Tech For Good - Issue 05

THE RISE OF THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE URBAN MOBILITY IN MEGACITIES EUROPE’S INNOVATION GAMBLE THE FUTURE OF YOUR FOOD SHOP

Issue 05

CALIFORNIA

BURNING Over four million acres of the state have been destroyed by wildfires this year. We explore how artificial intelligence is being used to fight back against a man-made disaster

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

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ometimes, a number just floors you. It happens a lot when reading about the environmental damage being done to our planet. TFG’s lead story this month, on the wildfires engulfing California - and other parts of the planet - is no different.

Learning that four million acres of the Golden State has succumbed to wildfires in 2020 alone was literally jaw-dropping. Four million. And the year’s not even done, yet. Just in case four million acres needs putting into context, that’s half a million acres bigger than the size of Northern Ireland, or Connecticut. All up in smoke.

The year started with apocalyptic scenes of bushfires raging across Australia, and then in September the foreboding images emerged of San Francisco coloured a deep orange from the fires in California. There has rarely been a starker visual representation of the harm being inflicted by global warming.

The areas at risk from wildfires don’t have long enough to wait for the world to come to an agreement on how to tackle

climate change. The threat is very real to them, already, and they’re left with fighting the problem, rather than the cause. So we spoke to the United States Forest Service about how predicting, mapping and controlling such enormous fires has had to become far more sophisticated, and very quickly.

It is a story featuring NASA, satellites, AI, and a whole lot of old-fashioned bravery from firefighters, and you can read it from page 6.

Elsewhere, we have some cracking interviews. Ben Mouncer investigates where the world is at with electric vehicles: can we call it a revolution yet?

He speaks to Luca Castignani, Chief Automotive Strategist for Hexagon, and Hui Zhang, NIO’s VP for Europe, to get the big picture.

We also delve into how Europe has turned to innovation to fight COVID-19, with Beatriz Valero de Urquía talking to Teresa Riesgo, Spain’s Secretary-General for Innovation, to get the story.

Enjoy!

PUBLISHED BY BULLETIN MEDIA LTD, Norwich, UK Company No: 11454926 TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

CONTENTS 06

ENVIRONMENT

Technology takes on California’s wildfires

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PUBLIC SECTOR Europe turns to innovation in fight against COVID

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LEADERSHIP

Tracking the electric vehicle revolution

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GLOBAL NEWS From flying taxis to drought tools, we round up the news

40

SOCIAL GOOD The startup mapping the world’s megacities

50

EDUCATION

Britannica CEO Karthik Krishnan on classroom transformation

60

EXPERT INSIGHT Capgemini’s Kees Jacobs reimagines your food shop

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HEALTHCARE The case for making hospitals more efficient

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ENVIRONMENT

APOCALYPSE

NOW?

The eerie images of San Francisco bathed in orange smoke from nearby wildfires in September reminded the world that climate change is impacting on nature like never before. We speak to the United States Forest Service to find out how, with a little help from NASA, they are using new technologies in their ongoing battle against increasingly destructive wildfires AUTHOR: Daniel Brigham

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APOCALYPSE NOW?

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n October, California reached a shocking milestone: over four million acres of the state had succumbed to wildfire in 2020. It is more than double its previous record for land burned, and the grim figures don’t end there. This year, there have been over 8,200 fires, fought by over 20,000 firefighters, with hundreds of homes destroyed and 31 lives lost in the Golden State.

If you think those numbers are unimaginable, you’re not the only one. Even the experts are flabbergasted by the destruction being wrought. “The four million mark is unfathomable. It boggles the mind, and it takes your breath away,” said a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, in October.

The situation gained worldwide attention when apocalyptic scenes of San Francisco submerged in an eerie orange smoke littered social media – and then international headlines – in September, the result of intense wildfires.

This isn’t just a Californian problem.

Parts of the Arctic, central Asia and the Amazon have seen severe wildfires, while Australia battled its most intense period of bushfires on record at the turn of this year. Even the UK – that green and pleasant land – saw a larger area burned by wildfires in 2019 than ever before.

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Getting actionable information to first responders and those that have to call evacuations is critical to saving lives” Everett Hinkley The problem isn’t going away. The planet is 1.1°C warmer than in pre-industrial times and, while wildfires are natural, the increase in volume is linked to the rise in the earth’s temperature. A report from the University of California found that the fire season in the west of the USA is almost 11 weeks longer than in the 1970s, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that global warming has increased the likelihood of droughts and storms. Lightning strikes are the biggest cause of wildfires, and a 2014 study in a scientific journal found that the volume of lightning strikes increases by 12% with each degree of atmospheric warming. Add that into increasingly long

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dry seasons, and it becomes a tinder-box.

It’s also a vicious circle: the more wildfires there are due to climate change, the more trees that will be burned, and the more carbon is released into the atmosphere, which accelerates global warming.

As well as the environmental cost, there is a very real, immediate human cost.

A 2019 State of Global Air report from the Health Effects Institute found that air pollution – which wildfires are a great contributor to – can reduce life expectancy by almost two years. Cancers, respiratory problems and heart disease are all linked to poor air quality, and one look at those images from San Francisco

in September gives you a tangible illustration of its dangers.

While the fight against global warming may be the long-term solution to reversing the alarming trend, there are also short-term battles to be won. One of those is improving the response to wildfires, to save vegetation, wildlife, human lives and homes, and to stop smoke pumping into the atmosphere.

For decades, fire detection has been the preserve of fire wardens armed with a pair of binoculars. It’s no way to treat something with such serious implications, and, as wildfires increase, so too does the need to be able to predict, detect and respond to fires.

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We can likely use artificial intelligence to calibrate and increase the accuracy of predictive models over time” Brad Quayle The Forest Service, which sits in the United States Department of Agriculture, is tasked with “caring for the land and serving people” across the USA. When it was founded in 1905, the Forest Service’s main aim was to protect valuable timber reserves from fires, but the emphasis quickly changed to protecting lives and property.

Part of the Forest Service is its Geospatial Technology and Applications Center (GTAC). The department’s brief is to explore and implement new technologies to support the Forest Service’s mission. The Forest Service’s own records show just how more challenging its job has become: between 1960 and 1999, 141 million acres of land were destroyed by wildfires in the USA. Then, between 2000 and 2013, almost 161 million acres were destroyed. It is a staggering escalation, in part caused by the 10

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amount of land in ‘wildland urban interface’ areas – where housing and fire-risk vegetation exist side by side – but also due to the surge in wildfire numbers.

“Managing wildfires is inherently complex and challenging and compounded by many factors,” says Brad Quayle, who is on the leadership team at GTAC. “The factors include longer fire seasons, increasing size and severity of wildfires, continued expansion of the wildland urban interface which places more people and structures in harm’s way. That increases the risk to communities, natural resources, and firefighters.”

GTAC’s suite of current and emerging technology solutions include the potential for real-time imagery; faster and more dependable communications and data transfer; location tracking of resources; and advanced aerial resources –

APOCALYPSE NOW?

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including the use of satellite data – to help improve decision making. With the difficulty of combating fires increasing due to their intensity, there has also been a resource issue: there simply aren’t enough firefighters to attend every single blaze. So technology needs to act as a guide that helps pool resources correctly.

The inherent dangers involved in mapping fires mean that any tech has to work from a safe distance. Unmanned aircrafts are increasingly used to provide updates on the locations of wildfires, and their behaviours. “We have added live internet connections to our fire-mapping aircraft to speed up delivery of thermal 12

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imagery for interpretation and use at fire incidents,” says Quayle. “This means we no longer rely on ‘land and hand’ or drop tubes to get thermal imagery to the fire incidents. This greatly reduces the length of time getting this data to the folks who need it most. It also reduces the risk to the crews of our fire-mapping aircraft.”

Everett Hinkley, National Remote Sensing Program Manager at the Forest Service, says innovation is key to detecting wildfires.

“Technical innovation is extremely important in improving the detection and reporting of new fires,” he says. “That includes the sensor systems and aerial

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platforms, to the tools for analysis and the communication technology which rapidly sends alerts to first responders. We are actively working on all these pieces to improve the reliability of the system while reducing latency and false reports.

