Tech For Good - Issue 13

MICROSOFT’S AI VISION FOR EMERGENCY SERVICES THE THREAT OF DEEP SEA MINING THE MOVERS BEHIND THE RISE OF URBAN FARMING IS ONLINE LEARNING HERE TO STAY?

ISSUE 13

ONE TRUTH

The East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust is going through a digital transformation to keep all of its life-saving information in one place. We were invited along for the ride

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

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ne version of the truth. It’s a simple, powerful statement that gets to the core of the digital transformation that the East of England Ambulance Service (EEAS) NHS Trust is going through.

“The benefits of having one version of the truth is that it makes decision-making much easier on an individual basis, but also a system basis,” EEAS’ CEO, Dr Tom Davis, tells Tech For Good.

“For our individual patients, seeing all their data in one place allows us to make the best decision with the best available data specific to that patient. And then, as you expand that across the system, we can start to identify areas of inequity, which can help us learn from today’s patients to make sure that tomorrow’s patients have a better experience.”

EEAS looks after six million people across six counties in the UK. To better

serve its patients, a year ago EEAS began a journey to create a data lake that brought all of the previously disparate legacy systems and information about patients into one place. With clinicians and analysts having easy access, it means better decisions about patient care are reached more efficiently. Ultimately, it saves lives.

It’s a fascinating, important piece of work, and we speak to the leaders driving the transformation.

On a similar theme, we chat to Microsoft and Hexagon about how they are helping the emergency services leverage AI to improve public safety. We’ve also got features on deep sea mining, the rise of urban farming and the growing risk of technology addiction.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

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From Honduras to Kenya, we round up the latest news

How Microsoft is helping the emergency services leverage AI

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Behind East of England Ambulance Service’s digital transformation

Kura CEO Godfrey Ryan on making school transport safer

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Freight Farms’ sustainability crusade through urban farming

A deep dive into the rights and wrongs of ocean mining

GLOBAL GOOD

CASE STUDY

PUBLIC SECTOR

EDUCATION

ENVIRONMENT

ENVIRONMENT

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GOOD OR BAD? Is online learning better than in-person teaching?

TEEN TECH STORIES We meet 16-year-old coder and gymnast Michelle Hua

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SOCIAL GOOD

We visit a Swiss clinic tackling technology disorders

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EXPERT INSIGHT

Eaton Corporation’s Siobahn Meikle on water management

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GLOBAL GOOD

Nvidia gives health researchers access to its $100m UK supercomputer Nvidia will make its $100 million Cambridge-1 supercomputer available to external researchers in the UK healthcare industry. The computer will be launched in July 2021 with the goal of accelerating research in digital biology, genomics and quantum computing. AstraZeneca, King’s College London and the NHS are some of the organisations that will have access to Cambridge-1.

Virginia launches first smart city testbed in Virginia Virginia has launched what it considers to be the US’ first smart city testbed. The project has been developed in partnership with Stafford County, Virginia’s Centre for Innovative Technology and technology provider Mutalink.

The new testbed will explore Internet of Things deployment using 5G communications in real-world settings. More than 15 commercial partners are also part of the project.

Heifer and IBM support Honduran coffee and cocoa farmers using blockchain

GLOBAL GOOD In case you missed them, we’ve debriefed six of the most interesting Tech For Good stories from the last four weeks 6

TECH FOR GOOD

IBM and Heifer have announced a new partnership that will use blockchainbased IBM Food Trust and artificial intelligence platform IBM Watson to help small-scale coffee and cocoa farmers in Honduras get higher crop yields and access new markets. This technology will allow farmers to track products from farm to point of sale to avoid the 46% to 59% loss that occurs because of excessive middlemen.

NEWS DEBRIEF

Taiwanese tech giants buy and donate 10m COVID vaccines Taiwanese technology manufacturers Foxconn and TSMC have signed a deal to buy 10 million doses of a COVID vaccine that they plan to donate to the country’s health authority. The deal sidesteps months of complicated geopolitical negotiations between Beijing and Taipei. The companies will pay $35 million to German manufacturer BioNTech for the vaccines with the goal of slowing down infection rates in the country.

Kenyan foodtech startup Kune raises $1m in preseed funding Six-month-old Kenyan foodtech startup Kune has closed a $1 million pre-seed round to launch its on-demand food service in August 2021. Kune delivers freshly-made, ready-to-eat meat meals at affordable prices, by combining cloud and dark kitchen concepts. The funding round was led by pan-African venture capital firm Launch Africa Ventures with participation from Century Oak Capital GmbH and Consonance.

Edtech company becomes India’s most valuable startup Following a recent funding round, edtech company Byju’s has become India’s most valuable startup. Bangalore-based, Byju’s has reached a valuation of $16.5 billion after raising $350 million from UBS Group, Zoom founder Eric Yuan, Blackstone and others. Byju’s is now the 11th most valuable startup in the world.

The company has said it plans to use the funds to grow through acquisitions.

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EAST OF ENGLAND AMBULANCE SERVICE

DELIVERING ONE VERSION OF THE TRUTH During an emergency, reliable data can save lives. Tech For Good speaks to the leadership of the East of England Ambulance Service about how a digital data lake can help managers make better decisions, and achieve faster and better patient care for the six million people they serve

PROJECT DIRECTOR: Romily Broad AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía VIDEOGRAPHER: Fraser Harrop PHOTOGRAPHER: Krystian Data

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he phone rings. “999 what is your emergency?” If the situation is life-threatening, an ambulance is expected to have reached the patient within eight minutes after receiving a call. In these cases, every minute counts and having accurate information about the emergency is essential.

But when patients welcome the ambulance services, they don’t want to repeat to the clinicians the same story that they’ve just told over the phone, and do it all over again once they reach the hospital. They don’t want to have to recall their medical history and previous treatments when they’re in a state of stress. Healthcare providers are aware of this, and that is why the East of England Ambulance Service (EEAS) has embarked on a journey to 10

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create a digital data lake that will store all of this information, saving time, and lives, in the process.

As one of the largest ambulance services in the UK, the EEAS NHS Trust provides urgent care to six million people across an area of about 7,500 square miles that spans over six counties in the east of England.

EEAS attends over one million emergency calls a year and transports nearly two million patients to and from routine hospital appointments in various methods of transportation, from cycles to fast response cars and frontline ambulances.

A year ago, EEAS got started on a path towards digital transformation that included the creation of a data lake where all the information about its patients and systems could be kept together, breaking

EAST OF ENGLAND AMBULANCE SERVICE

the organisation’s data silo. In short, creating one version of the truth. EEAS’ CEO, Dr Tom Davis, and his team brought Tech For Good along on this journey.

“One of the challenges for the NHS over many years has been the need for individual organisations to work more collectively as partner organisations to make sure that we join up the care for our

patients,” Dr Davis says. “And, obviously, communication and access to data are really important aspects of that.

“The benefits of having one version of the truth is that it makes decision-making much easier on an individual basis, but also a system basis. For our individual patients, seeing all their data in one place allows us to make the best decision with the best

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CASE STUDY

The benefits of having one version of the truth is that it makes decisionmaking much easier on an individual basis, but also on a system basis.

This can help us learn from today’s patients to make sure that tomorrow’s patients have a better experience” Dr Tom Davis

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EAST OF ENGLAND AMBULANCE SERVICE

available data specific to that patient.

And then, as you expand that across the system, we can start to identify areas of inequity, which can help us learn from today’s patients to make sure that tomorrow’s patients have a better experience.”

A fundamental piece of EEAS’ digital transformation project is its data strategy. It will see the creation of a data lake, where all the information from the ambulance service’s different systems will be put together, allowing both analysts and clinicians to reach accurate conclusions and make better decisions. The process, which began a year ago, is set to be completed within the next 12 months and Stephen Bromhall, Chief Information Officer at EEAS, is the man tasked with leading its success.

