Oriel student creates history with Microsoft Imagine Cup success

Brown’s creation, CopyFlag, detects copied and AI-modified content across the internet, helping creators spot infringement and automate takedowns. 

The inspiration behind creating the software was sparked by Brown’s own experience of copyright infringement.  

“I was creating art and selling it online,” he explained. 

“I found that it had just been ripped off and sold elsewhere thousands of times. I lost about £70,000. 

“I thought, ‘Right, that’s enough. I’m going to solve this myself.’” 

Brown’s Biochemistry studies helped him on his way to building the image algorithm.  

“As part of the final year of my degree I did research in the lab,” Brown said. 

“I was looking at cells on plates, and I built my own image vision algorithm to quantitatively understand whether the cells on the plates were of interest for us to do further research on. 

“This introduced me to the world of image vision.” 

The first winner from the United Kingdom in the competition’s history, Brown says he has built a model that is 94per cent accurate in detecting copyright infringement. 

 It’s been a hectic end to Brown’s time at Oriel, who has just completed his studies at the College.  

“I submitted my dissertation on Thursday of week six, Microsoft then flew me out the same day to San Francisco,” he said.  

That led to Brown on stage with the two other finalists at one of Microsoft’s conferences, Microsoft Build.  

“I was sitting there with the two other teams live on stage in front of this huge audience of 1,000 people,” Brown said.  

“You get up for a minute, talk live with a demo of what your product’s doing while it’s kind of shown on the huge screens around you. 

“Once everyone’s shown what they’ve been building, they announce who the winner is. 

“It’s just this surreal experience of finding out you’d won live on stage after months of building.” 

Reward for Brown’s efforts include a $150,000 winning prize (roughly £112,000), plus an additional six months to continue building his product with the support of Microsoft and a mentorship session with Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO. 

He says CopyFlag has detected works up to £20,000 from a single design being used by AI-modified content.  

“I think whenever anyone’s kind of thinking of starting a startup, there’s always this kind of thing in your mind of, ‘Oh, is my idea actually good enough? Will it actually work in the real world?’ 

“It’s been great to go from this idea stage of nothing existing to the full product existing, real customers using it and it’s getting real-world traction and real-world impact in a positive way.”