“We are looking to machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve each of these goals. Machine learning algorithms are also used on ground-based automated fire-and-smoke spotting systems which are increasingly being used in priority areas, such as where wildland meets urban areas. We are also investigating sensor webs, where various remote-sensing platforms can be linked

for cross-validation on new fire starts.”

The Forest Service is also getting help from a higher source: NASA. A constellation of satellites, which is operated

by NASA, is used to help detect and then map the spread of wildfires. The data from these satellites – as well as fire-mapping aircrafts – provides a bigger picture when hundreds of separate fires are raging. Strategic decisions are then better informed, with resources distributed according to where they are most needed.

However, there is a flaw even in this system. Satellites tend to capture images on early morning passes, but most wildfires reach their aggressive peak in late afternoon. This lag in reporting means data on how intense a fire might be – or how it might spread – is often incomplete until it’s too late: the fire will already have taken hold.

Canada is leading the way in accessing real-time data from satellites.

Since 2012 a Canadian Wildland Fire Monitoring System has been in development. Now called WildfireSAT, advances in satellite technology means the Canadian Space Agency is confident of launching wildfire-detection satellites in 2025. They will work by measuring the radiation emitted from fires, which provides the real-time date necessary to gauge a wildfire’s intensity.

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Wildfire-specific satellites are one of a number of things Quayle wants to see come to the party in the USA, but there is currently none in the design or building stage. “One piece that is missing is the need for improved fire behaviour modelling and prediction which can be a significant aid in evacuating populations at risk and deploying firefighting resources with greater efficiency and reduced risk,” he says.

“To improve the models we need better fuel maps and also a better understanding of fire behaviour itself, which can only come from increased observation of fire activity. With increased frequency of fire observations, we can likely use artificial intelligence to calibrate and increase the accuracy of predictive models over time.”

Hinkley, meanwhile, wants a system that links fire detection to active fire monitoring and mapping. “In many dynamic fires, the most critical time is immediately after the fire starts,” he says. “By dynamic, I mean high winds, dry and plentiful fuels and populations at risk. Getting actionable information to first responders and those that have to call evacuations is critical to saving lives in those early phases of a new fire in dynamic conditions. Where is the fire? What direction is it moving? How fast is it moving?

“Having a sensor web of ground stations, airborne assets and space 14

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APOCALYPSE NOW?

Machine learning algorithms are also used on groundbased automated fireand-smoke spotting systems which are increasingly being used in priority areas�

Everett Hinkley assets that can effectively answer those questions is where I would like to see things going. In addition, having large streams of digital remote sensing data from a sensor web in disaster situations will increasingly rely on AI to sift through, assess and analyse the data to get at the critical pieces and provide essential information to inform decisions.�

As the world’s population continues to rise, and warming temperatures result in more storms and droughts, wildfires will increase in number. The cure, it seems, is a planet that takes the threat of climate change seriously. Until that cure is found, the battle will continue to be how best to innovatively respond to wildfires in order to avoid more foreboding images of major cities cloaked in orange smoke.

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PUBLIC SECTOR

EUROPEAN INNOVATION As the second COVID-19 wave hits Europe, we speak to Teresa Riesgo, Spain’s Secretary-General for Innovation, and other leaders to find out how the continent’s public sector is investing in innovation to counteract the medical and economic consequences of the pandemic AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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hange is integral to human development.

Throughout history, humans have been forced to adapt in order to overcome adverse conditions, whether that be harsh weather, a challenging geography, or the spread of viruses.

‘Innovation’ might be a new term, but it’s as old as our DNA, and the rise of innovative solutions to counteract the medical and economic challenges of COVID-19 is yet another example of adaptation.

By November 5, Europe had reported over 250,000 COVID-19 deaths and over 11 million cases. It is a human tragedy, but the pandemic’s impact is not only medical: more than five million jobs have been lost in the European Union alone since March.

The current challenge facing Europe is unprecedented and so must be the public sector’s response.

Last March, while the pandemic was hitting Europe in full force, Gioia Ghezzi was voted Chairman of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) Governing Board. The EIT is an independent body created by the European Union to create knowledge and innovation communities (KIC) that bring together companies and research institutions from all around Europe to ISSUE 05

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solve specific problems. Currently, COVID-19 is the most pressing problem.

“We quickly realised that one of the consequences of the pandemic would be a terrible economic recession,” Ghezzi says. “So we decided to free up funds very quickly, focusing in two big areas: to respond to COVID from a medical point of view, and to support our ventures, which will be devoted to driving Europe’s recovery and growth.”

The EIT set up a Crisis Response Initiative, which awarded €60 million to different innovative projects to provide solutions to the pandemic by the end of the year. Some of these projects - such as AFFIX Labs’ Si-Quat, a long-lasting antiviral surface treatment; the air-powered INNOV-ventilator; the BEAMitup food hygiene testing solution; and Hospital 18

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Clinic’s COVID-19 AI tool, which we cover in the Healthcare feature of this issue - are already showing incredible results.

“The EIT has been able to mobilise communities that we have built over the past 10 years, to bring innovation to the ground very quickly,” Ghezzi says.

“We are part of the answer, and that’s very very exciting.”

However, Ghezzi’s vision for the EIT goes far beyond the immediate response to the pandemic, and it follows the European Union’s commitment to the “twin transitions”: the digital transformation and the green revolution.

“We think we should take this crisis as an opportunity to rethink profoundly the way we live and how we achieve growth,” Ghezzi says. “We very much believe in a more sustainable way of living, where

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sustainability and growth can go hand in hand, and this will be achieved through technology and innovation.”

A complete transformation is also the aim of Spain’s current government.

Last January it created the role of Secretariat of Innovation, as part of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and Teresa Riesgo was chosen as its first Secretary General. The goal of this Secretariat is to make sure that Spain met European standards in terms of innovation investment. While European countries invest on average 2.4% of their GDP on research and innovation, Spain invests only 1.24%.

“The first thing I think we have to do in Spain is understand that R&D expenditure is not an expense, it is an investment,” Riesgo says.

To do so, the Ministry of Science and Innovation published a Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy that details the country’s plans for the next seven years. In addition to funding doctoral and postdoctoral projects, Spain invests in a public venture capital fund and alongside private co-investors, through an independent entity called INNVIERTE. “It is a different way because you are not giving straight funds or loans, but you are becoming part of the capital of

We think we should take this crisis as an opportunity to rethink profoundly the way we live and how we achieve growth” Gioia Ghezzi

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the company,” Riesgo says. “You get more involved.”

Another way that the Secretariat fosters innovation is through “public purchase of innovation”, where the Ministry supports public administrations who are willing to be the first users of new technological products.

“These purchases turn the administration into a more modern and riskier one,” Riesgo says.

Companies won’t innovate if public administrators don’t create conditions that encourage innovation. Riesgo uses 20

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Apple’s case as an example: “We say that Apple is a super innovative company, and actually, Apple is very innovative using inventions that others made,” she says.

“GPS, liquid crystal screens, the accelerometer; they were all discovered through publicly funded projects.”

Moreover, as a response to COVID19, the Spanish administration has pledged €36 million in funds to support disruptive solutions for healthcare and businesses, and it has promised a further €1 billion investment in the next two years.

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“The COVID-19 fund has shown us that we work both quickly and rigorously,” Riesgo says.

Thanks to this fund, Algenex, a Spanish biotech company known for developing veterinary vaccines, has begun researching a possible COVID-19 vaccine. The IMDEA Nanoscience Institute has also used these funds to develop cheap and rapid COVID-19 tests utilising a colourchanging material.

Other sectors of the Spanish government have also stepped up to find solu-

tions for the challenges posed by the pandemic. For example, the Ministry has supported several projects focused on ventilators.

“Ventilators were an essential element during the toughest time of the pandemic,” Riesgo says. “In Spain it was possible to solve this problem by putting together companies that knew how to make ventilators but had very small productions with companies that were capable of manufacturing precision devices, but didn’t know how to make ventilators.”

