Visiting Researcher Talk: Prof Sangmi Chai | 06 February 2026

Talk Title
From On-Chain Graphs to Expert Knowledge: Toward Interpretable Detection of Illicit Activities in Blockchain Networks

Speaker

Prof Sangmi Chai

About the Speaker

Professor Sang-Mi Chai is Professor of Management Information Systems at the School of Business Administration, Ewha Womans University, where she has been on faculty since 2012. She earned her Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and holds an LL.M. from Salford University in the United Kingdom. Her interdisciplinary expertise spans information systems, AI, cybersecurity, and blockchain governance. Professor Chai serves on national advisory committees and review boards for digital forensics, personal data protection, autonomous systems, and AI, and holds leadership roles in multiple professional societies including the Digital Asset Research Association and the Korean Society of Blockchain Management. She has also held academic and advisory positions internationally, including a faculty appointment in the United States.

Description

Blockchain is often said to be “transparent,” but in reality it can feel like a giant maze of wallet addresses and transactions. Criminals exploit that complexity to hide money flows—through tactics like rapid hopping across wallets, splitting funds into many small transfers, or passing through mixing services.

In this talk, we introduce a simple but powerful idea: treat the blockchain as a graph (a network map), and combine it with human expert intuition. We turn expert knowledge—like “new wallets that quickly scatter funds after using a mixer”—into clear, structured rules (knowledge triplets), and blend them with graph-based analytics. The result is a detection approach that is not only smarter, but also explainable: we can show why a transaction looks suspicious, not just that it does.

You’ll leave with an intuitive understanding of how graph thinking and expert knowledge can work together to make blockchain investigations faster, clearer, and more trustworthy for finance, compliance, and regulation.