Learning from different industries

Aythora believes he is a technologist at heart, having started his career as an engineer, and has worked across different industries as he climbed the career ladder. “Every time I’ve changed jobs, I’ve changed industries,” he adds.

The benefit of working in many different industries has given Aythora the opportunity to continue learning, which he regards as an important skill for technology leadership. “Curiosity and the ability to learn plays an important role,” he says, adding that these help with confidence and broadens the depth and breadth of knowledge.

When asked about applying technology know-how in different sectors, in Aythora’s experience, irrespective of the business sector, technology challenges and opportunities are quite similar: “It’s how you apply technology and what you do with it in the organisational context that matters the most. Technology is linked to the return on investment, which, in any organisation, has to deliver value.”

Content credentials

A recent project the BBC Research and Development team has been working on is around demonstrating the authenticity of content. “The verifiability of content has become quite an important aspect of our daily lives. We often come across news that we question, and then we ask [for] or we go to search for other sources to validate and verify,” Aythora says.

The team has been working with Microsoft and its chief scientific officer, Eric Horvitz, for several years, developing an approach to verifying content called Content Credentials. “This is a really good example of transferable knowledge from one industry to another,” adds Aythora. 

Aythora previously worked at De Beers and in diamond mining. One of the important challenges De Beers faced was to prove where a particular stone came from and whether it was a “clean” diamond, which resulted in the development of Forevermark to verify the authenticity of diamonds.

“We invented a piece of technology [Forevermark] that would mark a diamond with a specific watermark that can be traced from where it originates to how many hands it would have exchanged over a period of time,” he says, adding that the same concept can be applied in the content world. “If a piece of BBC content is appearing on social media platforms, you want to be sure of where it has actually come from.”

“It’s how you apply technology and what you do with it in the organisational context that matters the most”

Jatin Aythora, BBC Research and Development

For Aythora, verifying content is an important challenge not only for the news, the media industry and the BBC, but also the wider technology industry. “The content credentials capability and the standards that we’ve invented are now being adopted by most of the large technology organisations, including OpenAI, Google and Microsoft,” he says.

The Content Credentials feature on the BBC news site provides a button which enables people reading stories to check the authenticity of the information. The tool uses metadata, such as the time or date an image was taken, compares locations, matches the weather conditions in the image to actual reported weather, notes whether shadows are casting in the correct way, and runs searches for other instances of the material online in case the image has been taken out of context.

Content Credentials is now a technical standard from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which was co-founded in 2019 by BBC Research and Development – alongside other members including Adobe and Microsoft.

BBC News Verify published its first article using the C2PA standard in March 2024.

New Music Portal

Another project coming out of BBC R&D looks at evolving radio using virtual worlds in a way that can draw in a younger audience, as Aythora explains: “We’ve been exploring how can we make that performance much more interactive and immersive for younger generations who are not going to listen to the radio.”

Last year, the BBC partnered with Bristol-based tech company Condense to design immersive live music experiences for younger audiences, which enables fans to join these live events as avatars on their mobile or laptop. The New Music Portal, which began with Radio 1’s New Music Show, hosted by Jack Saunders, enables the audience to navigate the venue like a video game while chatting with other fans via an instant messaging platform. 

“We made this experience easy for people to access – you [just] need a device that’s connected to the internet,” says Aythora.

He hopes that as virtual reality headsets become more popular and affordable, the experience can evolve to provide a true immersive experience using these devices.

Speech-to-text tech and AI

BBC R&D tends to have a decade-long outlook on technology, which implies it has been working on certain technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) for a long time.

Recalling the first implementation, Aythora says: “We take it for granted today, because we have access to technology that can do speech to text, but 10 years ago that wasn’t the case. BBC R&D had the best speech-to-text algorithm that was delivering 85% accuracy.” This was significantly higher than the accuracy available from some providers, which, according to Aythora, was only 30% accuracy. Speech-to-text tech powers also subtitles on BBC Sounds.

“When we started with the journey of speech to text, we were the market leaders, but we’re not market leaders anymore. AI has matured quite significantly, so what we do is take the best of our capability and the best of what the industry has to provide,” he says, adding that BBC R&D combines the AI technologies developed in-house and products available from speech-to-text providers to deliver “amazing experiences for our audiences”.

The BBC is also looking at using AI with video. “We believe defect detection using computer vision and AI models is going to be important for organisations like the BBC,” Aythora says. “There needs to be a method through which we are able to highlight if a particular piece of video or an image has been manipulated.”

Innovation at the pace of the organisation

The BBC’s biggest challenge – and one that the research and development team needs to be cognizant of as it embarks on technology innovation – is how to deliver services at scale at an affordable cost point.

“We are a public service organisation. We don’t have an endless amount of money available to us,” Aythora says, adding that this is a different challenge compared with a commercial organisation that uses technology either to gain a competitive edge or drive profit. 

IT and technology leaders often encounter situations when they cannot achieve results as quickly as they would like due to organisational constraints. Aythora believes patience is key: “Patience plays an important role in your ability as a leader not only to manage certainty and opportunities, but the challenges as well.”

Aythora also recommends IT leaders validate their ideas, adding: “Don’t assume that your idea is the right idea and the best idea. Validate it with various people to build confidence. The more you validate, the more confident you will become, either to pursue it or not to pursue it. Sometimes your ideas might just not be the right idea, and that’s OK, you just have to accept that. But at the same time, continue to validate it.”

This is important as good ideas tend to be taken up eventually. “It’s only a matter of time and context before the idea becomes more relevant,” he says.

Technologists and IT leaders can often face what may seem like insurmountable barriers and objections to the technology proposals they put forward, but perseverance is key. Among the themes to come out of the conversation with Aythora is one of self-belief – to use Aythora’s words: “Self-belief is not instant; it becomes a belief over a period of time. It’s a journey that we go through.”