Blog Article
This project is a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between BCU and leading safeguarding company Renato Software Ltd, developers of the cloud-based classroom management software Senso.cloud.
Senso.cloud monitors what students type on school devices in order to identify keyword violations that signal potential safeguarding issues (e.g. ‘bomb’, ‘kill myself’) so that the school’s Designated Safeguarding Lead can intervene and protect children.
The KTP seeks to enhance Senso.cloud’s keyword violation detection by drawing upon BCU’s world-leading expertise in Corpus Linguistics: the automated analysis of large textual databases to find patterns and trends in language use. The project is funded through the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) programme.
This groundbreaking collaboration is of vital importance in an increasingly hostile online environment. The Department for Education requires that UK schools implement filtering and monitoring software to “block harmful and inappropriate content without unreasonably impacting teaching and learning”. Many filtering and monitoring systems use ‘keyword monitoring’ to track language use on online devices to identify specific words or phrases (e.g. ‘bomb’) that correlate with specific forms of risk (e.g. violence). However, this poses some issues: filtering and monitoring software tends only to raise concerns if there is a direct match to a keyword, and the keywords themselves are often isolated from their context(s) of use. This can lead to ‘false positives’, where a keyword match raises an automatic safeguarding concern (e.g. ‘bomb’) even if the use of the keyword was innocuous (e.g. ‘bath bomb’).
This project is improving the context sensitivity and overall accuracy of the monitoring system, thus detecting a wider range of threats and protecting more children from online harms, including abuse, bullying, extremism, sexism, and self-harm.
Project Aims:
- Reduce false positives when detecting threats to the safety of children and young people.
- Enhance keyword detection to flag and prevent a wider range of threats.
- Broaden Renato Software’s capabilities for linguistic analysis.
- Develop KTP Associate’s skills in a non-academic environment.
- Widen the reach and significance of impact generated by research in linguistics at BCU.
The project aligns closely with BCU’s emphasis on the STEAM agenda, which places the Arts at the centre of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines to foster innovative solutions to a range of commercial and societal challenges.
Project Team:
- Professor Andrew Kehoe(Academic Lead)
- Dr Charlotte-Rose Kennedy (Associate)
- Dr Mark McGlashan (Academic Supervisor)
Project Impacts:
Impacts on the company:
- Increase revenue and customer satisfaction based on the success and sophistication of linguistic advancements.
- Create a dedicated linguistics team within the business.
- Establish position as the most linguistically accurate safeguarding tool in the EdTech industry.
Impacts on BCU:
- Produce a research case study about safeguarding issues which will be used within BCU for teaching and learning.
- Develop future KTP projects with Renato which build on the success of the current project.
- Create opportunities for BCU students to do work placements at Renato.
Impacts on Associate:
- Gain practical experience translating linguistic expertise into research-informed tools in a corporate context.
- Attain new skills in computer science, programming, and algorithm design.
- Disseminate academic and non-academic publications based on the findings of the KTP.
Impacts on Society:
- Keep children and young people in schools as safe as possible from online harms.
- Save time for schools and increase their capacity to quickly intervene with safeguarding risks.
Contact:
For more information on the research project, please contact Andrew.Kehoe@bcu.ac.uk