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We believe that we have to change the productive model of the country and move towards greater innovation and knowledge” Teresa Riesgo

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Following this strategy, the Ministry of Industry collaborated with a military company to adapt its manufacturer line to produce over 5,000 ventilators.

However, despite the rapid response, Spain’s COVID-19 cases were rising in early November, and its economy has been hit hard. “The pandemic has taught us our strengths, but also some of our weaknesses,” Riesgo says.

These weaknesses include the country’s general economic dependence on the services sector, which was severely hit by lockdowns and social distancing restrictions. In Riesgo’s view, there is a need to diversify the country’s economy.

“Countries that have higher innovation and industrialisation rates, and a stronger and more independent generation of knowledge, have suffered the impact of COVID-19 less,” she says. “We believe that we have to change the productive model of the country and move towards greater innovation and knowledge.”

However, innovation is not only beneficial for a country’s economy. It is also absolutely essential to protect our planet. “I think that Europe needs to bet on this green transition to stay at the forefront of technology,” Riesgo says.

To ensure this, the European Union has created the Missions for Horizon Europe. They are projects based

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Helsinki, Finland

around the idea that having a specific goal — a “mission”— helps drive innovation, similar to President Kennedy’s 1962 promise of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

“The important thing is not putting a man on the moon, but it’s something that got a lot of people excited,” Riesgo says, explaining the importance of bringing people together around a common goal. “Europe has a mission to ensure that 100 European cities are carbon-neutral by 2030. That will require a wide variety of technologies, from business models, to

new cars and houses, and even new economic models.”

Education, digitalisation, private investments and a sustained public bet on innovation are the key elements that Riesgo believes Spain needs to focus its efforts on to brace the impact of COVID-19 and catch-up to European technology leaders. Leaders such as Finland.

Finland is the country with the largest number of digital startups per capita, and one of only seven countries globally that exports more health technology than it imports. A key to ISSUE 05

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this success is the work of Business Finland, a public organisation that focuses on funding innovative projects, supporting the internationalisation of Finnish companies, encouraging international investors to invest in Finland and promoting tourism.

“We have a national interest and mandate to direct taxpayer’s money to investments that are expected to bring wellbeing back to society by the way of the growth of our businesses, revenues from exports and new 24

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jobs,” says Kari Klossner, Programme Manager and Head of Smart Life Finland at Business Finland.

Currently, Business Finland is focused on the digital transformation of healthcare. While other countries struggle to put together accessible medical data, Finland already has a national electronic health system that covers 100% of the nations’ clinical records. It is the perfect base to develop strong remote healthcare services.

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“We’ll never quite go 100% back to the ‘old way’,” Klossner says. “The care delivery mechanisms now being implemented at a fast pace will remain – because they make sense, economically and care wise. No doubt in many cases seeing the doctor is still going to be necessary, but much can also be done remotely, with a much quicker response time and efficient use of medical resources.”

Moreover, new technologies like artificial intelligence are also offering the possibility of including preventive and predictive solutions. “In the long run they support the change to more valuebased healthcare, where the human as an individual is in focus,” Klossner says.

But remote healthcare is only one of the 20,000 projects that Business Finland supports with its €1 billion crisis fund.

“Business Finland played a pivotal part in the country redirecting the production of suitable companies to manufacture hygiene products and protective equipment such as hand sanitiser and surgical masks,” Klossner says.

Disior Oy, a company that can turn CT and MRI images into 3D mathematical models to improve analysis and outcome assessment, has been one of the companies that has put these crisis funds to use during the

Going digital is a slow and long adoption process. It’s a big ship that turns slowly, and often the bigger the country the slower the rate of turn. The adoption is much more about change management than it is about technology” Kari Klossner

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Madrid, Spain

pandemic. Another one is Nukute, which has developed a sleep monitoring device to assess breathing quality in COVID-19 patients, and the cross-industry project TUPA. TUPA analyses COVID-19’s transmission both in hospitals and in public spaces, after Finnish Michelin-star awarded chef Henri Alén contacted the research team to set up a virus transmission simulation in his restaurant, which was recently launched.

“The objective of the consortium is to examine and predict the transmission 26

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routes by combining the knowledge obtained from hospital environment and restaurants, and to create a synthesis of effective safety procedures,”Klossner says.

Finland has been investing in digital healthcare for decades, and therefore has a clear advantage over other countries that have only recently embraced the digital transformation journey.

“Going digital is a slow and long adoption process,” Klossner says. “It’s a big ship that turns slowly, and often the bigger the country the slower the rate of turn. The adoption is much more

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about change management than it is about technology.”

The turn might be slow, but it’s necessary.

In Klossner’s opinion, there were three key aspects behind Finland’s digital healthcare success: strategic support and infrastructure from the government, culture and education.

“But we also got lucky a little bit,” he says. “When Nokia exited Finland, it also released a lot of resources in this country who were very knowledgeable in radio technology and mobile appli-

cations, and now all that brain power is being applied to digital health.”

Although luck can’t be replicated, it is never too late to improve education, as well as the public administrations’ commitment to innovation.

People generally dislike change.

However, COVID-19 has already disrupted everyone’s lives, both personally and professionally. Public institutions are taking advantage of that need to change to ensure the version of Europe that comes out of the pandemic is healthier, greener and more innovative.

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SPARKING INTO LIFE

SPARKING INTO LIFE Luca Castignani and Hui Zhang, two industry insiders, help Tech For Good track the current state of the electric vehicle market. How close is the revolution? What are the barriers? Will Tesla dominate forever?

We tackle those questions and more

AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer

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lectric mobility is the future, and you would be a fool to question it.

The mighty institutions that steer the automotive world - manufacturers and governments - are all-in on electrification.

135 years after Karl Benz built the first practical car powered by an internal combustion engine, a revolution is upon us.

Yet for all the recent headlines and hyperbole, electric vehicles (EVs) still

accounted for only 2.6% of global car sales in 2019 according to the International Energy Agency. While this figure did mark a 40% year-on-year increase, it is also plainly a very small percentage.

In terms of global car stock, EVs made up only 1%.

So while the shift to electrification is ultimately unstoppable, we are still taking our baby steps. And even though the end ISSUE 05

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They are asking us to be agile, to go on the same path as them, to explore more solutions.

In just 10 years, we are recovering one century of development” Luca Castignani

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goals are there for all to see - 73 countries worldwide have net-zero carbon targets to reach before 2050 - the path forward isn’t mapped out in detail for anybody. As Luca Castignani in fact tells Tech For Good, we are now stepping into a critical period for the industry: “In just 10 years, electric vehicles have to bring a disruption into the design of the vehicle while keeping the same high standards in safety and comfort that we have achieved over the last century.”

Castignani is Chief Automotive Strategist for Hexagon, whose design, engineering and manufacturing technologies touch more than 75% of vehicles produced today. It is a company embedded deep in an automotive sector that is changing from the inside out, facing not just a transformation in how cars are powered but also how they are driven. In October, Hexagon made its stance on electrification abundantly clear: it was going 100% EV. According to Castignani, this meant committing every last one of its internal resources to electrification.

The “100%EV” initiative aims to enable “rapid innovation” towards new classes of vehicles that outperform combustion models. Hexagon’s different solutions promise to accelerate the move to EVs in many ways, including by optimising the efficiency of electric powertrains,

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vehicle acoustics and manufacturing and quality inspection.

“From the strategic point of view, this initiative makes a lot of sense,” says Castignani. “The world is going in this direction and we want to align. But it’s not that easy. Even if EVs are all about tomorrow, most car companies are still very concerned about today because a very high percentage of the vehicles that are sold have classical combustion engines. However for today, we [Hexagon] have all the solutions in place. We are now totally projected for tomorrow. The next challenge is to make electric vehicles, and for this challenge we are all committed.”

This statement of intent from Hexagon is similar to many bold moves made recently by the industry’s biggest players. Volkswagen, the largest carmaker in the world, wants to build one million EVs by 2023 and has promised investment of $9 billion to make it happen. In March, General Motors revealed that it has built its own EV platform and battery, and plans to release 20 electric nameplates inside the next three years. And the sector is awash with an unprecedented number of collaborations and joint ventures on key tech for electric mobility.