“We were able to look at what was good in the commercial world, and how that could help us as a provider of services to six million patients in the East of England, to look at how we drive transformation and use leading technologies for the benefit of patient care,” Bromhall says. “We also wanted to make sure that our staff have the technology they need to do their jobs, not just for the frontline, but also all of the support services that keep our paramedics going on a daily basis.”

Similar to the situation of many healthcare providers, EEAS’s data was stored in many different unconnected legacy systems. Crews would have to look into

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one application for one part of the patient journey and then jump into other elements as they analysed the care pathway. This took time that could be better spent, for example, saving lives. EEAS’ strategy is to bring together all of this information into one single location to provide faster and better patient care.

“What our patients don’t want to do is have to keep telling us the same story over and over again, during a very challenging time,” Bromhall says. “We want to capture

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that information in one place and be able to use it to pull further information about that particular patient; perhaps their long-term conditions or their medication, so that our crews have more time to spend focusing on the patients, rather than trying to find data about them.”

That way, when the ambulance crew arrives at a patient’s home, they already have an understanding of the situation and the patient’s medical history. But the data journey does not end here. Once the

EAST OF ENGLAND AMBULANCE SERVICE

In Partnership: EEAS and Version 1 Version 1 has been a fundamental part of East of England Ambulance Service’s digital transformation and the creation of a new data lake that will improve patient outcomes

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Ready to modernise, transform and accelerate your IT? We drive customer success through proactive partnerships that deliver real business benefits

www.version1.com

CASE STUDY

For us, that’s what this project delivers: that one version of the truth that we can then store in our systems, but also make available to other partners through the ecosystem of healthcare to speed up care throughout the whole system” Stephen Bromhall

ambulance service has taken the patient to the hospital, EEAS wants to be able to give that information to the hospital workers who will be treating them.

“For us, that’s what this project delivers: that one version of the truth that we can then store in our systems, but also make available to other partners through the ecosystem of

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healthcare to speed up care throughout the whole system,” Bromhall says.

In order to bring together the information from all of EEAS’ systems, Bromhall’s team devised a phased approach, which accounted for the different metrics and characteristics of each of the systems. The first phase has already been completed,

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and it is related to one of the most important systems of an ambulance service: rostering.

“Rostering is vital for the ambulance service, or any organisation, because it is used to actually look at what our demand is,” says Caroline Jones, Head of Rostering at EEAS. “It looks at how many vehicles you might need to put on at a certain time

for a certain day and then allows us to actually make sure we’re providing a safe level of cover with people so that they are where they should be and where we actually need them.”

Jones describes the previous rostering system as “very manual”, explaining that users had to go to the software and individually run all of the reports, export them to Excel and give them to the relevant people. In contrast, the new data lake, created using Microsoft cloud technologies, updates automatically every 10 to 15 minutes, combining all the sources of information to an accurate and almost realtime picture of the service, that users can access at any time, from anywhere.

“I’d say the majority of people are now using it and loving it,” Jones says. “It’s not just about improving our team and the information, it’s actually about helping managers to do their jobs more efficiently.

Rather than having to filter through lots and lots of reports, data and information, they now can actually go away to do more staff support, more training and make better decisions.”

One of these employees used to be Zoe Collis. She joined EEAS as a 999 call handler when she was 18 and is now the Head of Information and Analytics for the organisation. During her career, she has seen EEAS and the wider NHS and the growth of reporting and dashboards within

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healthcare. The data lake is just one more step in this transformation.

“We are enabling more data structures to be fed into that ability, more information to be visible, and making work more efficient across the organisation,” Collis says. “We’ve now moved on to the patient transport services data feed, which is just coming to a close in the next week or so. And again, they had daily refresh rates, which are now every three hours with the aim to move to 15 minutes before the end of this month.”

The rostering system was the first system whose data was put into the data lake, but it won’t be the last. The next phase of the project is critical, as it relates to the 999 call system, including all the information from the calls received, as well as the telephone and patient-care records. EEAS takes an

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average of 3,300 calls a day. As a result, the 999 system is the one that holds the majority of the organisation’s data, and therefore the most complex step of the digital transformation.

“Once the transformation is completed, we will create a data dictionary which will identify the definitions for each of the metrics included, and give the organisation consistency across all of the reports,” Collis says. “This will enable the paramedics to see the critical areas of focus for the day on their personal issue devices across all of the systems, which is something they do not have access to currently.

They will be able to see the pressure points and then perhaps divert patients to another hospital, giving them faster and better care overall.”

EAST OF ENGLAND AMBULANCE SERVICE

It’s not just about improving our team and the information, it’s actually about helping managers to do their jobs more efficiently” Caroline Jones ISSUE 13

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But EEAS has not been on this journey alone. The ambulance service’s data lake project has been developed following a competitive process with Version 1. With over 20 years of experience and over 1500 team members, Version 1 helps customers navigate their way through shifting IT landscapes. The company also has a history of working with both government and private sector agencies, as well

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as with other health service agencies in both the UK and Ireland.

Mary Kearney, Change Management Consultant at Version 1, explains why the company was best suited to support EEAS’s transformation. “We are an IT company that recognises the value of data,” she says. “We pride ourselves in being very much a customer-focused company, and making a real difference

EAST OF ENGLAND AMBULANCE SERVICE

through long-term outcome-focused relationships with our customers.

“Everybody is aware of the fact that data analytics is ‘the next big thing’. But that move from seeing data as something that’s used as part of your operational processes, to something that there’s real value in can be difficult for companies. This is because the operational systems were designed to solve operational issues; they

weren’t designed to allow the kind of data manipulation that is now expected. It’s a question of getting the right work in the right systems. That’s why moving the data into one platform where you can do that reporting is just much more beneficial to the individual companies.”

With the new data lake, all of EEAS’ information will be held in one single place.

There’ll be no more gaps or mistakes on the

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This [system] will enable the paramedics to see the critical areas of focus for the day on their personal issue devices across all of the systems, which is something they do not have access to currently” Zoe Collis

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EAST OF ENGLAND AMBULANCE SERVICE

reports because of contradicting or missing information. And all of this has been developed in record time, using an agile DevOps approach to address each business area individually and bring the data together as quickly as possible. The result is obvious: an easy and faster decision-making process for everyone involved.

But technology is not the reason why digital transformation happens; people are. And this is why the collaboration between the EEAS and Version 1 teams has been a fundamental element of the ambulance service’s digital journey.

“One of the key reasons for the success of this project is the partnership with Version 1,” Dr Davis says. “The relationship definitely hasn’t been one of provider and customer.

It’s been absolutely one of collaboration with both teams using their different expertise to ensure that the product that we are ending up with is the very best. It’s a great example of how the public sector can work with the private sector because, ultimately, we’re all aiming for the same thing, which is that one true source of the truth, and a better outcome for our patients.”

What does the future hold? Once EEAS has gathered information, it plans to put it to use.

“Currently, the tech that we’re using really just sits within our data lake,” Bromhall says. “As part of the long-term journey, I want to start to consider machine

learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing.”

That vision might not be too far down the road. The data lake that EEAS is currently building will allow for those layers to be added on top and the organisation has recently hired its data scientist, who will soon start looking at ways to utilise the information held in the data lake. In the future, data analytics tools might be able to predict what would happen in specific situations, such as a bank holiday weekend, a bad storm or another COVID-19 wave, and how it would affect an ambulance service such as EEAS. Moreover, these technologies could also suggest solutions about how to best manage the available resources to be able to respond adequately to crises.

According to Bromhall, EEAS could start its first wave of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications before the end of this calendar year.

“This is the new ‘What if?’” Bromhall says.

“The data is never leaving our data lake. It’s not like there’s a worry that the data is going to be exploited for commercial purposes.

