One award is for a collaborative project between the Law and Tech Lab and the Institute of Data Science (IDS), titled “Catch Me If You Can: Mapping EU Company Mobility & Abuse-Detection." It will be undertaken by Marcus Meyer and Ruta Liepina, assistant professors in the Faculty of Law, and Kody Moodley, a postdoctoral researcher with a joint appointment with the Law and Tech Lab and IDS, and Pedro Hernandez Serrano of IDS. 

The project concerns financial fraud and tax evasion by companies in the EU. These crimes lead to loss of tax revenue estimated at €110bn each year. The team will create an innovative artificial intelligence system combining legal expertise, natural language processing, machine learning and knowledge graphs. The system will improve the detection of financial fraud by automatically flagging potential abusers. 

The second award is for “Using AI for Consumer Protection: creating AI based persona for mystery shopping”. This project involves a feasibility study for an AI based tool that automatically generates personas and carries out online mystery shopping. This tool can help consumer authorities to efficiently detect consumer law infringements and academics to collect information on online sellers’ use of big data to personalise prices and shopping experiences. The project will be carried out by dr. Caroline Cauffman (associate professor at the Faculty of Law) and Pedro Hernandez Serrano (senior researcher at IDS) in collaboration with the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (Hamad Bin Khalifa University) led by dr. Jim  Jansen. 

The project fits with the NWA route "Creating value through responsible access to and use of big data" which aims inter alia to improve the efficiency of the Dutch government  by making smart use of new big data methods, models and techniques.​ 

"Catch Me If You Can" and "Using AI for Consumer Protection" were two of 40 awards in the Idea Generator programme, which supports out-of-the-box thinkers and creative, exciting and innovative research ideas that have been deemed relevant for the Dutch National Research Agenda (NWA).