Thursday, October 30, 2025

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• Wildlife trafficking within a web of organized crime

• Outcomes from the Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs portfolio review

• Frank Tompa and colleagues win best paper award
• Learn how to start making change with those you’d rather cancel

 Wildlife trafficking within a web of organized crime

A veterinarian at a wildlife rehabilitation facility in South Africa picks up an orphaned Cape pangolin whose mother was taken by poachers. Pangolins are the most-trafficked mammal in the world. (GettyImages/Neil Aldridge).

A news release from the Media Relations team.

A new study reveals that the illegal wildlife trade — worth billions annually — is deeply connected to other forms of organized crime, including arms dealing, drug trafficking and human smuggling. 

By mapping these criminal intersections, researchers found that tackling the illegal trade in animals and plants requires understanding how it converges with other serious crimes. This approach can help law enforcement agencies focus on the key actors driving these global networks, rather than low-level offenders.

The illegal wildlife trade has wide-reaching implications for society globally. According to the study led by the University of Waterloo, learning how this activity intersects with other crimes can boost the efficiency of anti-trafficking interventions by concentrating on key players in large networks.

“Law enforcement agencies in South Africa, Hong Kong and Canada have identified links between this and other major crimes, which shows that wildlife trafficking is more than an environmental issue,” said Dr. Michelle Anagnostou, now a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, and who led this research as part of her PhD at Waterloo. “It is a complex, high-stakes criminal problem that affects public health, biodiversity and human security.”

Leopard skin in a traditional wildlife market, South Africa. (Dr. Michelle Anagnostou/University of Waterloo) 

While South Africa and Hong Kong are known hotspots for the illegal wildlife trade and part of this study, the researchers wanted to include Canada as well. 

“Canada might not be the first country people think of in relation to illegal wildlife trade, yet our research finds it is occurring from coast to coast,” Anagnostou said. “This study is unique because it shows that even high-income countries also experience this interconnectedness of criminal activity involving the illegal trade of plants and animals.”

Seized wolf skin in Canada. (Credit: Dr. Michelle Anagnostou/University of Waterloo)

The next phase of the research will focus on understanding how best to implement anti-money laundering interventions to counter wildlife trafficking in Canada. Following the money trail allows law enforcement to determine the key players that are operating at the top level internationally and profiting the most from the exploitation of wildlife.

The research team used innovative methods of data collection and access to law enforcement and intelligence experts, who often cannot publicly share opinions or experiences. 
 
"This study is a prime example of the kind of research that can inform policy with real-world experience to solve a global problem,” said Dr. Brent Doberstein, a professor in the Faculty of Environment at Waterloo and Dr. Anagnostou’s doctoral supervisor. “This work promises to both extend what we know about the complex world of illegal wildlife trade and help in designing interventions to reduce the extent of this crime.”

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and UWaterloo funded the research. Other authors on the paper include Dr. Derek Armitage from Waterloo, Dr. Peter Stoett from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Dr. Ashwell Glasson from the Southern African Wildlife College in South Africa.

The study, Disentangling and demystifying converging crimes and illegal wildlife trade in South Africa, Hong Kong, and Canada, appears in the Journal of Economic Criminology.

Outcomes from the Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs portfolio review

Frank Tompa and colleagues win best paper award

Andrew Kane, Frank Tompa, and Besat Kassaie.

This article was originally published on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website.

Postdoctoral researcher Besat Kassaie, Dr. Andrew Kane and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Frank Tompa have won a Best Paper Award at DocEng’25, the 25^th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering. Their paper, Exploiting Query Reformulation and Reciprocal Rank Fusion in Math-Aware Search Engines, introduces new methods that improve how search engines handle mathematical queries.

“Congratulations to Besat, Andrew and Frank,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Their work demonstrates how combining large language models for query reformulation along with reciprocal rank fusion can substantially improve mathematical information retrieval, achieving far better performance than relying on the original query alone.”

Besat Kassaie is a postdoctoral researcher working with Professor Renée J. Miller. Her research interests focus primarily on data systems. She is particularly interested in challenges related to data intelligence, information extraction, unstructured data quality, and information retrieval. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Professor Tompa, introduced and addressed the problem of updatability in document databases.