We’re inquisitive about what that data tells us. What does that mean? How can we use it differently? It’s effectively an untapped asset that we, as an organisation, want to use going forward. And that’s really what this journey is about, which is controlling our data and being able to use it for our benefit, and for the benefit of our six million patients.”

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DOWN ON THE URBAN FARM

DOWN ON THE URBAN FARM Freight Farms is on a crusade to help tackle food security, bring sustainability to the local food system, and revolutionise food production. We find out how AUTHOR: Joe Appleton

IMAGES © FREIGHT FARMS ISSUE 13

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ccording to the UN, more than 68% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050.

The rise of megacities is a challenge that governments are already struggling to deal with. Swelling populations are putting pressure on urban services such as local housing and transit, but as populations increase, along with a greater demand for resources, securing access to basic amenities such as fresh food and water will become harder than ever.

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It’s because of this that food security should be at the heart of any city’s longterm resilience plan.

Currently, cities can easily import their produce. However, as municipalities edge their ways towards carbon and sustainability goals, the current use of impractical logistics will make fresh food harder to come by and more expensive for urban dwellers. It sounds apocalyptic, but with careful planning, creative innovation, and the adoption of modern

DOWN ON THE URBAN FARM

technology, providing access to fresh food can be sustainable, socially equitable, and incredibly profitable too.

Boston-based vertical farming specialists Freight Farms aims to change the way the world views local food production, bringing sustainable solutions to a system that is under threat. To do this, it’s deploying modular, tech-laden shipping containers to entrepreneurial farmers and bringing automation, IoT, and data-analytics to the urban agriculture industry.

Currently, Freight Farms has a presence in 48 US States and 32 countries, supporting more than 537 farmers (and counting), many who began their journey with absolutely no experience in agriculture at all.

“Vertical farming shouldn’t be a far-fetched novelty that’s inaccessible to the general public, because that’s how it’s perceived,” says Caroline Katsiroubas, Director of Marketing for Freight Farms.

“Instead, it’s a powerful tool for food production, and we want to get it into the hands of more and more people.”

Container farms aren’t a new phenomenon. The use of containers for growing produce is happening all around the world, from Vietnam to Nigeria, and in a variety of ways. What makes Freight Farms different is the level of technology involved that can help take the hard work out of farming.

Co-founders Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman first saw the value of urban farming when they were working on a rooftop greenhouse project for a school in Boston, Massachusetts. While they were developing their greenhouse, the pair realised the limitations of conventional farming methods for urban settings, as well the boundaries involved, including the knowledge, costs, and time required to turn the idea of an urban farm into a profitable enterprise. To make urban agriculture accessible, it needed to be ISSUE 13

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Vertical farming shouldn’t be a farfetched novelty that’s inaccessible to the general public.

It’s a powerful tool for food production, and we want to get it into the hands of more and more people” Caroline Katsiroubas

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DOWN ON THE URBAN FARM

space-saving, modular, and something everyone could operate.

Shipping containers provided the ideal solution. As Boston is a port city, containers were easily available. What’s more, the global shipping industry is already built around infrastructure designed specifically for containers.

With careful design and the application of advanced technologies, container farms were about to go through something of an evolution. After a successful campaign on Kickstarter, Freight Farms was officially launched in 2013 and people quickly took interest.

Early adopters came in the form of business-minded entrepreneurs who saw the value of local produce for urban landscapes. Soon,

these high-tech farms were popping up on rooftops and vacant lots in different cities of the world. It wasn’t long until Google got involved and purchased one for their Mountain View campus, with universities and other organisations following suit. Since then, the technology has evolved but the mission statement remains the same: to bring accessible and sustainable food production to areas that need it most, from densely populated cities to isolated rural locations.

The company’s current flagship container farm, the Greenery S, looks like it comes straight from the realm of science-fiction. Packed with sensors and sophisticated technology, it truly is a smart farm. The

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Greenery S, and all of Freight Farms’ other container farming modules, are governed by the company’s Farmhand App. Using a network of cameras, IoT sensors, and other data inputs, the Farmhand App gives users access to a full suite of tools that control almost every aspect of the farming process.

“We have full remote monitoring so that you can watch your farm at all times,” says Katsiroubas. “You can check the

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water levels, CO2 levels, the humidity, and the lighting levels. You can absolutely control everything.

“From the data gathered and collected, it’s possible to maximise yields and manage optimal harvesting schedules.

This is particularly important if you’re a farmer that needs to fulfil certain quotas.

With advanced data analytics, we can measure the metrics and you can learn the perfect formula for making consistent

DOWN ON THE URBAN FARM

crop yields, growing your capabilities and growing your quality at the same time.”

It all sounds terribly complicated, but it’s not. “Traditional farmers rely on years of knowledge and wisdom, with complicated spreadsheets and elaborate whiteboards filled with information,” Katsiroubas says. “So we thought ‘we need to make this easier for our customers, how do we make this technology for our farmers?’

and the answer was by taking the guesswork out of farming. Being in a climate-controlled environment makes life easier, but by capitalising on huge amounts of data it makes farming easier for everyone.”

Almost every aspect of the Greenery S is fully automated, aside from the tasks that require human labour, such as planting, harvesting, and cleaning. And of course, pest and disease management.

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Clean energy is at the heart of our programme, and wherever it’s available, we jump on it. By using clean energy, we reduce the food footprint by up to 75% when compared with conventional industrial farming” Caroline Katsiroubas

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While being in a controlled environment helps to reduce outbreaks or pests and diseases, they’re not impossible. However, with the use of exclusionary practices and scheduled cleaning routines, potentially disastrous crop damage can be kept to an absolute minimum.

Great technology generally requires great resources to power them, and while the idea of having local farms on every street corner, the carbon emissions and energy demands can’t be ignored.

Fortunately, this has all been factored into Freight Farms’ business plan.

“In the US, we’ve partnered with a company called Arcadia, who are connecting our farmers to sustainable energy solutions, such as solar power or wind power,” Katsiroubas says.

“Clean energy is at the heart of our programme, and wherever it’s available, we jump on it. By using clean energy, we reduce the food footprint by up to 75% when compared with conventional industrial farming.” Wherever there’s an environmentally-conscious alternative to conventional energy sources, Freight Farms uses them.

Conventional farming also demands a lot of water, but thanks to the power of IoT and modern technology, it doesn’t have to be that way. “We use between 0 and 10 gallons of water per day to

DOWN ON THE URBAN FARM

grow 13,000 plants!” Katsiroubas says.

“And the water is all recycled, with a smart H-VAC system that can reclaim water from the air. In some cases, we’re actually water-positive. This ideal for regions facing drought.”

Using clean energy and water conservation isn’t the only environmental benefit to the Greenery S. By being able to provide fresh food locally, shipping costs - both financial and environmental - are cut considerably. Transporting food over long distances isn’t sustainable in this day and age, and with clever

vertical farming solutions like this, it can become a thing of the past.

“Having hyper local food is great for the environment, but it’s also good for the customer too,” says Katsiroubas. “It’s nice to see people realise that lettuce is supposed to have a taste, rather than just as a vehicle for dressing!”

Naturally, technology like this doesn’t come cheap. “The cost of the hardware is $139,000 USD,” she says. “That doesn’t include shipping or site preparation, but that’s the cost. We’re very invested in having our clients succeed, and we need

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to ensure that they’re successful in running them so that they can make a good return on their investment. It needs to make financial sense in order for this to be a viable solution that people will adopt.”

According to the company, entrepreneurial small farmers are generally able to make their investment back within two years. This depends on a wide range of factors, including what products they’re growing and their sales strategy, but the most surprising thing is that these farmers are able to turn a profit in what many consider to be a struggling industry.

“We’re turning small-scale farming into a viable profession,” Katsiroubas says.

