The Scientists Behind DataVisor Are Using AI To Spot Financial Scams Before They Begin

How two Chinese women turned their Ph.D. theses into machine learning that makes connections between seemingly unrelated events to discover emerging fraud schemes.

The Scientists Behind DataVisor Are Using AI To Spot Financial Scams Before They Begin

After nearly 15 years of academic research as doctoral students and then together at Microsoft, Yinglian Xie (right) and Fang Yu took their work to the open market.

Cody Pickens for Forbes

Feb 19, 2025, 06:30am EST

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How two Chinese women turned their Ph.D. theses into machine learning that makes connections between seemingly unrelated events to discover emerging fraud schemes.

By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff

Back in 2006, after earning her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, Yinglian Xie wasn’t thinking about whether she wanted to make her career in the U.S. or her native China, let alone about someday being an entrepreneur. Instead, she was laser focused on the best place to continue her work–her thesis was on identifying potential internet security threats by looking for correlations between seemingly unrelated events. She ended up at Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley…