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Open call

BAE Systems Applied Intelligence Pitch Day: Accelerating the transformation and optimisation of data

Open date: Thursday 20 February 2020   Close date: Friday 3 April 2020

For this innovation challenge BAE Systems, in partnership with Digital Catapult, is looking for established startups and scaleups to pitch cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions that address challenges for financial services and government.

BAE Systems Applied Intelligence is a large technology services business that helps nations, governments and businesses around the world defend themselves against cybercrime, reduce risk in the connected world, comply with regulation and transform business operations.

The Opportunity

BAE Systems is exploring innovative digital solutions that can deliver cost and time savings whilst also providing a better service for its customers.

Working in collaboration with Digital Catapult, BAE Systems will explore how machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions can help improve data access and optimisation for financial services and government.

This open call is for startups and scaleups within the innovation ecosystem to work with and explore two challenges with BAE Systems:

Challenge one: Data access:

This challenge seeks to accelerate the process of data understanding and transformation which takes place when BAE Systems’ products and solutions are deployed into its customers. This challenge focuses specifically on customers within the financial services (for example banks, insurance companies) and government sectors, and their need to onboard and update large volumes of data from disparate sources. These sources can be both within its customers and also from external third party sources which are used for analytics and insights.

BAE Systems seeks to reduce the time and effort it takes to understand, transform and ingest complex datasets, and then map this data to predefined schemas.

BAE Systems would like to investigate tools that allow them to quickly onboard new data sources by understanding the structure of the data, how to effectively transform it and then map it to a schema/interface that the BAE Systems solutions use. This scenario can often include accessing legacy systems, processing multiple datasets inherited via business acquisitions and managing large scale changes created by modern technology advancements.

Benefits of such a tool could include reduced time and effort for onboarding new sources, reduced time to identify changes in data source structure and increased confidence in the usability of data.

Challenge two: Optimisation:

This challenge seeks to support improvements in the overall performance of a team of analysts or investigators, tasked with the job of triaging and investigating alerts/risk indicators, and working with their queue of cases.

As an example, this improvement could be measured by reducing the amount of time a case takes to resolve – increasing the accuracy of decisions taken, and reducing the time it takes to bring new investigators/analysts/case workers up to speed.

BAE Systems aims to provide its analysts and investigators with proactive support during the evaluation and decision-making process, by having a system that learns from the most experienced investigators in the team and passes on tips and advice, for instance suggested next actions. The final solution should aim to reduce the cases unnecessarily escalated, improve the effectiveness of investigation and/or reduce time taken by a team’s most experienced case investigators to train more junior team members.

Startups and scaleups that can answer the following questions would be relevant for this challenge:

  • How can information be gathered alongside appropriate insights and recommendations to increase investigator productivity, and help them take optimal steps during an investigation?
  • How can an effective solution help to accelerate and increase the efficiency of the triage and investigation process?

Why get involved?

In addition to working on a highly focused challenge set by BAE Systems this challenge will provide:

  • Unique opportunity to discuss the product in depth with key stakeholders from across a British multinational defence, security, and aerospace company
  • Receive valuable feedback from BAE Systems business units, and potential end users within BAE Systems
  • Selected companies will have the opportunity to meet and discuss their proposed approach to tackling one or both of the challenges
  • Please note, there is no direct commercial opportunity being awarded as a result of participating in this process. However, BAE Systems are keen to progress with a company should they spot a high level of potential

Who should apply?

Startups and scaleups that are in the process of developing new cutting-edge technologies, and are interested in working with data that is managed by government, insurance, and financial services.

Technologies that could be relevant to this open call are:

  • Cyber security
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Data analytics
  • Data optimisation

Additional detail

Applicants should ensure at least one person per company is available to spend the day in London on 14 May from 09:30 to 17:30.

Please only send member(s) of your team who understand the technology or product capability in depth as they will need to describe its inner workings to the customer.

Applications will be judged on the following criteria:

Understanding of and response to the brief

We’re looking for clear evidence that applicants are able to respond to the challenges outlined in the open call and that they have understood what BAE Systems would like to achieve. We are interested in those that can share how they would approach the challenges outlined and those that can work with them to mutual benefit.

Relevant industry experience

We are interested in applications which display relevant technology and industry experience. We will also consider appropriate cross-industry knowledge and learning that can be applied from other sectors.