Pembroke team 'ConflictScanner' awarded £5,000 for winning 'Best Postgraduate Idea' at All-Innovate final!

We are delighted to announce that Pembroke team ‘ConflictScanner’ won ‘Best Postgraduate Idea’ prize at last night’s inaugural All-Innovate Competition at The Oxford Foundry! All-innovate is an inter-collegiate idea competition offering students a chance to pitch their entrepreneurial ideas, with a chance to win a share of £20,000.

Team members Alex Barnes (Pembroke, DPhil International Development, 2017), Yohan Iddawela (LSE PhD student), Sebastian Mueller (ConflictScanner CTO), Sam Watts (ConflictScanner – Legal Officer) and Marguerite Tong (Masters, Department of Computer Science), were awarded £5,000 for their entrepreneurial idea.

ConflictScanner is a navigation app used to aid individuals, charities and businesses to travel across conflict zones using the safest possible route. The team offer a free version providing users with a timeline of recent events, safe route navigation, the ability to report an incident, and an SOS feature which allows users to call emergency contacts from within the application. They also offer a more sophisticated, paid version which will provides in-depth analysis of historical trends of violence, more accurate route-planning adjusted with time of day (certain times experience higher incidents of violence than others) and time of year, as well as a predictive model which uses big data to predict when and where attacks are more likely to occur. Their software is easily accessible both through mobile and laptop.

Alex Barnes, Co-Founder of ConflictScanner commented 'Yohan and I conceived of ConflictScanner following our experiences in Afghanistan, where we saw that people doing vital humanitarian and development work had very little information to help themselves stay safe. I deployed to Afghanistan in 2013, 2014 and 2015, while Yohan was based there in 2017 and 2018. We both saw first-hand that charities and international workers often only had a limited understanding of their security environment, putting lives at risk. We wanted to introduce recent innovations in text analysis and machine learning to provide a low-cost platform to improve the safety of people and businesses in conflict zones. Our vision is zero – zero international worker casualties in conflict zones every year.

We are extremely grateful for the support that Pembroke College gave to us throughout the process, especially Jeremy Bennett, who was always generous with his time and gave us excellent feedback.’

A massive congratulations to the team and well done to all who participated!