Andrew Kane received his PhD in Computer Science in 2014 under the supervision of Professor Tompa. His research spans search engine space–time performance, mathematical search, the Janus search engine for locating Manipulus Florum quotation variants in digital documents, disk write latency, and the design and implementation of distributed systems.

Frank Tompa is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus. His teaching and research interests span the fields of data structures and databases, particularly the design of text management systems suitable for maintaining large reference texts — including the Oxford English Dictionary — as well as, large, heterogeneous text collections.

About this award-winning research

This research addresses the challenge of retrieving answers to questions in mathematical community question answering platforms such as Mathematics Stack Exchange. Unlike conventional text-based queries, mathematical queries often include extensive context, detailed elaborations and distracting asides, all of which make it difficult for traditional search systems to match queries with relevant answers. Traditional retrieval techniques are efficient, but they rely heavily on exact word matching and usually lack contextual understanding.

To overcome these limitations, the research team investigated how large language models (LLMs) can assist in reformulating queries by selecting, augmenting, or re-weighting query terms. They focused on the Answer Retrieval for Questions on Math benchmarks, developed as part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, to evaluate their approach. They investigated several query reformulation strategies, including using LLM responses to refine search terms, concatenating LLM responses with the original query, and re-weighting terms based on their presence or absence in the LLM output. The study also employed reciprocal rank fusion to combine the strengths of multiple reformulation methods into a single ranking strategy.

Experimental results showed that combining strategies significantly outperformed using the original question alone. In two experiments with real-world mathematical questions, combining four strategies for term selection, term augmentation, and term re-weighting improved nDCG’@1000 by 5 per cent, MAP’@1000 by 7 per cent, and P’@10 by more than 9 per cent — three evaluation metrics used in information retrieval — over using the question as given.

By showing how LLM-assisted query reformulation and score fusion improve the effectiveness of math-aware search engines, the study provides new tools to explore repositories of mathematical knowledge.

While exploratory, the findings suggest promising avenues for future work. The results provide insight into the effects of various ways to incorporate the responses from LLMs as part of query reformulation. As next steps, the researchers suggest investigating whether these results also apply more broadly to other mathematical corpora and query sets, as well as investigating how to determine which properties of a query leads to one rewriting strategy outperforming the others. If these approaches are possible, a hybrid, per-query strategy could lead to even greater improvements in mathematical information retrieval.

Excellence building on excellence: This award-winning paper builds on Choosing Math Features for BM25 Ranking with Tangent-L, which received the Best Paper Award at DocEng’18, the 18^th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, as well as on Dowsing for Math Answers, a Best of Labs paper presented at CLEF 2021, the 12^th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.

To learn more about the research on which this article is based, please see Besat Kassaie, Andrew Kane, Frank Wm. Tompa. Exploiting Query Reformulation and Reciprocal Rank Fusion in Math-Aware Search Engines. In ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2025 (DocEng ’25), September 2–5, 2025, Nottingham, United Kingdom.

Learn how to start making change with those you’d rather cancel

A message from Organizational and Human Development (OHD).

For a Keeping Well at Work special virtual event, join us for an interactive morning with guest keynote speaker Loretta J. Ross to learn about the concept of calling people in, from her recent book, as a helpful tool when conflict arises.

Participants will explore “how to start making change with those you’d rather cancel,” and ways we, as a society and as a campus, can incorporate new practices of reducing harm through conversations focused on shared values and connection, rather than punishment.

Event details

• Calling In Those You’d Rather Cancel with Loretta J. Ross
• Wednesday, November 26
• 10:30 a.m. - 12 noon
• Microsoft Teams Town Hall; In-person viewing room in EC5 1111
• Moderated discussion with Jazz Fitzgerald, Manager, Student Equity, Community and Leadership Development
• Live Q&A
• Open to all Waterloo employees

Register on Portal to hear from this influential activist and scholar and for a chance to win copies of her book on November 26! Questions about this event can be directed to ohd@uwaterloo.ca.