Government funding is helping with the commercial development of a real-time, rapid response software system to autonomously and efficiently inform on events (such as natural disasters, terrorism, riots) as they unfold.
The system can extract relevant, truthful information from social media, using the public as observers, to supplement existing information systems. Crucially the emphasis is on determining information veracity, to enhance and accelerate tactical decision making. This autonomous filtering of massive open-source data will help optimise the workload of analysts, prioritising data items for attention.
News breaks out on social media more quickly than on other media and in potentially large volumes. Capturing top relevant news items, tagging rumours and identifying the element of the truth of these rumours automatically will deliver a huge value to end users in defence and security, as well as many other sectors.
The innovation could help to swiftly and automatically identify top events/rumours in a certain geographic area, online community, topic, theme or entity; identify the confidence in these rumours; identify participants in these rumours and track the progress of the rumours over time. Gaining an early indication of what is true or false could help provide a quick response for situations such as disaster-relief, terrorist incidents and riots.
The work has been helped by funding from the Centre for Defence Enterprise, part of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). CDE funds novel, high-risk, high-potential-benefit research, working with the broadest possible range of science and technology providers, including academia and small companies, to develop cost-effective capabilities for UK armed forces and national security.
Dr Colin Singleton, Technical Director, CountingLab Ltd said:
“The support from CDE has been fantastic and dramatically improved how we develop our software; in particular how we focus the application towards the defence and security market. CDE have helped introduce us to and form relationships with other companies and individuals working in similar fields. The funding has allowed us to employ more extremely high-calibre staff and develop software that we simply could not afford otherwise.”
Formed in 2010, CountingLab Ltd is a micro SME spinout from the University of Reading’s Centre for the Mathematics of Human Behaviour and is based at the University of Reading. Its core mission is translational data science, creating, translating, developing and applying the latest research techniques from academia into commercial solutions to solve real-world problems.
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