Liopa selected for DASA behavioural analytics initiative
Belfast tech startup, Liopa, has been selected to take part in a new Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) initiative, which is investigating how behavioural analytics can improve understanding and measurement, help make confident and ethical predictions and guide better judgements on interventions for defence and security.
DASA, a cross-Government organisation, finds and funds exploitable innovation to support UK defence and security quickly and effectively and support UK prosperity. Its vision is for the UK to maintain its strategic advantage over its adversaries through the most innovative defence and security capabilities in the world.
Liopa will leverage its existing Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) technology which deciphers speech from analysis of Lip Movements for activities such as key word spotting. The existing VSR engine takes, as input, video of a subject(s) speaking and using advanced AI-Based techniques, predicts most likely utterances. Liopa will adapt its technology to identify utterances of specified words in uploaded video content, where audio is either not present or of very poor quality.
“This competition set out to find and fund a wide range of exciting and diverse proposals to advance Behaviour Analytics capabilities for the Defence and Security sector. A large number of high quality proposals were received and we are delighted to offer Liopa this contract through the Defence and Security Accelerator,” commented Richard Leigh, Influence Programme Manager, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.
Liam McQuillan, Founder and CEO, Liopa, said: “This represents a considerable stamp of approval. We were able to show how our idea will work, and how it fits in with a larger ecosystem and other data analytics feeds. We’ve the relevant Artificial Intelligence expertise and capability inhouse, and we’ll also be looking to grow our team of experts in Belfast.”
The company was spun out of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 2015. Since then Liopa has been onward developing and commercialising research carried out within the university into the use of Lip Movements (visemes) in Speech Recognition. The company is leveraging QUB’s capabilities in the area of speech, speaker and dialogue modelling to position Liopa as a leading independent provider of viseme-based VSR technology.