Welcome!

The Vortex Foundation was founded in 2011 with the aim of exploring new theoretical, methodological, and technological tools to understand complex social phenomena, such as criminal networks. Over the years, the foundation has analyzed a variety of cases involving the trafficking of humans, organs, wildlife, gold, precious woods, weapons, narcotics, and money, among other things. These cases always involve corruption and institutional cooptation at their core.

With the advancement of Artificial Intelligence and Vorisoma, the suite for Criminal Network Analysis, the Vortex Foundation and SciVortex present the Automatic Robotic for Criminal Observation Network, ARCON.

ARCON is a robot designed to search, download, read, systematize, and extract semantic entities from criminal networks. It generates Criminal Network Graphs of illicit flows that sustain global criminal markets. Its goal is to identify global hotspots of transnational crime and corruption.

ARCON monitors real-time sources from reliable international media outlets. The first stage focuses on reading, systematizing, and visualizing sources by The Guardian.