Research discoveries are developed into commercial products and services, creating economic and social benefits through the creation of spin-out companies.
City St George's supported the creation and development of the following spin-out companies based on our cutting-edge research and technology.
Heliex Power Ltd
Heliex Power Ltd was created from the research and development activities of Professors Ian Smith and Nikola Stosic at the Compressor Centre within the School of Science & Technology. The company is managed by entrepreneur Dan Wright.
Following a £2m industrial investment in late 2010, Heliex Power designed, manufactured and sell twin screw steam expanders. The steam expander is essentially a novel type of rotary steam engine that will be used to generate electrical power to feed into the electricity supply grid.
This steam engine recovers energy from waste steam produced in industries such as manufacturing and power generation and from geothermal energy.
Possible further applications include:
- Electricity generation
- The oil, gas and chemical industries
- Pharmaceutical manufacturing
- Marine propulsion
- Food and drink processing.
Research has indicated that the energy recoverable by the systems in Europe and North America alone could rival that generated by wind turbines globally.
Thomson Screening Solutions
Thomson Screening Solutions was formed by City St George's, University of London in 2011 to manage the ongoing development and implementation of SchoolScreener® software. The software was developed in the Department of Optometry, led by Professor David Thomson.
Today, the company’s products address both the Healthcare and Education sectors and are beginning to be used in a number of developed and developed countries.
For Health Services, the software manages and automates all requirements for school based screening (vision and hearing) and healthcare programs, according to locality requirements. This includes managing screening, through a laptop, without requiring clinical knowledge and automating all associated administrative processes across Community and Secondary care.
In the UK, SchoolScreener has been used to manage over 800,000 screenings by NHS Trusts. There is also a module for Body Mass Index. The company is developing new products including managing in school immunisation programmes, building on the underlying technology further developed by Thomson Screening.
For schools, a variant of SchoolScreener enables teachers, support staff or volunteers to identify those children who may need help with their eyesight for educational purposes. In the UK, this version is supported by the eyewear retailer Specsavers and is in over 3,000 schools mainly used between ages 8 – 13.
In 2012, the CEO Michael Ter-Berg and COO, Marta Kalas joined Thomson Screening. After a slow start, the company is growing strongly and is profitable.
City Occupational Ltd
Professor John Barbur, from the Applied Vision Research Centre, has developed a novel vision testing system known as Advanced Vision and Optometric Tests (AVOT). AVOT is a self-calibrating system that delivers computer generated tests via a high quality CRT screen that assess different aspects of visual function.
The company, led by Professor Barbur, provides the range of AVOT tests to the market, but in particular one known as Colour Assessment and Diagnosis (CAD), is an accurate method for detecting colour vision deficiencies.
The CAD system was created and developed at City St George's with support from the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) and FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) leading to the spin out company City Occupational which has successfully sold the system in the UK and overseas.
Development of CAD was influenced by occupational health standards, for example, in the aviation sector where certain roles require a good standard of colour vision in order to carry out safety critical tasks. CAD is more sensitive, accurate and reproducible than other widely used tests, which fail to quantify the degree of colour vision loss and hence can't be used to set minimum colour vision standards.
CAD also demonstrates comparable specificity and sensitivity to the current gold standard test method.
Raven Science Ltd
Raven Science is a spin-out company created by Professor of Cyber Security, Professor Tom Chen. The company commercializes Raven, an intelligent software using machine learning to find, classify, and analyse videos online. The software combines advanced machine learning, image object recognition, and crawling.
Raven has been developed in partnership with extremism experts and trained using thousands of videos in order to identify, classify and analyse extremist content.
The underlying technology can be used for other applications than extremism, such as identifying inappropriate content regarding human trafficking and exploitation of children or adults as well as for brand protection and IP infringement.
Raven Science won Mayor of London’s flagship tech scheme, the Civic Innovation Challenge. They are working with the Metropolitan Police Service to tackle extremism online. Their solution will enable members of the public to report online violent extremist content through a smartphone app while remaining anonymous.
City Defend Ltd
City Defend is a spin-out company born from the PhD research of Dr Shahzaib Tahir and his supervisor Prof Rajarajan Muttukrishnan. The research led the cyber security researchers to invention of an intra-cloud scalable and lightweight solution that allows the Client to search over the encrypted data stored in the Cloud.
This state-of-the-art technology is an enterprise solution that gives clients full control over their data resulting in full trust on the system.
The technology provides an API and Cloud Integrated Solution that can be merged with existing Cloud-based technologies and can have a profound impact along different verticals including healthcare, financial, telecommunication, public services, law enforcement and protection sector.
Unlike the existing solutions, this state-of-the-art Searchable Encryption scheme:
- Enhance the security and privacy
- Reduce the network latency
- Reduce the storage overhead
- Provide an intra-cloud scalable and lightweight solution
- Allows enterprises to comply with the GDPR requirements.
City Defend is currently deploying first test beds of the solution with the industrial partners.