the intel investigations lab

Kristen Patel is Professor of Practice in Korean and East Asian Affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She also serves as a faculty member in the Policy Studies Program, teaching undergraduate courses in policy studies and graduate courses in public administration and international affairs. Patel is a Senior Research Associate with the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC), Research Affiliate with the Moynihan Institute of Global Affair’s East Asia Program, and Co-Investigator for the Syracuse University’s Intelligence Center Community of Academic Excellence.

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Patel earned her B.A. in Economics and Policy Studies from Syracuse University and an M.A. in Economics from Duke University. She also holds a certificate in international finance from Georgetown University. Her career spans more than 25 years in intelligence and analytics leadership across both public and private sectors. She served in senior roles at the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), where she was Deputy Director of Intelligence, and at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she managed the largest analytics training program at the Sherman Kent School. Her federal service also includes leadership positions at the DNI Open Source Center and contributions to National Security Council sub-groups, including providing daily intelligence briefings to senior NSC staff and White House advisors.

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In the private sector, Patel led regional research and analytics for financial crime and threat mitigation at HSBC’s Asia-Pacific Compliance Office in Hong Kong. She has also worked as a consultant with TRM Labs, focusing on illicit finance and intelligence analysis.

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Patel’s research and teaching focus on the governance and practice of the U.S. intelligence community, illicit finance, and the evolution of criminal state behavior, particularly in East Asia. Her interdisciplinary work integrates policy analysis, intelligence tradecraft, and financial crime investigation to advance understanding of transnational threats and collaborative security strategies.

Arthur Paul Pedersen is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The City College of New York and The Graduate Center for the City University of New York (CUNY). He is also faculty research scientist with the CUNY Remote Sensing Earth Systems Institute (CREST Institute).  In addition to the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Computer Science and M.S. and Advanced Certification Programs in Data Science, Pedersen is faculty of the M.S. Program in Cybersecurity and the M.S. Program in Data Science & Engineering at The City College of New York.

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Pedersen conducts research at the interface of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, probability and statistics, logic and computation, decision and game theory, and network science. His current research focuses on fundamental and applied problems in natural language inference and human-machine interaction, theoretical and methodological foundations of artificial intelligence, and social network and economic modelling and analysis.  Current application areas include intelligence analysis and tradecraft, cybersecurity threat modeling and risk assessment, forensic handwriting identification and analysis, art authentication and attribution, forensic expert testimony and reporting, and social and strategic information forecasting and network design. A related thread of his scholarship targets the theoretical and methodological foundations of artificial intelligence vis-à-vis scientific inference, especially in connection with the theory of measurement.

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A driving force of the research efforts by Pedersen is his deep interest in theoretical and practical problems for reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, especially under conditions owing to incomplete or contradictory information, under conditions of unresolved conflict or competing interests, or under conditions of limited time, cognitive capacities, or computational resources.

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Pedersen has bachelor's degrees in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his Ph.D. in Logic, Computation & Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University for his work in theoretical and applied probability and statistics and has since led interdisciplinary research in positions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.