A Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University of Sheffield and disruptive UK tech company, Logically, looks to help users, platforms and organisations combat fake news, misinformation, and problematic content through a diverse ecosystem of tools built by combining advanced AI and human intelligence. 

The Business

Logically was founded in 2017 by Lyric Jain in response to the controversy and polarisation that emerged around the 2016 US election and the EU referendum vote in the UK. Featured along with other UK tech pioneers in the recent Tech Nation report, The Future UK Tech Built, Tech Nation 2021, Jain outlines the company’s ambitions for the future and the reasons for engaging in this KTP.

The Challenge

“The vision of Logically is to be a disruptive leader in the area of news and information media…and to realise this, it is imperative to build intelligent systems that can understand both textual and multimedia content with high accuracy.

Our unique combination of artificial and human intelligence means we can apply scale, accuracy, and nuance to the problem of mis- and disinformation, identifying issues earlier and before they become widespread: cutting edge technology that can monitor, identify, and track content at scale; and highly trained, IFCN-accredited human fact checkers and investigators who can provide complex research and analysis.

Over the last three years, we are proud to have been chosen to protect election interference attacks for three major elections across India and the US, uncovered the operator of the largest QAnon aggregator site, live fact checked the US presidential debates, reached almost 200,000 app downloads, and completed over 20,000 fact checks.”

Logically’s head of data science, Dr Anil Bandhakavi, added:

“With fast evolving multimedia manipulation methods and social media platforms, the spread of manipulated multimedia content is growing, requiring robust solutions. We wish to extend our products to accurately detect fake multimedia content such as images and video.

Logically is aware of the advanced research undertaken by the University of Sheffield and believes that a partnership with such a leading research institute in the area of computer vision and AI can significantly accelerate the process of building the necessary intelligent system. In addition, it will greatly improve the overall quality of the existing technical stack of the company.

Logically believes that the only way it can continue to maintain competitive advantage and provide quality insights and analytics to its clients is by continuously innovating its technology offering, for which such a KTP collaboration becomes very significant in order to further the already existing innovation culture within the company”.

KTPs link innovation-focused businesses with academic expertise. Each partnership is supported by one of KTN’s specialist Knowledge Transfer Advisers – in this case, Trevor Gregory, who commented “The issue of the use of fake news and misinformation as a means of influencing opinion is a global problem, and one that can have huge societal and economic consequences. This KTP project will develop and deploy tools using AI methods and enhanced video tracking capabilities to counteract this growing influence”.

Leading the academic team at Sheffield is Dr Charith Abhayaratne who is part of a research group which focuses on signal processing and machine learning (M/L) for automated understanding of visual content (computer vision), visual media security and video coding.

Commenting on the partnership, Dr Charity Abhayaratne said,  “This Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) is an exciting opportunity for us to share our knowledge on visual content security and machine learning and support the development of commercial solutions for combating misinformation in online visual content. There is a growing need for efficient and robust commercial products for the detection and localisation of manipulated images and video, and we look forward to collaborating with Logically to develop innovative solutions that can bring wider societal benefits.”

For more information on Logically, please visit https://www.logically.ai

This partnership received funding from InnovateUK.

News story published here.

Funding competitions for KTP and Management KTP are open throughout the year. More information here.

For more about KTP at University of Sheffield: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/business/support-business/ktp

For more about KTP in general: https://www.ktp-uk.org/

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