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© NIO

control of its destiny. The reality is that many OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) are having to pivot far quicker than they have ever done as they attempt to manufacture EVs at scale. Castignani believes this carries huge risks.

“The bigger the OEM, the bigger the potential trouble,” he says. “An OEM like Volkswagen, like Ford, or even like Geely, they cannot make a false step.

Any false step would imply thousands of jobs lost because they are producing cars that might need to be recalled. So it’s extremely important that companies like Hexagon provide them with the right 32

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tools. They are asking us to be agile, to go on the same path as them, to explore more solutions. In just 10 years, we are recovering one century of development.”

An interesting insight from Castignani offers a window into just how the sector is shaping up in this transition phase: he says that, for the first time in its manufacturing intelligence division, Hexagon is working with startups, not just the traditional carmakers. And he puts this solely down to the shift to electrification.

Tesla burned a trail for startups to disrupt the motor industry, and as EV technology and infrastructure has

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developed, more and more startups are threatening the establishment.

Castignani spoke about how Hexagon’s startup customers have made different demands, including shorter ROI forecasts and maximum agility on both software and manufacturing products.

One startup very much at the front of the race is NIO. Repeatedly labelled “the Tesla of China”, NIO has made waves since launching in 2014, shortly after the Chinese government introduced subsidies for the purchase of EVs. It launched its first vehicle in 2017 and, as of October this year, was rolling 5,000 EVs off its

assembly line each month. According to Barrons, stock in NIO is now worth more than $50 billion and J.P. Morgan analyst Rebecca Wen in November projected that the company will have a 30% share of the premium EV market by 2025.

Hui Zhang, NIO’s VP for Europe, echoes much of what Castignani says about the nature of the current market, believing the status quo to be under genuine threat.

“It is one of the most challenging times for car companies in the last 100 years, especially for these big players who are used to being successful in terms of their market share and capitalisation,” says Hui. “In a way, they’re stuck behind their own roadblocks. They have factories that were made to build combustion engines but now they need to change that investment into electric vehicles.

Of course they would be less inclined to do that themselves if there was no pressure from outside. Companies like NIO became that external pressure, and said ‘if you don’t move, somebody will move faster’.”

So with startups and OEMs going head-to-head to lead in the era of electrification, what other factors are at play? The notion of seeing only electric vehicles on our roads and the skies being free of car-generated CO2 emissions is great, but nobody is kidding ISSUE 05

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themselves that this utopic vision will now just happen.

Both Hui and Castignani refuse to shirk away from the barriers that still must be broken down for the EV revolution to truly pick up pace.

“The biggest challenge currently is the infrastructure,” says Hui. “If you asked me two years ago, there might have been another two: the range of the vehicles, and the price of ownership.

But with those two I see a positive development trend. What is really essential is how we can make the experience of charging easier.”

“Electric cars need electricity, and this cannot come from conventional energies like oil or coal, or even to some extent 34

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from nuclear plants,” adds Castignani.

“It is very appropriate this happens at a pace that the rest of the world can actually sustain - in February this year, Jaguar Land Rover actually had to slow the pace of electric vehicle production.

“We also know it is not enough to just not produce CO2 while we are driving; we must also be aware that we don’t want to damage the environment while we are mining cobalt or nickel. We are globally, environmentally conscious in the world of electrification.”

One area that is on-track say Castignani and Hui is the supporting technology for battery-operated vehicles.

While Hexagon is now taking an EV-first view when designing all its software,

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NIO has been at the vanguard of electrification tech for a while. It was the first manufacturer to roll-out battery swapping at scale, with 170 battery swapping stations across China, and it has developed its own electric drivetrain system and part-developed its own electric motor.

With many countries, particularly in Europe, setting aggressive deadlines for a ban on petrol and diesel cars, both believe technology won’t be the thing to hold back the revolution. Hui is adamant many different stakeholders, outside of tech and the industry itself, need to come together to continue the acceleration.

“You need everybody going in the same direction. The national governments, the local governments, and also the energy companies,” he says. “As an observer, I would say the European governments are following the industry trends most. In Europe, people seem to have a stronger sense of the need to protect the environment. This can give politicians and governments more pressure.”

Europe does indeed appear to be leading the way. In March this year, fully electric cars accounted for just under 60% of Norway’s new car market. Its own deadline to phase out combustion engine vehicles will arrive in just five years’ time.

Germany wants to do the same by 2030, the UK by 2035 and France by 2040.

In Europe, people seem to have a stronger sense of the need to protect the environment. This can give politicians and governments more pressure” Hui Zhang

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SPARKING INTO LIFE

Everything is doable if humans want to do it. If we want to do it, we can fly to the moon. And we can fly to the moon because we believe that is meaningful.

It’s the same for EVs” Luca Castignani Castignani adds: “The auto industry will absolutely be ready by that time [the deadlines in Europe]. There are more than 400 EV models to be announced in the next five years, so there will be no shortage of EVs across the full spectrum of price. The real transformation has to happen in society.

“But everything is doable if humans want to do it. If we want to do it, we can fly to the moon. And we can fly to the moon because we believe that is meaningful. It’s the same for EVs.” Thankfully, this is a society that is fully awake to the potential of electric cars.

Many observers credit Elon Musk and Tesla with literally driving this transformation. So, the Tesla question to finish. With the company’s curve of growth shooting sharply upwards over the last 12 months, will its market dominance continue to extend as EVs go mainstream?

Hui is measured in his response, saying that NIO is focused on its own

long-term strategy while acknowledging that “when you have a competitor like Tesla, you want to really move quicker than you can really imagine”. For Castignani, the market will be so big that there will be more than enough to go round if manufacturers get it right over the coming years.

“Tesla somehow created the cake of EV, and a traditional OEM would be a fool if it tried to eat a piece of that cake,” he says.

“But the reality is that the cake is going to grow by a factor of five in the next 10 years, so I would not go and compete with Tesla to take away its customers I would just grow the cake. And this is what most manufacturers are doing.

“We are already used to seeing the likes of Audi and BMW competing, but it’s not that one is making the other disappear. Simply, the world will be 100% EV, so there will be not just two or three million vehicles, but 100 million.

That’s a market for everyone.”

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GLOBAL GOOD

Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid platform released for NHS Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, has announced his startup Inrupt is releasing an enterprise version of its Solid privacy platform. Solid allows organisations to put users in control of their own data. The UK’s National Health Service is using it to build a platform that allows patients to control their health data. The BBC, NatWest and Government of Flanders are also using it

Lilium Aviation considers Florida hub for electric flying taxis German startup Lilium Aviation is seeking to build a 56,000-squarefoot transportation hub in Orlando. Lilium, which opened its first manufacturing factory last year in Munich, makes five-seat electric vertical takeoff vehicles. It hopes to start operating them in 2025. The city of Orlando is keen to explore electric vertical takeoff taxis, and it is reported Lilium is seeking tax incentives

GLOBAL GOOD In case you missed them, we’ve debriefed six of the most interesting Tech For Good stories from the last four weeks

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Provizio gets cash boost for sensor tech that “prevents road accidents” Provizio, an Irish company which has developed sensor technology that it claims can reduce road fatalities, has raised $6.2m in seed funding. Bobby Hambrick, founder of Autonomous Stuff, was among the investors. Provizio says its five-dimensional sensory platform perceives, predicts and prevents car accidents in realtime. The platform incorporates edge AI and lidar technology

NEWS DEBRIEF

Nordic countries will create common digital system to facilitate data sharing Nordic governments have reached a ground-breaking 5-year agreement to build a common digital platform.

