As we touched upon in our latest blog, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships – how combining minds leads to better outcomes, we believe KTP’s are a brilliant way to help businesses innovate and grow, by partnering with academics and researchers to share insight, knowledge, technology and skills.
We wanted to take this opportunity to delve a little deeper into the process of how SVGC uses Knowledge Transfer Partnerships in a unique way to deliver novel research and solutions which can deliver rapid and long-term benefit for our customers.
Many hands (or minds) make for light (innovative) work
At SVGC, collaboration is our bedrock. We’re passionate about working towards common objectives, to share resources and skills and work together to mitigate overall risks throughout the public sector. We create alliances that develop and expand knowledge across the sector for long term gain, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are key to this.
Through partnering with universities to deliver our KTP’s we are able to utilise existing academic knowledge, access state of the art thinking and have our innovation ideas meticulously researched and peer reviewed, giving our solutions and outcomes some serious academic rigour.
In return, the universities we partner with are able to tap into our bank of knowledge and experience sourced from over 25 years’ working within business, digital, security and military industries.
The result of this combined knowledge? State of the art, research and technologies that deliver innovation and transformative change for our customers that are fully tested, analysed and reviewed by experts within the field.
Bridging the gap to deliver research that’s never been done before
If you’re a techy, like us, you will have heard about machine learning, as Oxford Dictionary describes it:
“The use and development of computer systems that are able to learn and adapt without following explicit instructions, by using algorithms and statistical models to analyse and draw inferences from patterns in data.”
Through our previous KTP with the University of Glasgow we researched and developed new ways in which machine learning could be used and applied to deliver efficiency and risk reduction in Digital Sensitivity Review (DSR) using state of the art machine learning.
Through experimentation, we were able to upload decisions made in the past by reviewers and create guidance that could be understood by a computer. When this was applied to current records, it helped guide and speed up the review process, alleviating pressures on highly skilled Sensitivity Reviewers and reduced risk by highlighting areas of known sensitivity. The introduction of robotic applications also further reduced the risk of human error by standardising repeatable business processes.
Our latest KTP, partnering with Loughborough University, is set to be a game changer, investing in a new area of research that has never been attempted before. Together SVGC and Loughborough University are planning to delve deeper into the field of “lifelong machine learning” and determine how that can be applied to achieve a step change in future Sensitivity Reviews.
Lifelong machine learning (or lifelong learning) is an advanced machine learning model that learns continuously, and has the ability to “forget” as well as “learn” – critical to ensure the sensitivity review is based on the correct and current context.
Due to the nature of the tasks involved in digital sensitivity reviews there is a strong need to develop systems that are agile and adapt continually with the changing landscapes of the public sector. For example, something that was once classified as sensitive within a year or two may be deemed as non-sensitive. The computer systems in place need to be able to adapt to these changes to enable a more cost efficient and accurate process.
Loughborough University have a strong track record of knowledge and solution focussed research in fields including lifelong machine learning and are specialists within this emerging field. SVGC reached out to Loughborough and we have formed a strong bond – finding the team highly collaborative and industry oriented. The partnership is already delivering and we are enormously excited by this ground breaking and vital research, developing this area of technology that will enable us to deliver the most state of the art technology solutions for our customers.
