HUGH BULLOCK

Hugh Bullock has been Chairman of Gerald Eve LLP since 2015 and is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and a Fellow of the Royal Town Planning Institute. He is currently a Member of the Mayor of London’s Homes for Londoners Board, Adviser to the Westminster Property Association and a Member of the Cambridge University Land Economy Advisory Board. Other activities include supporting the University of Crete. His former roles include: Member of the Board of Trustees of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA); Member of the Property Advisory Group of The Passage; Commissioner on the Mayor of London’s West End Commission; Chairman of London First’s Planning and Development Advisory Forum; Member of the Mayor of London’s London Electricity High-Level Working Group; Member of the London Regional Council of the CBI; and Visiting Lecturer to the University of Reading.

MARK URBAN

Mark Urban is the Diplomatic and Defence Editor for BBC 2’s Newsnight and has covered diplomatic and defence matters for more than 20 years at the BBC. His major stories have included: the 1990 invasions of Iraq and subsequent Desert Storm campaign; the collapse of the Soviet Union; the Oslo peace process in the Middle East; the wars that broke out in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s as well as the diplomacy that stopped them; the second Palestinian Intifada; 9/11 and its aftermath; the Coalition campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq; and the Arab Spring. Before joining the BBC as a reporter he was Defence Correspondent for The Independent newspaper for four years, covering the end of the Cold War and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Mark Urban is also well known as a military historian, with several best selling books to his credit. These have included ‘Rifles’, about the Napoleonic Wars, ‘Generals’ an exploration of the British Army’s leadership since its foundation in 1688, and titles concerning more recent history such as ‘Task Force Black’ that dealt with special operations during the Iraq campaign. Mark Urban became a Trustee for the Royal Armouries in September 2012.

ANDREW FIGGURES

Andrew Figgures was educated at Loughborough Grammar School, Welbeck College and St Catharine’s College Cambridge where he read Engineering. He was commissioned from Sandhurst into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He has served in Germany and the United Kingdom and on operations in Northern Ireland, the Former Republic of Yugoslavia and Iraq in 2003-4 where he was Senior British Military Representative and deputy to the US Commander. He has been on the directing staff at the Royal Military College of Science responsible for the instruction of Surveillance, Target Acquistion, Aerial Vehicles’ Guided Weapons and Emerging Technology. In 2004 he became Technical Director of the Defence Procurement Agency and Defence Logistic Organisation, Master-General of the Ordnance and a member of the Army Board. On promotion to Lieutenant General In 2006 he became Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff responsible for the Defence Equipment Plan for all three services. On leaving the Army he in 2010 was appointed and held the position of Chief Executive of the British Transport Police Authority with the responsibility for policing the railways in Great Britain until 2016.

These roles are not remunerated and these appointments have been made in accordance with the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code on Public Appointments. The appointments process is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Under the Code, any significant political activity undertaken by an appointee in the last five years must be declared. This is defined as including holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election. Hugh Bullock, Mark Urban and Andrew Figgures have declared no such political activity.

Carol is a leading voice in consumer and regulatory policy and currently runs her own business providing support and advice to others on such matters.

She was previously Chair of the Board of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute and is currently the non-executive Chair of the Claims Management Regulation Unit for the Ministry of Justice. Carol holds other non-executive appointments for Trustmark (the Government-endorsed quality scheme) and is a Warden of the Birmingham Assay Officer. She is also an Independent Advisory Member for the Commission for Local Administration in England (the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman).

In September 2015, Carol led an Independent Review into the regulation of claims management companies, commissioned jointly by HM Treasury and the Ministry of Justice. She has also previously held roles that include Senior Ombudsman at the Office for Legal Complaints, a member of the Legal Services Board Consumer Panel, Operations Director at the Office of Fair Trading, Director of Service Improvement at the Local Better Regulation Office, and national operations manager for Consumer Direct, where she was involved in the establishment of the national consumer advice helpline on behalf of Government.

Carol was awarded an MBE in June 2016 in recognition of her services to consumers and better regulation and is a Fellow of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, an honour bestowed on her by her peers in 2009, in recognition of her contribution to the profession.

The role is remunerated at £295 per day and this appointment is made in accordance with the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code on Public Appointments. The appointments process is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Under the Code, any significant political activity undertaken by an appointee in the last five years must be declared. This is defined as including holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election. Carol Brady has declared no such political activity.

DR ASHOK ROY

Dr Ashok Roy, FSA is a scientist and a leading analytical specialist in the material history of works of art, particularly Old Master paintings. His career has been in museum science from 1977 when he was appointed to the National Gallery’s Scientific Department, of which he became Director in 1990. He was later appointed Director of Collections at the National Gallery from where he retired in 2016. He remains particularly interested in developing interdisciplinary study of works of art with curators and conservators with a view of presenting to a broad public the interest and value of understanding and preserving collections through material knowledge. To this end he has organised a number of exhibitions devoted to these subjects and published and lectured extensively in Britain and abroad. He is committed to promoting the widest variety of free public access to the national collections, and ensuring that the results of research on collections are made available to visitors both physical and virtual. He believes that presenting the materials and making of works of art provides a powerful way of engaging new publics particularly younger visitors. He is also interested in the importance of sustainability of museums as public institutions.