Today, the Freight Farms are being operated by more than just entrepreneurial urban farmers. The idea has caught the attention of cities and municipalities,

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schools and universities, real estate companies, mission-driven non-profits, and even retirement communities.

“We’re operating globally, operating in urban environments all over the world, from Anchorage, Alaska to Beirut, Lebanon,” Katsiroubas says.

“One of my favourite applications is run by a sister duo in Chicago. They call it ‘Freight to Plate’ and they grow for local restaurants, but they have a strong community focus too. They’re on a mission to secure one of our farms for every neighbourhood of the city to ensure fresh food for city residents 365 days of the year. They’ll be working with developers, urban planners, municipalities, and non-profits. They believe that every citizen deserves access to local, fresh food, and we do too.”

DOWN ON THE URBAN FARM

Community-driven projects are at the heart of the Freight Farms expansion plans, but it has even more exciting projects in the pipeline too. Of course, they’re all top-secret for the time being. “We have ambitious plans to expand further, so watch this space,” Katsiroubas says. “All I can say for now is that the future is automated, connected, sustainable, and farmer-focused. We’re focused on making our farms and our farmers as successful as they can be.”

To do this, the team at Freight Farms are devoting more time to R&D and devel-

oping new hardware and software to make urban farming a truly competitive industry.

“If you’re not moving at warp speed to evolve your technology, then you’re already way behind,” Katsiroubas says.

“Our goal for the future is to have thousands of these units in every city in the world, providing healthy and sustainable produce to populations, in an environmentally-friendly way.”

With urban populations on the rise and cities looking to improve the quality of life for their residents, the future of urban agriculture looks very bright indeed.

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GOOD OR BAD?

GOOD OR

BAD? Great power comes with great responsibility, and that is particularly true of new technologies. Each month, Tech for Good discusses the potential benefits and dangers of technological advances that are coming to market. This month we ask: Is online learning better than in-person teaching?

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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ONLINE LEARNING

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GOOD?

he COVID-19 pandemic has brought forth a new way of teaching - online learning - which is set to change education forever. Distance teaching is flexible, affordable and sustainable. The UK’s Open University has found that online courses equate to an average of 90% less energy and 85% fewer CO2 emissions per student than in-person courses. And the quality of teaching doesn’t suffer. A 2012 study from Babson/College Board showed that 77% of academic leaders believe that online education offerings were just as good, if not better, than traditional education.

The benefits of online education can already be seen. Students with disabilities or that come from low-income backgrounds have long been complaining about the lack of accessibility of educational institutions. Online learning allows these students to access educational materials of the same quality as their peers, bypassing the cost and accessibility frontiers. It also allows students to learn to manage their time and work around other activities or jobs, should they wish to. Thanks to

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online education, learning can reach places it wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, truly establishing education as a human right.

What the expert says: “ The reality is, classrooms can be anywhere anytime.

Students can be working on projects in virtual contexts with other students from around the world at any given moment. Technology can change learning forever and we need to embrace it and manipulate it to our advantage” Professor Tricia McLaughlin, RMIT School of Education

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chool is much more than the teaching curriculum. Face-toface teaching allows students to make friends and develop social skills. In June 2020, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that extended absence from traditional school environments can produce long-term academic and emotional damage, and stated that doctors have already started seeing the negative impacts of the 2020 school closures on children. Moreover, it also warned that disabled and low-income children suffered the most from online learning.

One of the things that makes online learning so positive is also one of its biggest downsides: accessibility. Online learning is more accessible, but only as long as students have the means to get hold of the necessary technology. Many families cannot afford to purchase computers for their children, therefore limiting their access to educational resources. According to OECD data, a quarter of the population will have major trouble in accessing e-learning as an educational method. Moreover, the Pew Research Center found that 1 in 5 teenagers are not able to complete

BAD?

schoolwork at home because of a lack of a computer or an internet connection This technological “homework gap” disproportionately affects children from minority backgrounds, widening inequalities. Until measures are put in place to ensure all students have access to technology, face-to-face teaching will continue to be the best and fairest option.

What the expert says: “ Watching a young child on a screen for several hours at a time is like witnessing the life being sapped out of them. I don’t mean to exaggerate but we know that excessive screen time is correlated with higher rates of obesity, shorter attention spans, and a decreased ability to read emotional cues from other people” Naomi Shafer Riley, Resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

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SOCIAL GOOD

A VERY MODERN ADDICTION Technology-related disorders, such as gaming addiction, are on the rise.

We visit a Swiss clinic to find out how they’re trying to tackle a disease that is likely to become more widespread

AUTHOR: Helena Pozniak

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itting in his tidy flat drinking green tea, software engineer turned teacher Marc has forgotten how bad he felt after gaming for 24 hours straight. So he’s dug up a text he sent back in 2015 to his then girlfriend: “I had pain in my wrist. My head was pulsating, throbbing, I had intense cramp in my calf, and it felt like the veins in my eyes were exploding.”

In the depth of his addiction he wouldn’t eat, he switched off his phone, and did just enough to hold down his job. Only friends knocking on his door could stop him. “It was terrifying – why would I hurt myself like this?” he says. “I was lucid but I just couldn’t help myself.”

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After visiting a pioneering Swiss clinic for internet use disorders, Marc has conquered his addiction to complex strategy games and other online habits.

He’s highly intelligent, softly spoken and now spends his spare time playing chess - online - but no longer games with the same intensity. He carries around a paper envelope; inside is a card with coloured dots stuck on certain days of the week. This is a visual strategy he developed with the help of psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr Sophia Achab, who runs the Geneva clinic for behavioural addictions. A dot signifies a positive action – meditation maybe, or a film with a friend, or a walk – at different times of the day.

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“Often people like a concrete visual reward – like Marc’s dots - to show what they’ve achieved,” says Dr Achab.

“It can be motivational.”

First opened in 2007, the clinic, hosted by the Geneva University Hospital, saw a 30 per cent rise in patients in 2019. Sometimes patients are children as young as nine or ten, and they see people in their 70s. Just 17 per cent of patients are female – it’s mostly young men, and their worried parents or partner, who come through the doors.

The last year and a half hasn’t helped online addicts. The Geneva-based behavioural addiction clinic that helped Marc has been busier than ever as patients tussle with family tensions, pandemic-induced anxiety and deep feelings of social isolation. Being stuck in limbo alongside their devices has been a severe test of self-control.

Dr Achab is a clinical expert for the World Health Organization (WHO) on addictive behaviours, from gambling, gaming and internet related disorders, as well as a public health adviser on digital wellbeing. Over the years she has tailored her practice and assembled a team of experts to deal solely with online problems, including problematic levels of online shopping.

Set off a busy Geneva street, with snowy peaks in the distance, clinicians

here assess and provide tailor-made treatment which is mostly a mix of expert coaching and psychotherapy – though sometimes it’s just a practical steer and structure that some families need. “We have to be creative, everyone needs something different,” she says. “It’s not an easy step to ask for help – people don’t come to us because they are happy.”

We have to be creative, everyone needs something different. It’s not an easy step to ask for help – people don’t come to us because they are happy” Dr Sophia Achab

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Today Dr Achab is bracing herself for an 11-year-old whose parents are worried about his obsession with Fortnite, the first-person shooter game which has famously been developed with input from neuroscientists to be particularly engrossing. Early consultations can be draining as she tries to win the patient’s trust.

One 40-year-old client transforms when he begins to talk gaming, animated and eyes shining – but he’s proud of an app which shows how little time he’s spent today on certain games. He’s here because his wife and two daughters are desperate for him to control his habit, which has prevented him holding down a job. He began

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aged seven when his mum gave him a console. “In the end, [gaming] crashed my life,” he says. He’s fallen off the wagon but is regaining control – it can be a chronic condition.

