Students and academics from the Department of Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London have launched a new commercial Artificial Intelligence safety spin-out called Seclea.
The new product was facilitated by a range of support initiatives from across the university, as well as the CyberASAP and ICURe programmes.
Nurtured under the guidance of Professor Konstantinos Markantonakis, of Royal Holloway’s Department of Information Security, Seclea is a digital platform that enables organisations to implement a responsible AI governance framework. It ensures AI applications are fair, explainable, accountable and in compliance with relevant regulations.
Many Advanced Machine Learning algorithms are posed with number of challenges including fairness, transparency, accountability, auditability and trackability. Seclea’s platform aims to ensure that all actions taken during the design, development and deployment of an AI application are tracked, documented and validated to be in line with both ethical and legal requirements.
Seclea received early support through Royal Holloway’s Smart Card and Internet of Things Security Centre, and the Department of Computer Science’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity (UROP) initiative. UROP projects are individual research projects conducted under the supervision of academics, often in collaboration with other members of their research groups. They allow undergraduate students to experience research first-hand and provide training in relevant research skills.
Seclea is co-conceived and led by Dr Raja Naeem Akram, formerly of Royal Holloway’s Department of Information Security, who said: “Royal Holloway has an immense talent pool of students at every level that can perform amazing research and build innovative companies. Building a spinout company, and especially a team, is not an easy task and we were given space, time and support by Professor Markantonakis and Royal Holloway’s Research & Innovation hub. This support is the reason behind our success.”
Professor Markantonakis, commented: “It has been a great privilege to be involved in the inception and commercialisation journey of Seclea. The ISG-Smart Card and IoT Security Centre fulfils one of its key priorities of empowering Royal Holloway students, through a high-quality collaboration environment, in providing solutions to real world challenges.”
“In this particular instance, student talent from Computer Science along with the pioneering and hard work of project lead, Dr Raja Naeem Akram, enabled us to successfully commercialise our proposition. We have also received valuable support from Royal Holloway’s Research & Innovation hub through their commitment and real world commercialisation experience.”
The Seclea team has successfully raised nearly half a million pounds in investment to date, and is currently productising their lab-based innovation into a commercial product.
More information on Seclea is available here.