TIMOTHY SCHRODER

Timothy Schroder is a historian and lecturer on the history of silver and goldsmiths’ work. Previous roles include head of silver at Christie’s, Curator of Decorative Arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Consultant Curator at the V&A. In addition to being a trustee of the Wallace Collection, he is a past Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths’ Company, a member of the Fabric Commission of Westminster Abbey and chairman of the Prostate Cancer Research Centre. His current area of research is the goldsmiths’ work of Henry VIII, which he will publish in 2020 to mark the 500th anniversary of the Field of Cloth of Gold, the celebrated meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I of France in 1520.

KATE DE ROTHSCHILD

Kate de Rothschild Agius will continue to use her extensive knowledge of the art world and fund raising when she is re-appointed as a Trustee of the Wallace Collection. During the past five years she has been a constant advocate and ambassador for the museum and has raised money for them from many different sources. Kate was formerly Chairman of the Patrons of the British Museum and is now Chairman of the Patrons of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. These roles mean that she is very aware of the skills needed to approach and successfully interact with people when raising money. She is on the board of Exbury Gardens, the Rothschild family garden, now in a charitable trust, in Hampshire which is open to the public (with 80,000 visitors a year) and is involved in all aspects of running this visitor attraction. Kate has spent many years in the art world and has a particular interest in the art on display at the Wallace. She can talk knowledgeably about it to the visitors and hopefully inspire them to share her enthusiasm for the collection.

The role is not remunerated and these appointments have been made in accordance with the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code on Public Appointments. The appointments process is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Under the Code, any significant political activity undertaken by an appointee in the last five years must be declared. This is defined as including holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election. Dr Ashok Roy, Kate de Rothschild-Agius and Tim Schroder have declared no such political activity.

A former athlete who competed in the Beijing and London Olympic Games winning a bronze medal in 2012 with the GB women’s hockey team. Since retiring from hockey Annie pursued a career in finance with Goldman Sachs, before recently moving into the commercial sports industry. Annie has maintained her involvement in high performance sport through positions on the UK Sport Mission 2016/2020 Panels, the British Cycling Independent Review and an Executive Board member of the International Hockey Federation (FIH), co-chairing the FIH’s Athletes’ Committee.

The role is remunerated at £218 per day. This appointment has been made in accordance with the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code on Public Appointments. The appointments process is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Under the Code, any significant political activity undertaken by an appointee in the last five years must be declared. This is defined as including holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election. Anne has declared no such political activity.

Tests have shown this new tool can automatically detect 94% of Daesh propaganda with 99.995% accuracy. It has an extremely high degree of accuracy, for instance if it analyses one million randomly selected videos, only 50 would require additional human review. The tool can be used by any platform, and integrated into the upload process, so that the majority of video propaganda is stopped before it ever reaches the internet.

Developed by the Home Office and ASI Data Science, the technology uses advanced machine learning to analyse the audio and visuals of a video to determine whether it could be Daesh propaganda.

The Home Office and ASI will be sharing the methodology behind the new model with smaller companies, in order to help combat the abuse of their platforms by terrorists and their supporters.

Many of the major tech companies have developed technology specific to their own platforms and have publicly reported on the difference this is making in their fight against terrorist content. Smaller platforms, however, are increasingly targeted by Daesh and its supporters and they often do not have the same level of resources to develop technology.

The model, which has been trained using over 1,000 Daesh videos, is not specific to one platform so can be used to support the detection of terrorist propaganda across a range of video-streaming and download sites in real-time.

Welcoming the new technology Home Secretary Amber Rudd said:

Over the last year we have been engaging with internet companies to make sure that their platforms are not being abused by terrorists and their supporters. I have been impressed with their work so far following the launch of the Global Internet Forum to Counter-Terrorism, although there is still more to do, and I hope this new technology the Home Office has helped develop can support others to go further and faster.

The purpose of these videos is to incite violence in our communities, recruit people to their cause, and attempt to spread fear in our society. We know that automatic technology like this, can heavily disrupt the terrorists’ actions, as well as prevent people from ever being exposed to these horrific images.

This Government has been taking the lead worldwide in making sure that vile terrorist content is stamped out.

The announcement comes as the Home Secretary travels to Silicon Valley to hold a series of meetings with the main communication service providers to discuss tackling terrorist content online. She is expected to discuss the new model on her visit to find out what companies are doing to develop innovative methods that identify Daesh propaganda, and support smaller companies, such as Vimeo, Telegra.ph and pCloud to remove terrorist content from their platforms.

Separately, new Home Office analysis demonstrates that Daesh supporters used more than 400 unique online platforms to push out their poisonous material in 2017, highlighting the importance of technology that can be applied across different platforms. Previous research has found the majority of links to Daesh propaganda are disseminated within two hours of release, while a third of all links are disseminated within the first hour.

The new research also shows 145 new platforms from July until the end of the year had not been used before.

As part of her two day visit to San Francisco, the Home Secretary will also meet Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen to discuss how the UK and US can work together to tackle terrorist content online, and appear together at a Digital Forum event today (Tuesday). The Home Secretary will also meet with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which was launched last year following a roundtable convened at the Home Office in the aftermath of the Westminster Bridge attack.