In Dr Achab’s serene and airy office, next to a box of hankies, is a dedicated screen, where she has permission form the Geneva University Hospital to pull up the games, or gambling sites that engross her patients.

This helps her get to grips with what patients are going through – the little boy obsessed with Minecraft, or the Fortnite player. She knows her World of Warcraft from her Overwatch, and she’ll happily chat gaming strategies and technical details. “I had to be creative

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– it’s an emerging field and there was no blueprint for treatment,” she says.

“I’m not against gaming – it can bring people a lot of pleasure.”

She’s not asking her patients for abstinence. “When patients realise I’m not their parent or spouse, and I’m not going to ban or set strict time limits, they begin to engage. My aim is for them to regain self-control and manage temptation – to reconnect with their life.”

Tall, elegant and immaculately dressed in black, she speaks softly during consultations, with pithy interjections, but great compassion. She knows how hard her patients struggle with cravings and the mechanism of addiction. “They want that immediate,

intense dopamine release, that immediate trigger of the reward system in the brain.”

Not all who come through her doors are addicts – part of her job is assessing the depth of a problem and what’s behind it. “But please, please don’t question patients whether internet addiction exists,” she says.

“For many people, it’s real and painful.

They are suffering.”

Dr Achab is referring to the controversial decision by the WHO to name gaming disorder as a disease. She’s part of an international group of doctors, scientists and policy makers who annually discuss provision and treatment. She’s also advised ISSUE 13

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colleagues around the world in setting up similar centres.

“If you don’t name a disorder, health services can’t train people to treat it – it’s an emerging field and there’s so much we don’t know,” she says. “We need to understand it from a patient’s point of view.”

In another room sits Jerome, 55, who just a few years ago was a bank manager but whose alcohol and gaming problems have led him to lose his job. “He lost a lot of money, spending it online to try to be the best,

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to be the boss he could no longer be at work,” says Ana Diez, a psychiatric nurse and online addiction specialist who is part of Dr Achab’s team. She’s coaching him to find new purpose now his marriage and professional life have collapsed, and he’s planning to head out travelling in a camper van. When he first came, he was having suicidal thoughts. With help, he’s conquered his compulsive gaming – next step will be the alcohol. The mood is light, jovial and optimistic. “You have to take patients on a winding path towards the goal,” says Ms Diez.

How do they do it? With skilled assessment and bespoke treatment.

Dr Achab recalls a 15-year-old girl who compulsively sought sexual encounters via the internet. She was adopted – her behaviour, Dr Achab determined, stemmed from her feelings of guilt at meeting her birth mother, who was a sex worker. Addressing this eventually helped solved the issue.

Another child played the “strong man” at home, but feared his mother would die after acute surgery. He was transgressing family-set gaming limits. “He felt the need for escapism, he couldn’t share his fears,” she says.

She has a host of stories, many revealing complex motivations behind compulsive behaviour – carefully unpicked during therapy. She tries to

A VERY MODERN ADDICTION

explain to some parents how limits they set might be overly strict; an hour, for example, is not long enough to play some games properly.

“Our aim is to help people reconnect to themselves, their lives,” Dr Achab says. “The more mindful of what you are doing, the less you will be automatically hooked. We want to ‘unstick’ people from their impulses.”

Patients are set small tasks at first, such as lengthening the time between

experiencing an impulse and satisfying it. This helps patients realise that the craving does eventually pass. Even children can learn to set their own limits with gentle guidance.

Is there anyone she can’t treat? “Yes, sometimes I don’t have answers.”

Once or twice a year, she’ll hear of extreme cases – usually a young man who doesn’t leave home, has stopped communicating, eating or looking after himself – a phenomenon the Japanese ISSUE 13

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If you don’t name a disorder, health services can’t train people to treat it – it’s an emerging field and there’s so much we don’t know. We need to understand it from a patient’s point of view Dr Sophia Achab

call Hikikomori. “You can get bed sores, malnutrition, dehydration, blood clots - all sorts of complications,” she says.

“But if they’re not willing to open the door, there’s little we can do.”

Difficult and numerous are the teenagers who’ve reached 15 or 16 and have never experienced any guidance or parental limits. “And suddenly parents want to restrict them – and that doesn’t work, that often results in violence,” she says.

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teenagers do want to control their habits but don’t know how, and it takes a neutral person to intervene.

Internet use becomes a problem in the presence of three specific elements: addictive property of the product (a game which triggers a feeling of danger, sexuality or reward for instance); a vulnerable person; the environment – which could be conflict, work difficulties, or even the accessibility of a product.

As for her own online life, Dr Achab switches her phone off in the evenings,

uses social media for practical purposes and sees people in person if she can. She shows how to turn a phone screen grey – so the inviting colours of Facebook, or Call of Duty don’t sparkle and trigger a kneejerk reaction.

The internet, she says, is an utterly immersive environment – when we’re deep in emails, or on social media there’s an intensity. “It’s normal to forget the outside world. But I deeply believe you can empower people to take control of their lives – I start from the very beginning.”

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EXPERT INSIGHT

EXPERT INSIGHT:

Water management Siobahn Meikle, Managing Director, UK & Ireland at Eaton Corporation, explains the strategies businesses can use to improve their water management and contribute to creating a more sustainable society

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very living thing across the globe needs water to survive, so it is critical for businesses to implement sustainable means of using water and managing it.

By 2050, the world’s population will grow from over seven billion today to more than nine billion. To feed all these people, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global food production will need to increase by 70%.

The OECD predicts that, within the next 30 years, and in the absence of new water-management policies, global water use will increase by more than 50%.

Agriculture consumes the bulk of water used worldwide. Second to agricultural uses are industrial processes, which consume about 19% of freshwater

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SIOBAHN MEIKLE

withdrawals. Water for industrial processes spans the range from fabricating and processing, cooling or washing to incorporating water into the final product, excluding water used by hydropower plants.

In the report Business guide to circular water management: spotlight on reduce, reuse and recycle, which discussed how organisations can achieve circular wastewater management, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development noted that “benchmarked data across industries indicate that there are opportunities to reduce industrial water consumption by up to 50%” through circular water management steps to reduce water use, reuse and recycle water, recover water resources, and replenish water ecosystems - the “5Rs approach” developed by the International Water Association.

What can businesses do?

Most organisations focus on reducing water consumption. A basic first step toward water efficiency is, however, identifying where water is wasted within a site or its industrial process. To achieve this, facility managers should find and repair water leaks and install low-flow faucets, toilets and urinals. Water-efficient equipment in commercial laundry or kitchen areas should be installed. Businesses should use filtration to optimise

the amount of water used in production processes, allowing the filtered water to be used for multiple cycles. In addition, smart water meters can serve to track water use, detect leaks and provide realtime reporting.

By increasing the amount of non-potable water for cooling towers, organisations can also reduce the amount of treated municipal water they consume - an increasingly important factor in water-stressed regions of the world. Non-potable greywater sources include filtered and recycled process wastewater, recovered condensate and rainwater harvesting.

Doing what matters In order to reduce freshwater consumption as much as possible and ensure that water is used responsibly, companies are looking for ways to treat water once used and reuse it in downstream processes.

We recognise that the water we use at our facilities is a shared resource.

Moreover, while our processes are not particularly water-intensive, water is critical to many of our operations.

Therefore, each of our sites must maintain up-to-date water maps and documentation of the following sources: water intake, water use and wastewater generation, including non-contact cooling water.

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Sustainability should be at the core of every business’s mission as we attempt to improve the quality of life and the environment we live in”

Our recent water-use management projects at some of our facilities include: Dausenau, Germany: We installed new heat exchangers and compressor systems with heat recovery capabilities.

