Gilbert Funk, President/Founder
Prior to founding Sparkight Analytics, Mr Funk has had an extraordinary career as a consultant for the US government. Mr. Funk has more than 25 years experience in programming, operational research, database management and systems design, implementation and maintenance. He has worked on information systems for the University of Maryland, the State of Maryland, Fannie Mae, the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). In these roles, he has defined, analyzed, designed, developed and maintained large and complex information systems. In addition, he has developed user interfaces, transactional interfaces, and rules engines to assist field users in their work efforts. For the past 17 years, his responsibilities also have included expertise in the tactical use of information to target terrorists, transnational criminals, money laundering, and contraband smugglers. He is also Subject Matter Expert on targeting and identifying terrorists, narcotics and currency smugglers.
Mr. Funk has received recognition for his contributions in these areas throughout his career at CBP, including special letters, awards and honors from CBP's leaders. Most recently he received the Blue Eagle Award from the Commissioner of CBP.
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Department of the Treasury March 2015 - present
As Principal Data Architect, Mr. Funk has applied his years of experience by designing and deploying the Enterprise Rules Engine (ERE) project at FinCEN. Championed by the Director, CTO and CIO of FinCEN, this large, multifaceted project delivers powerful event surfacing capabilities to analysts. ERE utilizes the computational intensity of Oracle with SAS to create a force multiplying effect in data analysis and helps counter money laundering by transnational organized criminal organizations and terrorists. Mr. Funk has also architected the Entity Resolution system at FinCEN for identifying individuals and organizations engaged in illegal behavior. This multi-tiered enterprise level system is designed to meet the demands of analysts, both at FinCEN and other government agencies, seeking to identify criminals and their behavior.
Mr. Funk has also used his experience to guide projects involving the Hadoop ecosystem, Elasticsearch, Neo4J, Postgres and Solr databases.
Mr. Funk has chartered projects in artificial intelligence and machine learning; supporting the diverse efforts at FinCEN. Utilizing various technologies including machine learning, deep learning, Python, Scala and Spark, he has led projects to uncover money laundering, healthcare fraud, compromised financial institutions, transnational organized crime, weapons proliferation, and terrorist financing. These projects use cutting edge methods to identify previously unseen anomalies and patterns in relational databases, free form text, document and graph databases. His projects have also included topic modeling and detecting emerging threats.
Mr. Funk co-developed an agency wide assessment methodology for identifying and addressing several threat factors to the financial system and national security. Threat, vulnerability, consequence identification and mitigation are the key aspects of this applied approach.
Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security August 1998 - 2016
As a Senior Software Engineer, Mr. Funk leveraged his technical and problem solving skills and designed and developed the Automated Targeting System (ATS) Passenger. ATS Passenger is CBP's front-line system for performing risk assessments of inbound and outbound cargo, persons and vehicles. ATS Passenger applies a number of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, including rule-based expert systems, to assist in identifying cargo, conveyances, passengers and vehicles that may pose a substantial terrorism or contraband risk, or for which the parties' documents and classifications are likely to be fraudulent or may be in violation of U.S. laws, trade agreements, etc. ATS Passenger automatically parses and standardizes trade-supplied data, makes evaluations based upon expert rules, and ranks the results according to their probable interest to CBP Inspectors.
In addition, Mr. Funk has designed and implemented a customized data retrieval system to retrieve passenger data from airline reservation systems allowing CBP to garner invaluable information to satisfy their business directives. Mr. Funk has created rule based systems that identifies patterns and alerts Customs officers of criminal and security related threats.
At CBP he also has built cross-government communications mechanisms for data sharing and coordination between CBP, the Department of State, the Transportation Security Agency, and the Office of Border Patrol.
Mr. Funk has supported the National Targeting Center, the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Border Patrol, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). His support for these agencies is primarily to locate and identify terrorists. He also has been employed to generate real-time reports to aid in targeting of terrorists, narcotics and currency smugglers.
Mr. Funk has enjoyed studying passenger analysis at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and has given instruction on the use of ATS to its user community for the purpose of identifying travels of high risk.
Mr. Funk has received numerous awards and letters of recognition throughout his career, including:
