Raven Science, a spin-out company created by Professor of Cyber Security, Professor Tom Chen, to find, classify and analyse extremist videos online, has emerged winner of the Mayor of London’s 2020 Civic Innovation Challenge for countering violent extremism online.

Raven Science beat out over 120 entrants to win the competition, and will receive a contract valued at £40k in order to pilot a smartphone app that will allow the public to refer the police to online extremist materials.

The app is based on an anonymous messaging protocol invented at City.

Through the Cyber ASAP, an Innovate UK academic start-up accelerator programme, Professor Chen has developed the minimum viable product, Raven, an intelligent web crawling system for finding, identifying, and analysing extremist videos using advanced machine learning techniques.

Professor Chen is grateful to Brigita Jurisic and Powlami Ghosh, in City’s Research & Enterprise Office, for their assistance in securing this win.

The Mayor of London’s 2020 Civic Innovation Challenge is delivered in partnership with Microsoft and the Social Tech Trust.
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