Johnson claiming they could be generating electricity by 2030. The US government has provided financial support to the firm NuScale Power to develop its version of the technology.
But to date there has been little independent assessment of how the radioactive waste produced by SMRs would compare with that from their large-scale peers.
Lindsay Krall at Stanford University in California and her colleagues used data NuScale Power has shared publicly with US authorities to assess the technology, and extrapolated to model the waste from three different SMR technologies. They compared the SMR technology with a conventional 1.1 gigawatt nuclear reactor, roughly a third of the capacity of a new nuclear plant being built in south-west England.
They have found that SMRs could increase the volume of short-lived low and intermediate level waste – the two lowest of three categories – by up to 35 times compared to a large conventional reactor, when looking at waste produced per unit of electricity generated. For the long-lived equivalent waste, SMRs would produce up to 30 times more and for spent nuclear fuel, up to 5 times more. The variation in these figures reflects expected variation in the SMR designs now being developed.
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