The new ecosystem will support small and medium-sized enterprises with efficient and secure data sharing to drive their competitiveness. The project will be administered by Nordic Smart Government (NSG), a partnership led by state-run trade registers in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark

Australian government to develop drought tool The Australian government has sent out a tender to build a digital tool for farmers to assess the impact of climate change on drought. The drought resilience self-assessment tool (DR SAT) would help farmers with drought preparedness, and would be part of the government’s Future Drought Fund. The delivery deadline for the tool, which will be rolled out nationally, is June 2022

Alphabet to roll out lightbeaming broadband Alphabet’s X has partnered with telecoms giant Econet to launch Project Taara in Africa, starting in Kenya. Project Taara uses laserbeaming boxes to deliver high-speed optical wireless broadband, meaning it doesn’t need cables. It beams an invisible light that transmits data between two terminals, which provides transfer speeds of up to 20Gbtps good enough for streaming quality video

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SOCIAL GOOD

MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE Urban mobility is an increasing problem in developing regions, with public transport unwieldy and inaccessible. Startup WhereIsMyTransport is looking to change that, and we spoke to CEO Devin de Vries about its mission to map the transport systems of the world’s biggest developing cities

AUTHOR: Daniel Brigham

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MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

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Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

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here’s a good chance you will be reading this on public transport. Perhaps on a commuter train to work, or in an Uber to meet a friend. Maybe your journey is a little late, or your seat isn’t quite as comfortable as you’d like. But you know, despite any minor inconveniences, it’s getting you from A to B with little fuss.

Not everyone is quite so lucky to be able to travel easily and reliably. Globally, around two billion people living in emerging markets rely on public transport to get to work, get food on the table, and live a fulfilling life. While large developed cities have streamlined transport 42

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© WhereIsMyTransport Ltd, photography by Imani Selemani

systems with apps, websites, and public screens all overflowing with real-time information, the picture is very different in emerging markets, where getting from A to B is, at best, complicated due to a lack of mapping and, at worst, impossible without information. Without good, reliable access to public transport, social and urban mobility gets much tougher; out of reach for billions of people.

A 2018 UN report projected that by 2030 the world is likely to have 43 megacities with a population of over 10 million people, most of which are classed as being in developing regions.

Its research also found that 68% of the

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world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, up from today’s 55%. Urban mobility has never been so important.

South African startup WhereIsMyTransport is actively trying to remove the barrier that denies urban mobility to billions of people. Using data and technology, its mission is to make commuting more reliable, accessible and easier for people who need it most. CEO and co-founder Devin de Vries neatly calls it “making the invisible visible”, and his company is off to an excellent start. It has mapped 40 cities in 27 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America, with the cities including Mexico City, Dhaka, Dar es Salaam, and Johannesburg.

WhereIsMyTransport calls itself the “world’s foremost data collection practice”, and it’s hard to dispute: it combines on-the-ground data collection methodology with technology, using formal and informal public transport data to make public transportation information available digitally.

It has built its own custom tools for mapping complex public transport systems, with an integrated mobility platform that uses proprietary algorithms to turn data into information for commuters, as well as reports for riders, cities, governments and NGOs. It was recently selected from almost 800 applicants across 54 countries to

In many ways, I think urban mobility is to people what blood flow is to our bodies.

It’s vital” Devin de Vries

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join the Elemental Excelerator Cohort, a global climate-tech accelerator, while earlier this year it received strategic investment from Google, Toyota, and Nedbank. Fittingly, WhereIsMyTransport is going places, fast.

WhereIsMyTransport started off when de Vries, a “software engineer turned business builder”, was challenged in his third year at the University of Cape Town to take on a real-world problem utilising tech.

A number of ideas were on the table, but he felt the strongest potential for growth and impact was in public transportation and urban mobility.

“In many ways, I think urban mobility is to people what blood flow is to our bodies. It’s vital,” says de Vries. “We want to ensure that all society experiences freedom of movement, regardless of income brackets and social status. We want people to access the things that make their lives whole: being able to participate in the community, being able to prosper by having access to opportunities.

“It’s no secret that unemployment is incredibly high across these markets, and urban mobility and access to mobility allows people to access opportunities to change their position. It’s the proverbial equivalent of enabling a person to fish as opposed to giving them a fish.”

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Simply getting your children to school, or looking for better employment, or seeing friends and family, are often dependent on using public transport.

People in emerging markets don’t have the option of calling an Uber; they can’t see how one bus route connects to another; sometimes walking is out of the question due to safety concerns. So good public transport access is a great accelerator for not only broadening horizons and community well-being, but also enabling economic and social growth in underdeveloped areas.

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Dhaka, Bangladesh De Vries ran with the university project, and WhereIsMyTransport started in Cape Town in 2015, using 13 data collectors to track bus routes, gathering information such as location and speed, as well as fares, waiting times and stops near major locations. It has grown rapidly over the last few years, and now relies on client requests, ranging from governments, local authorities, transport operators, and financial institutions, through to big tech companies, all wanting to utilise the data that WhereIsMyTransport collects.

When the request comes in, WhereIsMyTransport establishes a local partner and hires a local team to start mapping and collating the transport information. The team, usually of around 60 to 100 people depending on the size of the city, is trained in their respective roles before being sent into the field to start mapping. It usually takes a month to get everything collated, with the information as complete as possible: not just times and routes, but entrances, exits, pathways, levels, overpasses, and undercarriages where possible.

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De Vries believes using a local team is vital to the authenticity of WhereIsMyTransport’s data. “Looking at Dhaka in Bangladesh, we were met with the fact that in these markets, people differentiate between transportation services; the pricing is differentiated based on the nature of the service – is it standing, is it sitting, is it air-conditioned? And all these things actually impact the service.

“So we had to develop the tools and technologies to be able to handle the very dynamic nature of what you’re met with when you touch down on the ground. Because you actually have team members that are from the communities mapping their own hometown, they will also tell you that informally.”

De Vries, who has experience of both sides of the economic and urban mobility divide having grown up in South Africa, says that many people from developed regions are often oblivious to the need for reliable mapping in most big cities.

The reaction also includes shock that local authorities haven’t already taken the lead on this. After all, where social mobility exists, economic growth follows.

“I think the reality is that these markets are contending with different challenges to those of developed markets,” he says.

“I’ll never forget, there was a conversation I had one day with a transportation minister in East Africa, and it was one 46

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of the major capitals, and we were speaking to him about the importance of access to urban mobility information and having regular public transport services and integrating their formal and informal systems.

“His response to that was ‘absolutely, urban mobility is at the top of our agenda, it’s incredibly important. However, we also have to contend with…’, and he just started to list all of the other categories: really basic human rights and basic human needs that exist within these markets that also are competing for attention and resources and time.”

However, de Vries believes the ongoing success of WhereIsMyTransport – and the increase in urbanisation globally – is opening minds to the necessity of mobility for all. “At the very least, when we focus on the area of urban mobility, I think there is a broader understanding now of the wider impact and important role that it plays in furthering economic growth and social growth within the market. And to that extent, I think we’ve been able to raise the awareness of that at the baseline.”

Despite mapping 40 cities already, de Vries says there is a long way to go. He wants the 30 biggest emerging cities mapped and, perhaps even more importantly, he wants to ensure that the data in each city is regularly updated. As he puts it, he wants the data they capture

MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

It’s the proverbial equivalent of enabling a person to fish as opposed to giving them a fish”

Mexico City

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to go from a picture of a city’s transport system, to a medium-resolution video, to a 4K video.

“You’re touching on something that you can see from my face I’m really excited about,” he says. “Because we’re now able to have multiple clients per city licence, we’re actually able to leave a team behind in the market.

And what that team does is not only are they continuously updating the datasets but they are also building out local networks, so that we have direct relationships with the transport operators, with the city government, with the informal transport owners, even with drivers. So it’s kind of like we’ve moved

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from this era of taking a photo of the cities to maintaining what you might call a medium resolution video.”

Having the resource and tech to update on a weekly cycle also means WhereIsMyTransport is now able to provide data in the B2C and B2B realm, with technology companies wanting to develop products and services around mobility analysis, location-based services and mapping products.

Google joining the Series A funding of $7.5 million that WhereIsMyTransport received in February this year was a powerful statement that tech giants have faith in de Vries’s company having real value in previously untapped markets.