These technologies enabled excess heat from the site’s presses to be captured and reused to warm the facility. By reusing waste heat, we lowered the volume of groundwater needed to cool the presses, resulting in a 49% reduction in water used in the facility.

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India: At several facilities across India, we’ve installed smart faucets and sensors and implemented rainwater harvesting.

As a result, our water consumption is projected to drop by almost one million litres of water over a year.

Aguascalientes, Mexico: At our facilities in Aguascalientes, rainwater harvesting, permeable pavement and non-irrigated landscapes have helped to conserve water and reduce runoff.

In addition, we’ve reduced energy

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facturing sites are in areas classified as water-stressed.

Water stress is a watershed-based measurement of the ratio of water withdrawals to the availability of surface water and groundwater. The classification is essentially a measure of competition for scarce water resources. From our experience, we would recommend that all organisations use resources like Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas to work out how and where initiatives matter the most. By taking this approach, businesses can set targets around zerowater discharge in high baseline waterstressed areas.

and water process discharges with an efficient air compressor system and an industrial wastewater treatment, including treating chrome and industrial process water with ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis systems.

About 5,500 gallons of oily water are recycled per day, with 10,000 gallons being reused per month.

By mapping our water-stressed sites using World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, we have found that around 20% of our manu-

The time to act is now Sustainability should be at the core of every business’s mission today, as we attempt to improve quality of life and the environment we live in. By committing to using responsible water practices, organisations can minimise the potential negative impacts of wastewater on the environment and produce solutions that improve water efficiency, quality, sanitation, and desalination in communities worldwide.

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PUBLIC SECTOR

AGENT AI How can artificial intelligence keep people safe? Richard Zak, Microsoft’s Director for Public Safety, and Jack Williams, Director of Portfolio Marketing at Hexagon, discuss how public agencies can leverage AI technologies to support emergency services and improve public safety

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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AGENT AI

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rom firefighters, to doctors and even call centre workers, it takes a lot of people to keep a city safe. Now, one more agent has joined the watch: artificial intelligence.

Although the push for new technologies in the public sector has always been present, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated it. Globally, law enforcement agencies are expected to spend $18.1 billion on software tools and systems in the next two years. Among these tools, a recent Microsoft study found that two thirds of public sector organisations saw AI as a digital priority that would help

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them solve complex problems and create organisational change.

But change is a collaborative effort, and that’s where companies like Hexagon and Microsoft come in.

Hexagon is one of the lead developers of sensors and software solutions, as well as a top computer-aided dispatch provider for cities and metro areas all over the world. Microsoft needs no introduction. Both software providers have developed a multitude of solutions aimed at helping public agencies keep citizens - and emergency workers - safe and healthy.

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As a former firefighter and current Director of Public Safety and Justice Solutions at Microsoft, Richard Zak is passionate about the good AI can do in the sector. Him and Jack Williams, Director of Portfolio Marketing at Hexagon, want to shatter the many myths that come to people’s minds when they hear the words “artificial intelligence”. In a conversation with Tech For Good, they discuss the potential of assistive AI to improve the operations of emergency communications services.

“I look at AI in the same way that, in the fire service, you tell a firefighter that they should learn something from every single call that they respond to,” Zak says. “If they don’t, it’s almost like every call is their first. With assistive AI, what we’re asking is that those operational systems that support them learn from every call as well. There’s a really strong connection between the way that we train first responders and the way that we’re enhancing technology to support them.”

Zak brings in his expertise of working in the fire service and serving in the boards of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technologies to develop new technologies that truly meet first-responder’s needs.

In contrast, Williams’ area of expertise is business intelligence and data analytics.

There’s a really strong connection between the way that we train first responders and the way that we’re enhancing technology to support them” Richard Zak

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He is also the Product Manager of Hexagon’s Smart Advisor, an assistive AI capability that supports the emergency call centre staff to help them make better and more informed decisions.

“When you think of the public safety ecosystem and the players involved, we all picture the big strong firemen like Richard was, or the big strong cop running in to save a person from jumping from a building,” Williams says. “But very rarely do people think about the call takers and dispatchers and they are also a vital part of the public safety ecosystem.”

Every year, an estimated 240 million calls are made to 911 in the US. That’s

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millions of instances when communications centre personnel make high-stakes split-second decisions with very little information. Because of the siloed data in most legacy computer-aided dispatch systems and the lack of interconnectivity between them, the staff are often required to record information manually or memorise it, inevitably creating information gaps. But AI can help close them.

“Think of car blind spots, where the rear-view mirror is your blind-spot detector,” Williams says. “By providing a second set of eyes, the assistive AI capability can help solve operational blind spots and improve call takers’ overall wellbeing.”

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Assistive AI tools developed by companies like Hexagon and Microsoft can gather structured and unstructured data from each call, compare it with performance data from previous calls, and predict the most likely resources that will be needed in each situation. Contrary to popular belief, the AI does not replace actual call centre workers, but helps them prioritise information and make more informed decisions. Ultimately, the staff is still in charge of making the final call.

“It’s not scary science fiction,” Zak says.

“It’s about having systems learn the same way people do to drive better outcomes for the people that they serve. The AI in this situation amplifies people’s drive, it extends their reach, it lets them do more,

do better; and it actually accelerates the impact they’re making.”

AI tools can not only improve emergency workers’ workload, but also their mental health. Call centre jobs commonly carry with them high levels of employee burnout and emotional exhaustion, and this situation is exacerbated by the pressure that comes with working in emergency situations. In turn, this causes high levels of turnover, and forces managers to continuously recruit and train new workers.

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to continuous alerts get desensitised to them, leading to missing alerts or delaying responses. Zak and Williams think AI can provide the opportunity to support call takers’ wellbeing and mental health.

“Wellbeing is something that stirs up a passion in the kind of work we do,” Williams says. “Let’s be honest; public safety has been a whirlwind over the last year and a half, so we looked at assistive AI as a way to help reduce alert fatigue. Because the AI doesn’t get tired, 62

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it gets better the more data you give it; the more incidents that it sees. And it also helps to capture and store the institutional knowledge of the organisation. So, if you have a system that has learned over time, it can support new dispatchers by bringing the institutional knowledge along with it.”

One of the projects Microsoft has worked on in relation to this is a collaboration with law enforcement agencies such as the Chicago Police Department in the US to launch an AI system that looks for indications of fatigue and burnout in its staff. The system will track officer performance and measure it against past records to detect when a staff member might need support, which can be provided in the form of mental health services, additional training or a reallocation to a different role. The goal is to address the situation before it spirals out of control.

“Rather than being a punitive corrective system, the AI is meant to support the officer,” Zak says. “Instead of leading to punishment, it actually leads to resources. It’s about treating the officer as a whole person, and not just based on the actions that they take.”

Another public safety group that Microsoft has been helping is war veterans.

The company is providing AI tools for iRel8, an organisation that is partnered with the US Veterans Association, to

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“You need to put AI principles together with policies. AI can help save lives, but it starts by getting the right principles in place and making sure you have the right policies to support its responsible use” Richard Zak

obtain insights about veterans’ mental health and reduce their high suicide and addiction rates. According to the 2019 National Veteran’s Suicide Prevention Report, veterans were 1.5 times more likely to commit suicide than nonveterans, with over 6,000 veteran suicides a year between 2008 and 2016. Vets are suffering, and AI can help them.

“What iRel8 does is apply AI capabilities as the Veterans Administration interacts with veterans, to identify and interrupt this cycle that could potentially lead to veteran suicide,” Zak says.

“This is a very large issue in the United States. It’s something that the Veterans Administration takes really seriously and they found that by applying AI in new ways they could break this cycle, they could engage early on in their work with a veteran, provide those resources, get that counselling and avoid that terrible outcome.

“Sometimes we fear things that AI can do, but when you think about AI being part of helping veterans and breaking that cycle that can lead to suicide, that is absolutely tech for good.”

