by on 8 February 2023 with No Comments

Birmingham City University Partnership

Academic research meets innovative software development: a unique partnership to tackle online safeguarding in schools head-on.

After more than a year of planning, proposing, designing, and collaborating, we’re proud to announce the launch of a new and exciting partnership with Birmingham City University!

As part of Innovate UK’s competitive Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) programme, we’re now working with dedicated linguistics experts to develop new safeguarding technologies and strengthen Senso’s existing AI capabilities in detecting threats to safety. Not only will the partnership enable Senso to help users safeguard more effectively, but it also promises to radically reduce false positive rates and ease the administrative load on schools.

Senso and Birmingham City University - Innovate UK

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Senso already draws on an arsenal of features to help keep children safe online, including web filtering, keyword monitoring and integrated AI for visual threat detection.

Now, backed by the latest research and cutting-edge methodologies from academia, Senso is set to implement the most intelligent and innovative approaches in computational linguistics for digital safeguarding, with a particular emphasis on linguistic violations.

Senso's Partnership with Birmingham City University

Computational Academics Birmingham University

What is Computational Linguistics?

Computational Linguistics, sometimes referred to as Natural Language Processing, is the field that deals with any application of computational approaches to language. As you can imagine, this has a massive range of uses: machine translation, artificial intelligence (AI), search engines, spell-checking, web mining and chatbots. Computational Linguistics is the reason we have tools like Google Translate and ChatGPT.

In our case, we’re using computational and corpus linguistics to develop the most linguistically accurate methods for detecting potentially harmful language online. This will make life easier for Senso’s customers and Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs) and, most importantly, help to keep children safe online.

What This Partnership Means

As part of this ground-breaking academia-industry crossover, Senso and BCU will:

• Develop new algorithms using hand-crafted and intelligent (AI) linguistic rules
• Reduce the number of false positives, resulting in less administration time for schools
• Create high-quality training data for future AI integrations that will improve overall accuracy
• Increase the capability to detect threats, thus improving efficiency and effective protection for staff and pupils in any educational setting

As the Online Safety Bill makes steady progress on the road to regulation, and with growing concerns around online risks to children, this sophisticated linguistic research project could not come at a better time for Senso and its users.

More accurate and effective safeguarding means a greater chance of identifying risks to children and a better experience for those monitoring online behaviour, such as DSLs and assisted monitoring specialists.

Senso and SWGfL Partnership

SWGfL Partnership

“SWGfL are very proud to be partnering with Senso in providing an Assisted Monitoring Service for schools across the UK.

Our team of experts are in place to assist schools with their safeguarding responsibilities, providing support in monitoring online activity across the school community.”

Claire Hayden | Head of Customer Services at Southwest Grid for Learning (SWGfL)

Safeguarding, Our Top Priority

Here at Senso we have made safeguarding our top priority. With the help of our expert academic collaborators our safeguarding tools are set to become more effective and intelligent than ever!

 

GET IN TOUCH SAFEGUARD CLOUD