© WhereIsMyTransport Ltd, photography by Imani Selemani

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Cape Town, South Africa “To see global leaders like Google take to heart the potential for their products to transform life in emerging markets is really encouraging,” de Vries says. “And the very deliberate intent and humility and genuine ethical design intention with which they’ve approached building the solutions for these markets, and improving the experience for users, is also what’s been really encouraging for me.

“It’s been really nice for our team to start working a lot more closely with companies that we regard as the ones that get to change the world if they choose to turn their attention in that direction. It’s a privilege to be a part of

that, and to be working with a team that gets to contribute to bettering the lives of people in emerging markets.”

When de Vries was challenged at university to use technology to solve a real-world problem, few could have imagined the global impact his idea would be having in such a short space of time.

“It doesn’t take a lot to just lift your eyes, look around you and see incredible opportunity for change; positive change for impact on society,” he says.

“And I feel as a technologist and a citizen, that it’s incumbent upon us, if we have the tools and the talents, to affect that change.”

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No substitute for learning Karthik Krishnan is Global CEO of Britannica Group, Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Stern Business School and on the World Economic Forum Network.

Having overseen new initiatives which aim to promote educational equity and help teachers transform learning in classrooms, he’s very well-placed to speak to about the future of education. He talks to Tech For Good about the need for life-long learning, how curiosity is the key to education, and why digital enhancement rather than substitution is the way forward in transforming the schools system

INTERVIEW: Daniel Brigham

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here did your passion for life-long learning come from?

I grew up in a family where both of my parents were educators. First hand I’ve had the opportunity to see how really good teachers can have an oversized impact on the community. Education has always been the quickest bridge between the haves and the have-nots, and particularly from a social mobility point of view there has not been a better tool that can help a lot of people.

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We live in the 21st century, where things are changing pretty fast. The world we lived in 10 years ago is not the same world we live in today. In this kind of environment it’s important for us all to learn, unlearn, and re-learn. That can only happen if you have the penchant for lifelong learning. I’m a business leader, an NYU professor, and on the board of Urban Upbound – a non-profit that focuses on tackling poverty and transforming life – so one of the constant themes I see is education being one of the levers that,

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COVID has presented us with the chance to pause and ask ourselves ‘who do we choose to be?’ It has provided the opportunity to break with the past and reimagine a new and better world” Karthik Krishnan

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when used effectively, can lift everybody all across the world. Education can benefit individuals, it helps families, it benefits communities, it helps countries.

There is also a difference between education and learning. Education is extrinsic and driven by a curriculum; learning is intrinsic and driven by curiosity – and curiosity is the basis of lifelong learning. And I’m pretty big on the whole life-long learning piece, because if we lose our ability to think, learn, adapt and evolve, then the game is over.

Is there enough curiosity in teaching and in education?

Right now we are killing curiosity in the school system. Our current education model is based on an industrial revolution model. During the industrial revolution, we had taken the muscle power and converted that into machine power – and we just needed people to operate that, and people who were good at doing things that were repetitive. So the education model was much more focused on standardisation and memorisation.

According to the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report, almost 65% of the jobs that our elementary school students will end up having have not been defined yet. In that kind of environment, what do you teach them over 18 years and four years of college that’s going to be mean-

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ingful? Also, almost 50% of the upcoming generation is going to be either entrepreneurial or self-employed, and these are not skillsets we help students pick up in the current school system.

So it’s not just about the delivery of knowledge anymore, it’s about the discovery of knowledge – how do you build on existing knowledge and discover new stuff. The goal shouldn’t be about grades and certification, but also about what sorts of experiences you’re picking up that allows you to solve problems.

So are humans predisposed to get less curious?

It’s a combination. Ninety percent of a child’s brain is formed by the age of five, so it starts in the environment you’re being raised. But it’s also true

that teachers who were effective 20 years ago might not be as effective today because what we’re needing to learn is changing. How children are learning is changing, and the role of a teacher has changed and a lot of people have not realised that. We live in a world where we’re constantly inundated with information, so my personal take is that we’re all consuming a lot more information than we ever did but we’re processing less and less. To me that’s because cognitive information happens when you actually store information. But today we’re storing less and less information, and with devices in our hands all of the time we’re not observing, and with people sleeping less now it means we’re losing our ability to process information.

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There’s more incorrect and bad information readily available than there’s ever been – and that’s a barrier to curiosity and good teaching, isn’t it?

That’s so true. Fake information has always been there – let’s not pretend it’s a 21st-century concept. But previously, to get fake information out to a mass group of people cost a lot of money, and it was difficult to deliver it. But today, at near-zero cost you are able to create information and disseminate it to the far corners of the world. And if you know how to hack some of the algorithms, it’s easier still.

There was a 2018 MIT study that said bad information has a 70% higher chance of being forwarded or re-shared, and it takes six times as much effort to get good information to 1,500 people.

So let’s put this in context. If you look at technology platforms like search and social engines, they’re programmes like the PageRank algorithm – based on how many people are forwarding that information, and they use that to form the basis of whether the information is good or not. And the goal of social engines is to keep people trained on their website or app, and keep you hooked; so technology is putting us down a bad path and sometimes we don’t even realise it.

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article, why did they write it?’ – instead of them just clicking on the first two or three results on the results page.

We’ve had access to the internet for over 20 years now, so why has it taken education so long to catch up to the need to transform?

I think the awareness is there, but the action and impact is missing. In my own hypothesis what I find is it’s based on mindsets. Even if someone is trying to change things, because education is so political and emotional, there are multiple stakeholders who

NO SUBSTITUTE FOR LEARNING

Digital substitution is not digital learning.

The way we are using technologies in a lot of cases is much more of a substitution as opposed to an enhancer”

need to come together. For example, with COVID there are certain parents who say ‘my children are not learning from remote learning, we need to have them back in school.’ So one school might come back and say ‘let’s bring them back to school’, but then you will also have parents who don’t want their children to go back to school. Then you will have teachers willing to go back into the school system, and other teachers who feel at risk or vulnerable.

So for every move you are trying to make, there will always be people with valid opposing views.

So we need a hybrid mindset – what I call integrated thinking. For example, if some teachers don’t want to come into work because they feel at risk, today with technology those teachers can still be at home delivering the lecture. Before COVID, there were over 600 million students who did not have access to any form of basic information. But with investment in remote learning, imagine a world where a teacher sitting in the middle of the UK could be teaching a child in Africa or Asia. Not having teachers in a local community should no longer have a negative impact because ISSUE 05

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you can have a trained teacher reaching out to these students using technology and still give them a meaningful education experience. Then you can have someone locally who may not be trained as a teacher but who can still help the students with answering some questions and with homework. So the model can pivot in a way that’s meaningful.

So things haven’t moved on in education not because we don’t know what needs to be done, but because we haven’t had the political will, or the passion or the commitment to see it through.

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In 10 years, will we be talking about a pre- and post-COVID world when it comes to education?

Pre-COVID, the thinking was that schools and colleges were the centre of learning and you had to go there. Post-COVID, we’ve realised that learning can happen anywhere and there are multiple models. So if I miss a lecture in the morning, that can be recorded and I can view it later. If I were sick I’d miss out on school for a week and be a week behind, but now if the classroom is recorded I have the opportunity to watch it at home. It

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also means that people on low incomes, who might struggle to get to school due to public transport costs, can in a post-COVID world have better access remotely. COVID has presented us with the chance to pause and ask ourselves ‘who do we choose to be?’ It has provided the opportunity to break with the past and reimagine a new and better world.

You’ve touched on this throughout, but specifically what role should technology be playing in transforming education? Outside of remote learning, how else can it be a force for good?

I went to a school system where I was taught in front of a blackboard. My children are taught in front of a smartboard, where they can write things and print stuff. But do you think the quality of learning is going to be different whether you’re reading in a textbook, or on an iPad? Well, if it’s the same text then it doesn’t make any difference how you’re reading it.

Exactly. Digital substitution is not digital learning. The way we are using technologies in a lot of cases is much more of a substitution as opposed to an enhancer.

Great things can happen when tech is being used as an enhancer. So there are certain paths that can’t be used without technology: remote learning, for one.

