Progress report

AI for Digital Finance: Swiss-MENA Research Network, July 2026

This page reports what the project has produced in the first seven months of a nineteen month programme. It is a public record, updated as work completes. Every entry states its real status, so nothing planned is presented as delivered and nothing delivered is overstated.

The project connects Fachhochschule Graubuenden (FHGR) in Switzerland with the American University of Sharjah (AUS) in the United Arab Emirates, and the wider research community around both. It is funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation through the HES-SO Leading House for the Middle East and North Africa.

Where the project stands

A twenty one member international scientific committee is in place, spanning thirteen countries and territories. Two peer-reviewed papers by network members are published. A workshop at PAKDD 2026 has been delivered, an organised session at EcoSta 2026 follows in August, and the network hosts its first invited talk on 6 August. Three researcher mobilities are confirmed or already under way, one of them a two month research stay in Switzerland. A follow-on research bid has been submitted, and an external agency has awarded travel funding to a network member for network business.

The project's central event, the AI for Digital Finance Workshop at the American University of Sharjah, takes place in early February 2027. Registration is open.

The network

The scientific committee is the project's structural achievement, and the clearest evidence that something now exists which did not before.

Two members hold joint appointments across two of these countries, which is why the column sums to more than twenty one. The Swiss contingent is three, two of them at FHGR. The MENA anchor is at the American University of Sharjah. The rest reaches across Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, the Baltics, and into China and Hong Kong.

The full committee, with affiliations and photographs, is listed on the project site.

Research output

Multi-Modal Enhanced Graph Transfer Learning for Digital Finance Fraud Detection. Liu, Y., Chan, S., Chu, J., Zhang, Y., Yang, C., Wang, Z., Gel, Y.R. and Chen, Y. Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026, pp. 8709 to 8712, April 2026. 10.1145/3774904.3792946. Open access.

Multilayer topology-aware graph contrastive learning for fraud detection in the Ethereum transaction network. Chen, Y., Zhang, Y., Chan, S., Chu, J. and Lord, N. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society), 189(2), pp. 703 to 722. 10.1093/jrsssa/qnaf135. This paper appeared online first in August 2025, before the project began; its print issue falls inside the project period.

Both sit on the same theme, graph-based fraud detection in digital finance, which is the research ground the Swiss and UAE groups share.

Events

AI and Data Science for Digital Finance, delivered. A workshop held on 9 June 2026 in Hong Kong alongside the 30th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, under the theme "Transforming Markets, Assets, and Inclusion", with invited keynotes, paper presentations and a panel. Three network members sat on the organising committee.

EcoSta 2026, session EO222, 8 to 10 August 2026. "Data science, statistics, and AI for digital finance", an organised session at the 9th International Conference on Econometrics and Statistics at Ryukoku University, Kyoto. The conference is hybrid with all sessions live streamed.

Blended Intensive Programme, Mamaia, Constanta, 16 to 23 August 2026. The eighth edition of the FABIZ Business and Technology Blended Intensive Programme at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, themed "AI in Digital Finance". Both project co-chairs teach, and the MENA co-chair stays the full week to work on joint research with the Swiss side. Teaching faculty includes colleagues from Humboldt University of Berlin, Athens, Hamburg and ASE Bucharest, with sessions from industry. Certificates carry ECTS credits.

AI for Digital Finance Workshop, American University of Sharjah, early February 2027. The project's central event. Three days, hybrid, 80 to 100 participants expected, covering large language models in finance, explainable AI, risk management, blockchain and decentralised finance, and alternative data. Registration is open, with a deadline of 15 January 2027.

Invited talk, 6 August 2026

The network hosts its first invited talk on Thursday 6 August 2026 at 13:00 CEST, given by Dr. Ruting Wang of City University of Hong Kong, a member of the project's scientific committee. The talk is hybrid and open to everyone, on site in room B2.33 at FHGR in Chur and online via Microsoft Teams, with no registration.

Her subject is how stranded fossil-fuel losses are priced, amplified and transmitted through financial markets, combining stranded-loss estimates for Chinese listed energy firms with stock-market data. This is new work that has not yet been published, presented with the speaker's permission.

Talk details, abstract and joining link

Mobility and exchange

A visiting researcher at FHGR, July to September 2026, under way. A visiting BSc researcher from Poland is spending two months hosted at FHGR, working on AI-driven risk management, which is one of the project's four thematic areas and the closest to the fraud detection work above. The stay is funded through Erasmus+ on the Polish side and Movetia on the Swiss side.

An invited research visit to Shenzhen Technology University, China, 19 to 25 September 2026. A week at SZTU on invitation, with travel funded by an award from Movetia, the Swiss national agency for exchange and mobility. It extends the network past its Swiss-MENA axis into mainland China, alongside existing ties through Renmin University and City University of Hong Kong.

MENA to Europe, 16 to 23 August 2026. A full week of the two co-chairs working together on joint research projects, on the margins of the teaching programme in Constanta.

Further funding

A follow-on research bid, Liquidity-Fragmentation Indices for Tokenized Real-World Asset Secondary Markets: A Swiss-UAE Measurement Framework, was submitted in June 2026 to the Leading House MENA Research Partnership Grant call. It is submitted, with the panel decision pending, and is reported here as a bid and not as an award.

Tokenized real-world assets, meaning bonds, treasury bills, private credit and commodities issued as blockchain tokens, are among the fastest-growing parts of digital finance, and the UAE is among the first jurisdictions to regulate them. When one token trades across centralised exchanges, decentralised pools and on-chain contracts at once, its liquidity fragments and risk accumulates unobserved. There is no agreed way to measure this today. The proposal builds the first practical indices for it.

Separately, Movetia has awarded mobility funding to a network member, as described above. That a national agency independently assessed and funded network travel is evidence the collaboration is doing real work.

What comes next

Funding

This project is funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) through the HES-SO Leading House for the Middle East and North Africa (LH MENA) under the Connect & Collaborate Grants programme (CCG-2025-05). Research results are published jointly and reference the Leading House MENA funding.

HES-SO Leading House MENA