Lyric Jain, an MIT and Cambridge University student, founded Brighouse-based Logically, with the intention of “combatting fake news”. Originally from Mysore, India, Lyric moved to the Solihull, UK when he was 12.
With the increasing amount of social media influence, fake news is a very common factor. The engineering student, is trying to fight back with Logically, a machine-learning algorythm, which he has designed with aid of faculty advisers at MIT, at US.
According to a report by Businesscloud.co.uk, Logically has a board of advisers comprised of alumni from both MIT and Cambridge University and has raised £1 million in funding. It employs 38 people across the UK, India and US and is planning to almost double that in 2018.
It also has 10 full-time developers and researchers and aditionally it relies occasionally on academia and opensource work - the number of people who have helped Logically is well into the 100s.
21 year old Lyric started his first business at the age of just 16, when he reportedly designed and later developed the ABS Secure Lock, which is witnessed to be an industry benchmark for door locks. He was motivated to build Logically after witnessing the ‘echo chamber’ effect during the Brexit debate, where many people were only subjected to opinions that mirrored their own, through social media platforms like Twitter.
Speaking to Asian Voice exclusively, Lyric said, “We are living in an information ecosystem with opportunistic actors looking to win eyeballs and ad revenue by leveraging shocking content and confirmation bias. There are politically motivated actors and state sponsored Institutions such as IRA who are poisoning the information we consume to fulfill their objectives. Even some of the larger publishers and broadcasters tailor their content so that it's agrees with the worldview of their audience.
“News that is fake outright and is deliberately deceptive can be detected using our systems and filtered for our users. In cases where claims authors and publishers are in a 'grey area's where no judgement can be passed, we make our users aware of all the perspectives for that claim from across the political spectrum and highlight the trackrecords of pundits and speculators.
“We would like to be used as a source of almost instant verification of any questionable claims you might encounter and also as a news discovery platform that determines the credibility of articles and intelligently recommends alternative perspectives - allowing you to truly understand the world and what’s happening in it.”
Logically will have a private launch on 16 July, just for partners and friends, which will be followed by a public launch in September, to coincide with the start of University season and US mid terms.
What's next in pipeline for Logically? “Gathering feedback from our users about or product and technology,” said Lyric “And finding the right B2B partners for the many applications Logically and its core technology has in verticals such as government, media, adtech and fintech.”
