Startup pitch presented by Aeneas Wiener. Cytora is a real-time geopolitical risk analysis platform that extracts events from open-source intelligence and evaluates these events on their geopolitical impact.

1. Real Time Geopolitical
Risk Analysis
by
@aeneaswiener

2. About
• Aeneas Wiener
• Co-Founder of Cytora
• Background in Computational
Physics / Electromagnetic
Invisibility Cloaking

3. Geopolitical Risk
Tactical: As an airline, tell me
every time there is a protest
outside one of the airports
frequented by my fleet.
Strategic: What were
some of the early warning
signals for the Ukrainian
crisis of 2013?

4. “By 2020 more than 90% of what is
knowable about the world will be in
open source intelligence sources.”

5. Definitions
• Geopolitical Risk
Risk of loss faced by society and businesses as a result of actions
taken by government or private actors such as protesters,
terrorists and activists.
• Event Extraction
Identification of real world events such as protests, suicide attacks
and insurgency, which can be delineated in space and time.

6. Event Extraction
• Problem statement
• Recognise 10+ event types from unstructured text
• Event information augmentation (geo, date)
• Event aggregation (group together mentions of same event)
• Two approaches
• Natural language processing (NLP) based pattern matching
• Machine learning (ML) based bag of words classifier

7. Date Type Lat Lon
04/11/14 Crme N 11° 5' 26'' E 11° 12' 56''
Event Extraction

8. User Interface

10. Stream Processing
• Problem statement
• Billions of sentences per day in real time
• Historical archives (10+ years)
• Context
• Micro-services (web crawling, social media crawling, filtering,
geo tagging, event extraction, entity extraction, translation, event
persisting)

11. Apache Kafka
• Characteristics
• Fault tolerant distributed message log
• Publish/subscribe semantics
• Can extent to queue and workers semantics
• Abstractions
• Topic
• Consumer
• Producer

12. Apache Kafka + Storm
• Characteristics
• Version controlled processing graph (Storm topology)
• Horizontal scaling within Storm cluster (good resource utilisation)
• Streamparse library for integration with Python
• Issues
• Harder to debug than standalone micro-services

13. 9 June
Isis seize control of Mosul
1 June
ISIL 'kills 102-year-old man'
Event Correlation Analysis

14. Event Detection during
2013 Ukraine Crisis
The Cytora platform identified unrest in the East of Ukraine weeks before
mainstream media and other providers.

15. Conclusions
• Events constitute a lens to observe the real world
• NLP / ML offer viable approaches for event extraction
• Apache Kafka + Storm enable event extraction at scale (It would
take a human 5 years to analyse all the documents the Cytora
system processes in a day.)

16. Senior Backend
Engineer
Full-time
Skills:
Python
Distributed Systems
Machine Learning
Full-stack Engineer
Full-time
Skills:
Python
JavaScript
HTML/CSS
Jack Palfrey
Location:
113 Shoreditch High Street
Dev-ops Engineer
Full-time
Skills:
Fabric, Asible or Chef
PostgreSQL/ElasticSearch
Monitoring / log shipping
UNIX administration
Forward Deployed
Engineer
Full-time
Skills:
Python
Project management