When technology is used right, particularly with augmented intelligence, it really allows us to take the path of redefining learning” Another is augmented intelligence: think about a teacher who is in the classroom, who spends breaktime grading an assignment. It takes five minutes to grade an assignment, and if there are 20 kids in the classroom that’s an hour and 40 minutes of grading, assuming you’re efficient. Today, with the tech and AI out there, what if the grading is being done by technology?

Take this particular case: you and I take the same quiz of 10 questions – you’ve got all 10 answers right, and I’ve got all 10 questions right. From a teacher’s point of view, the two of us are comparable. But, what if you answered those 10 questions in five minutes, and I took 20 minutes? That actually suggests you ISSUE 05

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understand the concepts better than me. Or the other thing that could happen is I might have got nine questions right in eight minutes, but then spent 12 minutes on another question. So these are potential insights the teacher could be getting, learning that one question is something I struggled to understand. So if you can get that sort of data, you can adjust how you’re teaching the class, or teaching individual students. So all of a sudden the teacher isn’t focusing on ticking boxes and giving out the grades, but they have greater insights provided by technology to personalise learning.

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Another example is that people have different styles of learning. You might be a visual learner, and I might be an auditory learner. Technology allows you to support all different styles of learning.

If a child has dyslexia, for example, to make that child sit in a classroom and read text is painful for them – they won’t enjoy the learning process. But with a read-aloud feature, they will be able to listen to the text and enjoy learning much more, and won’t be getting frustrated.

When technology is used right, particularly with augmented intelligence, it really allows us to take the path of

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redefining learning. It’s not just using technology as a substitution.

Are you hopeful that education will eventually use technology as an enhancer rather than a substitute? And how do we get there?

I think we will see a paradigm shift in how we approach learning. I think the level of awareness was there but there was nothing pushing us down the path.

I think the coronavirus will make us rethink and reshape things. It’s a portal that opens an opportunity to break with the past, so that’s one reason I’m opti-

mistic. The other reason is that the types of conversations I’ve been having with people across the world – we just did a partnership with Japan, who has asked us to look into a curriculum that blends analytical and creative thinking. So these things are starting to happen. There are also more conversations around ensuring more people have access to technology, and to broadband, so that people don’t fall behind and create an access divide.

So I’m optimistic that in 10 years we will have seen a significant shift from just grades and certification to experiences and skill.

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EXPERT INSIGHT

EXPERT INSIGHT: HOW TO CREATE A HEALTHIER FOOD SHOP Kees Jacobs, Vice President of Global Consumer Good and Retail Sector at Capgemini, lays out a digital recipe for retailers to drive positive societal change and help consumers make healthier food choices

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ccording to the World Health Organization, over half of Europe’s adult population is overweight, and similar pictures can be seen across the world. Unhealthy food choices play a large role in the obesity crisis. The low cost of unhealthy food, a lack of education and constant advertising have created a climate where it is easy to make poor choices, and at a potential cost to our health and wellness.

Who should shoulder the responsibility of turning this around? In light of COVID-19, more consumers are looking to organisations to embody a sense of responsibility and altruism.

In April, Capgemini surveyed 11,000 60

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KEES JACOBS

In light of COVID-19, more consumers are looking to organisations to embody a sense of responsibility and altruism”

consumers and found that more than half of consumers expect organisations to showcase their sense of purpose and give back to society, both during the crisis and beyond.

Food brands, manufacturers, and retailers have an opportunity to become proactive change-makers by innovating their in-store and online offerings to help consumers make healthier food choices.

The benefits are three-fold: helping the organisation itself to embody a sense of much-needed social purpose; for the bottom line, improving customer loyalty and standing; improving global health outcomes.

So why is change so hard? While the desire to be healthy is universal, good intentions are often thwarted by in-the-moment temptations, as well as influenced by marketing messages,

complex claims, and sensory appeal.

As a result, behavior modification is complex. When it comes to encouraging consumers to make better food choices, changing behavior at scale is not straightforward. For example, food items have nutritional values printed on the packs - while this may be useful in increasing individual awareness, it does not address the deep, systemic behavioral issues.

Effective health and wellness programmes have to aim high: they must be multi-faceted and address the underlying social and cultural issues underpinning how today’s consumers make their choices. Solutions must simplify the complex and sometimes conflicting world of ‘healthy living’, breaking down this lofty goal into smaller steps and creating clear and consistent paths which reward progress over time.

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These concepts leverage technology as a way to empower consumers by improving access and understanding, and inspiring a sense of motivation�

Together with The Consumer Goods Forum, as part of its Healthier Lives Coalition, Capgemini recently explored how grocery retailers can use technology at scale to guide their customers to make healthier choices. The paper deconstructs four digital concepts which supermarkets and food brands can deploy to shape consumer behavior. These concepts are not solutions to poor food choices, but rather enablers, leveraging technology as a way to empower consumers by improving access and understanding, and inspiring a sense of motivation.

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consumers visualise the health ratings of their purchases. Products in the green category are healthy, yellow moderately healthy and orange the least healthy.

These colour assignments are calculated by an algorithm that analyses products against official health guidelines, ingredients, claims, and other factors – a far more holistic assessment than judging products on nutritional information alone.

In store, the colour codes are displayed on digital shelf tags or revealed through a barcode reader on the shopping trolley or a mobile app. Carts can also be outfitted to designate space for each colour category, helping customers

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visualise the overall composition of their shopping and weight purchases toward more healthy options. Online, the same system is present across product and checkout pages.

The intention is to educate and influence behavior towards healthier choices. In breaking down the basket by colour, Decoded helps demystify the food labels and nutritional messaging, simplifying the decision-making process for many consumers. Over time, consumers become more familiar with product categories, helping them form healthy habits and bringing balance into their diet.

An example of the Healthier Lives Coalition in action was launched last year by Carrefour with its online programme, ‘On s’y met’. It is designed to nudge consumers towards healthier baskets and increase awareness around healthy lifestyles as they buy groceries online. The campaign encourages consumers to eat better by advertising healthy, brand-led recipes on the Carrefour website, based around fruits and vegetables. The campaign included a financial incentive: a specific promotional price of 15% to 25% off almost all products in the recipes. As a result, Carrefour recorded an increase of x1.2 (in value and in volumes) in sales of the selected products featured in the recipes, and the brands promoted also saw a x1.6 increase in sales.

As more consumers look to – and expect – the organisations they purchase from to act with responsibility and purpose, grocery retailers and consumer products companies have a unique opportunity to use technology for good and improve the lives of their customers.

Ultimately, by incorporating digital solutions like this into their stores and e-commerce platforms, organisations can both boost the bottom line and have a positive societal impact, and also win loyalty as customers begin to feel that the companies care for their wellbeing.

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REVOLUTIONISING HEALTHCARE Dr Malcolm Pradhan, Chief Medical Officer at Alcidion, and Dr Carolina García Vidal, head of Respiratory Infection at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, discuss how new technologies are making hospitals more efficient in the fight against COVID-19 AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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s the shadow of a second lockdown starts to cast its gloom over Europe, the world’s eyes are directed towards the epicentre of the pandemic: hospitals.

But, are hospitals’ IT systems prepared to fight the pandemic?

Preventable errors in healthcare is the third leading cause of death in the United States. According to a John Hopkins study, medical mistakes lead to 250,000 deaths every year. The number is estimated to be higher — some studies say it’s as high as 440,000 — but the lack of mentions of human error and system failures in death certificates obscures the real numbers.

As a response to this situation, a new area of expertise is gaining traction: 66

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Health Informatics. Doctors and computer scientists are working hand in hand to come up with technological solutions that improve patient care, reduce medical errors and even predict healthcare outcomes.

COVID-19 has only increased the need for these solutions.

When the pandemic hit Barcelona last March, the city’s Hospital Clinic was suddenly inundated with patients.

Although the hospital has only 800 beds and 10 infectious diseases specialists, by the end of March it found itself caring for 2,000 COVID-19 patients.

Carolina García Vidal is the head of Respiratory Infection and Infection in Severe Immunocompromised Patients at this hospital. She led the efforts to

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When we realised how complicated this would be, what we did was put our AI program at the service of COVID patients” Dr Carolina García Vidal treat COVID patients and manage the infectious disease department during these difficult times.