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Think of car blind spots, where the rearview mirror is your blind-spot detector. By providing a second set of eyes in the assistive AI capability, we can help solve operational blind spots and improve call takers’ overall wellbeing” Jack Williams When combined with cloud, artificial intelligence tools can also help public agencies share information securely with one another and bridge jurisdictional barriers. Each agency has its own operational traffic management system, public hazard dispatch system, record system and mobile workforce. This is a lot of information to sync in the case of a natural disaster, or a pandemic.

Hexagon’s goal is to reduce these information gaps through its platform Hexagon Connect and create one single integrated site, a platform that “does not belong to a single public agency”, but to all of them.

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“As human beings we think out every possible scenario that can go wrong,” Williams says. “Well, in this world, there’s going to be some stuff that surprises you. And when that happens, you’re going to need to be able to quickly communicate and coordinate action with someone, whether that’s regarding traffic, public safety, or mutual aid. That’s why Microsoft and Hexagon make a pretty good partnership when it comes to addressing, not only public safety, but also broader city government collaboration and coordination efforts.”

Public agencies have been traditionally resistant to change. However,

as public services have had to go online because of the pandemic, the use of these technologies has been unavoidable. A clear example of this has been online trials. Before COVID, stakeholders in the justice system were very resistant to using remote working tools. But, when justice had no option but to move online, people embraced technology in a way they might not have otherwise.

“Over the last three years, that viewpoint from public safety leaders has really changed,” Zak says. “And this is because it has become so common across the private sector. When a ISSUE 13

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senior leader will talk to me about being concerned about AI, I generally ask them: ‘Did you talk to your phone today?

Did you talk to your car? Well, that’s AI’.

Decision makers now have a more open approach to using new capabilities like AI, because they are using it every day in their private life.”

The biggest barrier that public agencies face when implementing new technologies such as artificial intelligence is fear. As the use of AI becomes more and more commonplace, human rights organisations are raising the alarm regarding the terrible effects its abuse could lead to, if left unregulated.

Companies and regulators need to be aware of the dangers of artificial intelligence and put measures in place to ensure its responsible use. In this journey, Microsoft is leading by example.

The company has set six principles around the responsible use of AI: reliability, fairness, transparency, privacy, inclusiveness, and accountability. The goal is to always keep these in mind while developing AI, despite the lack of regulations in the area.

“Companies should still be building and deploying artificial intelligence in a way that respects people long before the government’s boundaries around it come into play,” Zak says. “No matter how sophisticated the AI system is, a person is always responsible for its operations.

There are cars that will drive you home if you set your address, but you’re still responsible for them. That is what we mean about AI accountability. You can’t blame the car for driving off the road; you’re ultimately the driver of the car.

“You need to put AI principles together with policies. AI can help save lives, but it starts by getting the right principles in place and making sure you have the right policies to support its responsible use.

You can’t catch up later. You’ve got to build them both at the same time.”

AI is not going anywhere. From augmented reality to 3D-surveillance capabilities, it is going to become the foundational piece for a lot of the future technological tools. Eventually, AI will cease to be a separate system, and become woven into all public sector operations. But machines are made by people, and only people can ensure they are used for good. For this reason, AI education is more important now than ever.

“People need to become more AI-literate because that’s how you can avoid misuse and hold your technology providers, your vendors, and your governments accountable for its responsible use,” Williams says. “AI has the potential to do a lot of good for the world. Once people become more AI-literate, they can have a conversation about it, instead of just conjuring up an image of the Terminator movies.”

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REINVENTING THE SCHOOL RUN

Tech For Good speaks to Godfrey Ryan, Kura’s CEO, about how technology can make home-to-school transportation safer, easier, and more sustainable

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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REINVENTING THE SCHOOL RUN

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e’re here!”, “Don’t forget your coat!”, “Have a nice day at school!” Every morning, the areas surrounding schools are buzzing with children making their way into the school, and cars and buses trying to park or leave. Anyone would describe the school drop-off as noisy and chaotic, but few pay attention to the effects that the daily concentration of vehicles in the areas surrounding schools can have on children’s health and safety.

Insurance industry figures show that 37% of local school areas in the UK had at least one child road injury every year from 2006 to 2011. In addition, Unicef found that while children spend less than half their time at school, they breathe in nearly two thirds of the toxic air pollution they take in each day during school hours. Recent research has also shown that 71% of UK children are reportedly breathing unsafe levels of air pollution and that almost half of parents believe that traffic fumes near their children’s school are a safety risk.

All of these risks can be avoided by encouraging the use of buses, and that’s where Kura’s technology comes into play.

Kura uses tracking and app technologies to allow for a safer, greener and more intelligent school run for children in the UK. The company manages a 70

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My main task was changing the business from a coachbrokering mentality to a technologyled strategy and culture” Godfrey Ryan

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virtual fleet of 30,000 vehicles and works with 1,000 schools, providing safe home-to-school services for over 7,000 students every day. By offering safe and more environmentally-friendly transport services, Kura hopes to take cars off the road and improve the safety and wellbeing of school-aged children.

“Our goal is to encourage the use of shared transport for children, and that goal is achieved by providing better information to the parents, the drivers and the school,” Kura’s CEO Godfrey Ryan says.

Kura was originally born as a coachrenting service. It wasn’t until 2016 that it began developing its home-to-school tracking and safeguarding technology,

after a school asked them if it would be possible to track the buses’ journey, in order to ensure the children’s safety.

And that’s exactly what the company delivered.

Kura builds its technology on a portal, allowing schools to monitor their transport network in real time. Each driver has an app that shows the fastest journey and expected passengers, so that they don’t have to take a route that’s longer than necessary, or wait for children who are not using the service on a certain day. Finally, parents have information regarding any delays on the route, and the location of their child.

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Our goal is to encourage the use of shared transport for children, and that goal is achieved by providing better information to the parents, the drivers and the school”

and the parents - and then it’s adding communication to that,” Ryan says.

“This can be communication about delays with the transport in the morning or the evening, information to the driver that a particular child has been taken off the route, or information to the parent to say that there’s been an accident and the coach is running 20 minutes behind, so that the parent doesn’t have to stand in the rain with their child waiting for the coach to come.”

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port are traditional and paper-based.

Drivers have paper records of which kids are taking the bus on a certain day, and no means of communicating when there is a blocked run, an accident, or any other kind of delay. Moreover, if that same bus is involved in an accident, there is no way of knowing for sure which children were riding on it, to be able to notify the parents accordingly.

“What that does is encourages parents to put the children on the coach service,” Ryan says. “This is better for the school, because they have fewer

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cars coming in the morning, better for parents, because the more people using the coach service, the less it costs, and better it is for the environment, for obvious reasons.”

The more children that use coaches, the safer the roads will be. Research shows that the average 49-seater coach takes 31 cars out of the road.

That’s 31 fewer cars piling up at the school gates, increasing the pollution around the area where children play as well as the risk of children getting knocked down by cars. From both

an environmental and safeguarding perspective, Kura’s technology keeps children safe.

Although Kura currently considers itself a transportation technology company, this wasn’t always the case.

When the company was created 10 years ago, it simply provided coaches for hire. However, when Ryan joined the company as its CEO during the pandemic, he came in with a different vision for the future: to expand its offer to provide technology services separately from its bus services.

“My main task was changing the business from a coach-brokering mentality to a technology-led strategy and culture,” Ryan says. “The first challenge we had was taking the software that was used in-house and making it available for somebody externally for the first time.

“If I describe our typical school customer, we provide the full outsourced home-to-school transport service for them. We give them the tech, we train them on the tech, we have the operators brought in and we train the drivers. What we wanted to do was start selling the technology as a standalone piece of software, so we could would walk into a school and say: ‘You have coaches here for moving your children, we can provide you with a technology layer.’”

