ICON’s CEO Ian Castillo gave an interview for CounteR Project’s sixth newsletter. Mr. Castillo reflects on our project’s main advantages in terms of technology for facilitating the work of LEAs and the fight against radicalisation. ICON is a leading digital transformation company that works within the financial services and public sectors.
Below is a summary of the interview. The full text can be found here.
The participation of ICON Studios in the CounteR Project’s consortium not only improves the firm’s portfolio from a skills perspective, but it also adds an important social factor which we thrive on – in this case, creating a safer society, Catillo stated. In his perspective, law enforcement’s ability to adapt to the realities of social media is critical in a world where ideas spread faster than ever before. It’s no longer a question of having enough people on the force to patrol problem areas or locations but about leveraging tools that can understand and identify threats as they happen online. “Hopefully this will not only lead to law enforcement agencies preventing crime, but also giving wider society an understanding of how to address radicalisation in general” – ICON’s CEO Ian Castillo, who brings over 25 years of tech leadership experience, said in the interview.
What are your organization’s specific roles in CounteR?
ICON has worked on a number of technical aspects on CounteR, including business analysis and requirements gathering where we helped extract precisely what Law Enforcement Agencies were after from the functionality of the tool. We also provided user interface design for the tool itself, as well as powerful visualisations allowing end users to make sense the data gathered. Finally, we worked with other technical partners who developed the tool to deliver quality assurance, ensuring that the tool meets the high standards we’re setting.
ICON and MITLA hosted CounteR’s consortium meeting in Malta in September 2022. What are your key takeaways from the interaction with the project partners?
There were many, but one particular aspect that comes to mind was the power of our image recognition technology and how accurately we’re able to review images for harmful content at scale. This is where the power of CounteR can be instrumental in addressing the threats of radicalisation online.
ICON’s CEO Ian Castillo: “Image Recognition Technology is CounteR’s Main Power”