“What everyone had to do was put all the hospital doctors at the service of COVID patients: surgeons, gynaecologists, ophthalmologists,” she says.

“Without them we wouldn’t have made it, of course, but you have to understand that their area of ​​expertise is very far from COVID and that you are therefore placing a huge responsibility on them.”

However, since the year preceding the pandemic, Barcelona’s Hospital Clinic had been working on becoming a smart hospital. As part of this project, a team of doctors and engineers were exploring artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to improve medical care.

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If you think about current IT systems, they’re really designed as electronic filing cabinets. But Miya Precision has been built from the ground up to be able to examine data as it flows through the system” Dr Malcolm Pradhan

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This AI tool was originally being used to support cancer patients with febrile neutropenia, to predict and prevent infections. However, that project was paralysed last March and turned into a Digital Control Centre for COVID-19.

“At that moment, when we realised how complicated this would be, what we did was put our AI programme at the service of COVID patients,” García Vidal says.

The AI tool developed by García Vidal’s team is able to analyse over a trillion anonymised data points, identify clinical patterns and predict outcomes, allowing clinicians to provide personalised treatments to COVID-19 patients. The team realised that the complications that COVID-19 patients faced generally fell into one of three categories: complications related to a new infection (co-infection), inflammation or thrombosis.

“We realised that each of these patterns was correlated to analytical findings,” García Vidal says. “So what we did was put our AI system to analyse everything that was happening with our patients - 2000 patients - in real-time.”

The AI then classified the patients according to how serious their condition was and the likelihood that they would develop a specific type of complication. The tool uses neural networks to analyse the data points and identify the patients who are likely to require

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mechanical ventilation, or those who might be at an increased risk of dying in the next few hours.

The results showed that the AI was able to predict, with 90% accuracy, the trajectory of the disease in a specific patient.

The use of the AI tool in the hospital led to a 93.9% improvement in patients’ conditions from the fifth day of the disease and reduced COVID-19-related mortality rate in the hospital by 50%.

García Vidal is “extremely proud” of this achievement but also confesses that a significant reason behind its success is that the hospital had already migrated their patients’ entire clinical history to an intelligent system called SILDD (in Spanish, Intelligent System for Reading and Dispensing Data).

“The greatest difficulty that hospitals have is being able to read the data in their medical records,” García Vidal says. “I think that this is something we are very advanced in, in comparison with other hospitals.”

García Vidal’s team has received a €600,000 grant from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) to develop the AI and is now working on expanding the solution to four other European hospitals within the EIT Health network.

García Vidal believes that data analytics will be extremely useful in tackling COVID-19 and understanding the nature of the virus, despite the public’s concerns regarding the use of medical data.

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“I am sure that any doctor who sees these patients improve because of prediction systems, diagnostic aid systems, and treatment aid systems will end up embracing these techniques with total ease,“ she says.

The main challenge in the digitalisation of medicine is, however, the need to obtain high-quality, unified data that can be transferred between doctors and even hospitals.

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“In truth, when you are able to create this infrastructure, when you are able to create these intelligent systems for reading and dispensing data, transferring AI from one hospital to another will be really easy,” García Vidal says. “But you have to do that job first.”

One company that is helping hospitals “do the job” is Alcidion.

Alcidion is an Australian healthtech company that helps healthcare organ-

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isations embrace new technologies.

Dr Malcolm Pradhan, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, says that many of the problems that lead to preventable deaths, such as IT failings, have not been addressed in the last 20 years.

“When I was going through medical school and then as a junior doctor, I was really struck by how manual everything was, even though we had some basic computer information on the screens,”

he says. “Sadly, things haven’t changed that much over the last 20-25 years.

People are doing more typing, but a lot of the processes are still the same, and that’s what we are trying to change.”

Alcidion was born to provide a new approach to these challenges.

“We started up Alcidion to focus on ‘How do we improve healthcare to improve patient safety, to enable clinicians to do their work better?’” Pradhan says.

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AI is here to cause a great revolution, to the level of the appearance of antibiotics or other great milestones of medicine, no doubt” Dr Carolina García Vidal Alcidion is known in the UK for its Patientrack early warning and electronic observations system. Patientrack is currently being used in several National Health Service (NHS) trusts, where it has helped hospitals to reduce cardiac arrests and improve sepsis and acute kidney injury diagnosis. However, Alcidion has recently formally launched another product for the NHS, Miya Precision, conceived as a more comprehensive approach to healthcare and the NHS’ first smart clinical asset.

“If you think about current IT systems, they’re really designed as electronic filing cabinets,” Pradhan says. “But Miya Precision has been built from the ground up to be able to examine data as it flows through the system, analyse that data in real-time and apply clinical decision support and algorithms to identify clinical risks, clinicians who forget or haven’t complied with best practice, people who haven’t turned up to appointments who need to be followed-up; all that sort of 72

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stuff that is manual and such a cognitive burden on clinicians every day.”

Pradhan stresses that the purpose of Miya Precision is not to replace clinicians but to support them by compiling and presenting all the pertinent information so that clinicians can focus on making the best decisions for each patient.

“We use real-time natural language processing to assist clinicians as they type,” Pradhan says. “We analyse what they’re typing and recommend best practice guidelines and retrieve data for them so that they don’t have to go manually hunting for it.”

Although Miya Precision uses AI for features such as this language processing system, Pradhan is wary of the limitations of these technologies.

“We use AI algorithms more for things like predicting flow and risk,” he says. “But, having been in this area for a long time, I’m very nervous about using machine learning in patient care,

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because the deep learning models are quite brutal and quite sensitive to noise in the data. And if you know anything about healthcare data, it’s very messy.”

Miya Precision also supports healthcare workers by automating manual tasks, such as checking a patient’s kidney function or keeping track of the drugs that a patient has received. In addition, Alcidion has launched a remote healthcare capability in Miya Precision and developed Miya Memory, a mobile electronic patient record that enables clinicians to access information anywhere at any time.

“Because of COVID, people are accelerating virtual care, which was always going to be the solution in the future,” Pradhan says. “We just didn’t know it would need 74

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to be a solution in the first few months of this year, but it was always necessary to scale up healthcare.”

In Australia, Alcidion has been using this technology to monitor people at risk during COVID-19 and even worked with the New South Wales local health districts to support the healthcare staff by monitoring patients in their home or quarantine hotels.

The pandemic has been a great driver for innovative healthcare solutions, and it has also demonstrated the need for these solutions to be smart and adaptable.

“Health organisations had to learn the hard way,” Pradhan says. “Even if you found some good evidence about risk

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calculation, or a risk algorithm, or even just a good way of managing patients, being able to implement that in any kind of timeframe while under pressure was sure to be almost impossible.”

Although hospitals such as García Vidal’s did manage to adapt to the challenges of COVID-19, the Hospital Clinic is unique in its possession of electronic patient records. Nonetheless, it is still unable to share those records and findings with other hospitals.

“A big challenge of the Health IT industry is the inability to move data between different systems,” Pradhan says. “And it’s not a technology problem. It’s a strategy by big companies to lock out other competitors.”

This is the reason why Miya Precision’s ability to take data from different sources — lab reports, scans, doctor notes, vitals, etc — and standardise it, could be game-changing.

“That’s a really powerful thing to do because it means that if someone has an innovation in one part of the country and someone else is interested they can much more easily bring it across, download it, and adapt it,” Pradhan says. “That’s really a key part of where we want to be: helping clinicians and Trusts improve their care, but also maximise their use of their data, rather than just having it sitting in databases.”

Data is one of the most underused resources that the healthcare industry has, and it is fundamental to ensure that there is communication between experts and hospitals. Moreover, in García Vidal’s opinion, it is also an important step in the development of AI solutions.

“AI is here to cause a great revolution, to the level of the appearance of antibiotics or other great milestones of medicine, no doubt,” she says.

COVID-19 has made the healthcare sector painfully aware of its need to step up its technological game, whether that is through AI, data analytics or automation. There are many challenges on the way, but also many lives to save.

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