Working with Discovering Safety can open doors for start-up companies and bring them together with new clients. That’s the view of Kyle Dupont CEO of Ohalo, the first winner of our Safetytech Accelerator Challenge. Four years on from winning the challenge in 2019, Ohalo’s data anonymisation technology is making work safer on both sides of the Atlantic, and the company’s pipeline is healthy.
Work on the challenge has led to an ongoing relationship with HSE, new clients in the UK and Ireland construction sectors and an ever-growing list of sectors we operate in including oil and gas, finance and government,
Kyle Dupont, CEO of Ohalo
Where tech meets safety
For those developing new data technologies, Discovering Safety can provide a sandbox where the laboratory meets the real world, to explore how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence can benefit safety at work.
Working with us also has benefits for companies in safety-critical sectors such as construction, transport and energy. Getting involved with Discovering Safety can provide a secure environment for investigating the potential of new technologies.
In 2019 the Safetytech Accelerator Challenge was created as a vehicle for bringing the worlds of data tech and traditional industry together. With funding from Lloyd’s Register Foundation, the Accelerator has offered winners the chance to take part in a three-month pilot project (worth £25k in research time) with Discovering Safety’s data scientists and partners from safety-critical industries.
Working together and learning from the things that work well (as well as those that don’t), we’re developing intelligent solutions that are creating a safer world of work.
Ohalo’s Data X-Ray
Ohalo’s work has huge potential in removing one of the major barriers to sharing sensitive safety data – the need to carefully anonymise it by redacting. This has historically been a prohibitively labour-intensive task, fraught with the potential for error. Ohalo’s technology cuts through mounds of documents, anonymising them reliably, accurately and speedily.
The need to anonymise data has been a major obstacle to the creation of the large datasets needed to provide HSE with the insights that lead to safety improvements. Ohalo’s project saw 600,000 records anonymised (with 99% accuracy), in an incredible 1.4 days compared to 12.5 years. The trial has led to a successful ongoing collaboration between Ohalo and HSE.
Back in 2019, HSE put in an industrial challenge to Lloyd’s Register’s Safetytech Accelerator, centred around the challenges of auto-redacting large volumes of GDPR sensitive research datasets.
The principal driver was the aspiration to promote sharing of health and safety data to stimulate innovation – and the major barrier posed by the risk of breaching data protection legislation. Ohalo won the challenge with their pitch to use their proprietary software platform, Data X-Ray, as a starting point. We ran a pilot project later in 2019 which successfully demonstrated proof of concept.”
Steve Naylor, HSE Senior Scientist and Data Specialist
Ohalo set up a Data X-Ray server in HSE’s environment to analyse the RIDDOR reports. The server ingested the data to identify sensitive personal data and redacted it. HSE data scientists worked with Ohalo to identify any sensitive information that had not been redacted. When the HSE team spotted any errors such as false positives, the Data X- Ray enabled them to update the models with example training information for a better result next time.
Next steps and new clients
Now working on both sides of the Atlantic with companies in construction, finance, oil and gas and many others, Ohalo’s involvement with Discovering Safety helped it expand its client base and further develop the Data X-ray.
We felt from the beginning that our technology could drive real value in anonymising sensitive data from the safety and accident reports that HSE manages, so that the anonymised records can more easily be used by third parties to reduce accidents and fatalities in the UK. However, it was a fairly high-risk project and so the Safetytech Accelerator was the perfect vehicle for HSE and Ohalo teams to work together, in iteratively improving the algorithms to get to a point where HSE could use the data.
Work on the challenge led to an ongoing partnership with two construction companies based in the UK and Ireland, Costain and Wood Group. It opened new doors and allowed us to meet new clients and expand our reach,
Kyle Dupont, co-founder and CEO of Ohalo
Having proved the concept on HSE data, Ohalo is using the same data anonymisation tools in a continuing relationship with Wood Group and Costain. Wood Group were collating hundreds of thousands of safety data records from seven construction firms. They used Ohalo’s Data X-ray to redact the records automatically, so they could be securely shared and used to learn lessons from.
We’re also working with banks, governments, law enforcement agencies and safety-critical industries such as the oil and gas sectors on redaction, discovery, classification, and records and retention management.
Kyle Dupont
Developing the product
As well as expanding its client base, working with Discovering Safety has also allowed Ohalo to develop its key product, the Data X-ray.
It gave us a safe springboard which allowed us to develop the Data X-ray’s capabilities further. “Starting from a base of 100,000 words, it can now redact, to a high degree of accuracy, millions of words per second”.
Kyle Dupont
Ohalo’s work with Discovering Safety has been a springboard to a future where learning can be extracted easily from massive quantities of safety data, which will lead to the most important outcome of all – saving lives and preventing injuries in the workplace. As Kyle says:
“The great work we did between us will hopefully change the lives of many workers for the better.”
If you’re a start-up tech company or a company working in a safety-critical area, and you’d like to find out more about working with Discovering Safety, contact: discoveringsafety@hse.gov.uk
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