Innovation Hub

Start-ups and SMEs to demonstrate their offers to industry and the military at DSEI's Innovation Hub.

Defence and Security Equipment International is a biennial platform for the display of defence and security equipment and services from around the world. September 2019 marks DSEI's 20th year, and an ideal opportunity to showcase the developments and innovations that are revolutionising and modernising the defence and security sectors.

The DSEI Innovation Hub provides a platform for start-ups and SMEs to demonstrate emerging, forward-facing technologies and products to global militaries and industry. The Innovation Theatre within the Hub will allow for practical demonstrations of the latest developments on offer.

Exhibitors in the Hub include ESROE, which is displaying the world's smallest and most affordable radar electronic support measures (ESM) system, its MicroESM. This is a key sensor for major military platforms, providing passive detection and identification of military and civilian radar signals. The MicroESM provides a radar ESM capability for platforms for which similar systems have previously been too large or power-consuming, including in drones, unmanned vessels, soldier-borne sensors, and armoured and unarmoured vehicles.

Jon Roe, CEO of ESROE, said: ''The Innovation Hub provides us, as a micro-SME, a cost-effective way of making the most of DSEI to showcase our innovative technology. We will be exhibiting our production system for the first time and we believe that DSEI will give us a worldwide audience.''

HAELO will display its Enterprise Control software, which works to bridge gaps in situational awareness and alert users to threats and issues, allowing them to maintain full alertness and control in complex and fast-paced project environments. It had seen previous success in large-scale enterprise operations, and following talks with the UK Armed Forces, HAELO is hoping to see this technology find new application opportunities in military settings.

HAELO managing director Michael O'Connor said: ''HAELO is influenced by how military commanders gather intelligence, make decisions and take action in a layered defence environment and how this can be applied to industry. Exhibiting at DSEI gives HAELO the opportunity to showcase its methodology and software product to a global audience of influential military and industry players.''

The Hub will also welcome Phonexia, which specialises in the development of speech technologies to assist government agencies, police forces and forensic experts in speech analysis. It will be launching two new products at DSEI − Phonexia Screen, which allows intelligence agencies to search for speakers and content within large audio recordings, and the latest version of its speaker identification technology called DeepEmbeddings, the world's first commercially available voice biometric engine using exclusively deep neural networks to produce swift and accurate results. This technology can identify unique features to map individuals' voices directly to their unique fixed-length records called 'voice-prints'.

Phonexia vice president of marketing, Miroslav Jirku, said: ''At DSEI we will present our unique speech technologies and our new Phonexia Screen in order to attract the UK market. Until recently we haven't been very active on that market but we are experiencing very good traction, and with our presence at DSEI we believe we can accelerate our growth even more.'' Also present will be BOXARR, whose platform builds dynamic software models to create a digital replica of an organisation in order to analyse and optimise operational process efficiency, helping to quickly and effectively understand and visualise complex data and identify inefficiencies and risks.

BOXARR vice president for Global Alliances, Fraser Hamilton, said: ''DSEI is important to us as it is the largest defence and security event and opens new opportunities for us to meet industry leaders and decision makers and hear exclusive content. The fact that this edition will see increased nontraditional SME attendance means that defence industry needs innovative thinking and better solutions which can be achieved in a shorter time frame.''