Commercial exploitation of our research
A number of companies build on the commercial success of our research work. Here are some examples:
Agena
Ltd is a leading provider of decision support and risk management software for critical and business systems and for a range of major clients, including QinetiQ, National Air Traffic Services, Philips, and Motorola. The company's Chief Executive Officer, Prof Norman Fenton, and the Chief Technology Officer, Dr Martin Neil, are internationally renowned members of the Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis group at the Department. Their pioneering work in applications of Bayesian nets is being applied, through Agena as well as through numerous EPSRC and EU funded research projects, in many high-stake and safety-critical environments.
Aprorie Ltd is a spinout company of the Department, commercialising the research of the Information Retrieval research group. Apriorie provides cutting-edge, patented technology to build advanced, customised and, at the same time, highly efficient and effective search systems. Apriorie's platform technology is based on a semi-structured probabilistic framework for knowledge representation and information retrieval with wide applications, such as sales enhancement for e-commerce/finance service portals, search detection for computer crime in law enforcement, as well as patient management in medical fields. Apriorie is actively working with several early technology adaptors, including online-banks and insurance companies, the BBC, Credit Suisse First Boston, Computer Crime Centre, as well as research institutes across Europe.
Safehouse Technologies Ltd develops software products from Computer Vision research for the surveillance and facility management sectors under the brand name Clarity Visual Intelligence. These software products enable organisations to more efficiently manage facilities and significantly enhance security by automating common surveillance tasks. The Clarity Visual Surveillance software uses advanced image analysis techniques to detect and segment activities and interesting events, identify and track objects and record information captured by surveillance cameras in real-time. Artificial intelligence is used to prioritise these observations so that, once correctly configured and trained, the software can automatically trigger alerts for user-defined events and bring the most important security issues immediately to the attention of security staff.