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Kura’s offer is focused on the independent school sector in the UK, where schools compete to provide the best services. In addition to academic excellence, Kura’s research shows that the next two things parents look at when choosing a school are catering and transportation. Therefore, Kura’s technology provides additional value, 74

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while also lowering the costs of operating home-to-school transportation services. Moreover, its tracking technology has proven to be incredibly efficient when it comes to COVID-19 contact tracing.

“Safeguarding is a natural benefit of the technology, and it’s becoming more and more so, especially post

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COVID-19,” Ryan says. “We’ve had a number of incidents in the current school year, where a school has called us to say ‘This child has received a positive COVID-19 test result, we need to know who was on that coach’. And in seconds, we can say, ‘This is who was on the couch that morning with him or her’ and provide the school with that information.”

However, some schools are still skeptical about the benefits of the technology, especially in the public school sector, which are typically more cost-restricted and don’t consider these types of services a necessity. However, Ryan’s goal is to prove them wrong.

“When we talk to a school, typically they have no idea that this type of technology exists,” Ryan says. “It’s not like trying to take an existing provider out and replace it with Kura. It’s bringing Kura into a school for the first time.

And so people need to be convinced that it’s not just a nice thing to have; it’s essential. I think that’s our biggest challenge in getting this technology out there. It’s a bit like if somebody said to you 10 years ago, ‘You will need an iPod in your life’. People would say ‘I’ve never had one. Why would I need one now?’ Well, actually, once you have an iPod, you go, ‘Wow, how could I not live without it?’ I think that’s probably common with any new technology.

When we talk to a school, typically they have no idea that this type of technology exists.

It’s not like trying to take an existing provider out and replace it with Kura.

It’s bringing Kura into a school for the first time”

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“Our strategy is to talk to the state school sector, and provide the awareness that this technology exists, so that they will talk to the local authorities and say, ‘We need more than just a set of wheels. We need to provide the parents and ourselves with the information on who’s traveling and to try to get more and more children to use the coaches or the buses coming into school.’”

In fact, Kura has already signed its first contracts with the public school system, specifically with the Cornerstone MultiAcademy Trust based in Devon. As a result of the partnership, Broadclyst Community, Westclyst Community, and Monkerton Community Primary Schools will move from traditional paper registries of students that use the school transportation system to a digital service through the Kura parent app from September 2021.

Kura has also partnered with Homerun, a startup that has developed a platform where parents can have a complete view of where their children’s schoolmates live, and the method that they use to get to school. The platform allows the school to optimise and facilitate the most efficient way of getting into school in the morning, by allowing parents to communicate among themselves to share rides or take turns taking their children to school.

“Homerun gives the school a holistic view of the whole school journey,”

Ryan says. “And we can offer an optimised coach journey. We can provide the route planning the analysis to get as many children as possible into school and via a coach in the minimum amount of time, so it’s kind of a natural partnership with Homerun.”

However, Kura’s technology can not only help schools. The company’s goal is to continue developing the software to suit the needs of business users and help them reduce their environmental impact as well.

“We’re bringing that technology to the corporate shuttle market now,” Ryan says. “We want to go to an employer to say, ‘You move your stuff from this train station to your business park. We can give that passenger an app, your app, and he or she can book their seats’. And we are now building out the technology to cater for that requirement. By the end of this year, we’ll be selling the cure technology and transport service to both educational and corporate clients.”

At the end of the day, the fewer cars there are on the road, the safer and healthier children - and the general population - will be.

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THE DEEPEST DIVE Deep sea mining for rare earth metals has clear environmental benefits, but the mining itself could pose a significant threat to the ocean’s ecosystems. We take a look at an issue that divides environmentalists AUTHOR: Helena Pozniak

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Forest of the Weird

T

hese deep waters are an unlikely setting for a modern day gold rush. Pitch black and silent, the abyssal plains beneath the high seas are some of the most pristine parts of the planet. Some four to five kilometres below the Pacific, they lie peppered with knobbly black fist-size lumps, which have developed undisturbed for millions of years.

Within these nodules are rare earth metals that could feed our growing technology needs and low carbon future.

Unsurprisingly, pressure to extract them sooner rather than later is mounting.

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Thousands of miles away, mining companies are developing giant mechanical harvesters and putting them through their paces in deep water tanks and then the ocean. These could eventually trundle along the sea bed, hoovering up the metallic nodules and squirting them thousands of metres up to the surface.

A host of nations are chomping at the bit to get going, not least the Pacific island state of Nauru which at the end of June asked authorities to fast-track long-running talks on mining permissions within two years, prompting dire

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warnings from environmentalist groups, who believe too little is known about the the impact of the practice.

Deep sea mining is often discussed - if at all - as a clear tussle between the environment versus profits, with vigorous campaigns from pressure groups. But Nauru, which is collaborating with contractor The Metals Company (formerly DeepGreen), says it wants mining to proceed as soon as possible, as it has most to lose from climate change. Private companies must be sponsored by a state to mine the deep seas.

But this is a complex problem with many vested interests. And when Dr Alan Jamieson, senior lecturer in marine ecology at Newcastle University, describes deep sea mining to his students, they’re wholeheartedly against it. But, he asks, what about their smartphones and touchscreens? Electric cars? What would they be willing to give up? What about batteries to store renewable energy - electrification is a key strategy for countries moving towards net zero, and these battery metals are in hot demand by green technologies. “By the end of the class they almost completely won over to the idea that a certain amount of deep sea exploitation is necessary,” he says.

Once metals are in use, mining firms argue, they can be then recycled within

a circular economy. But that’s a simplification, say scientists: extracting and recycling metals from discarded electric car batteries and other technology is complex and costly.

And at the bottom of the oceans are millions of kilometres of untapped wealth. Late last year China, which has ambitions to mine the deep seas, sent a crewed submersible more than 10 kilometres down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific - the deepest waters on the planet. In June this year, the Indian government

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Corals on Seamount approved a mission to develop deep sea technologies. But no one can mine the high seas without the UN’s permission.

Twenty two international contractors, from countries such as the UK, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, Russia, and Poland have been awarded exploration licences by a United Nations body, and 19 of these are for the manganese nodules found in the area of the Pacific known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a stretch roughly the size of Europe, which seems the mostly likely area 82

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for exploitation. This hosts roughly 21 billion tonnes of nodules containing largely manganese and also cobalt, nickel and copper. Nations can sponsor companies and scientists to take out licences.

As scientists continue to examine how mining might affect delicately balanced marine life deep beneath the surface, various mining interests await international approval.

Geologically, these nodules are nothing like the rocks they resemble.

They’ve formed over many millions of

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years, as metals precipitate from water and layer upon objects such as shark teeth, bones and other objects on the sea bed. Elsewhere in more contested areas, polymetallic deposits rich in copper form around hydrothermal vents, and cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts settle on ‘mountains’ beneath the sea, and these areas are more contested by environmentalists.

From the outside, this might look like an unruly scramble for resources, but the rule of law prevails. An international agreement signed in 1982

grants countries rights to resources stretching 200 nautical miles beyond their coasts. But this leaves 46 per cent of the world’s oceans unclaimed by nations - the high seas.

To date, no one has authority to physically start mining this no-man’s land - and that’s down to the UN’s International Seabed Authority (ISA), formed in 1994 some three decades after the UN designated the high seas as a common heritage of humankind. Its remit is to manage access to deep sea wealth, prevent conflict and ensure profits are spread fairly. Exploration licences only permit investigation and research. In order to mine metals, companies and countries need a licence to exploit.

None of these have yet been granted and there are regulatory hurdles to jump before the ISA grants permission.

But commercial interest in the deep sea is escalating along with the technology to pursue it.

“We’re at a stage where conceivably deep sea mining could start and be viable within the reasonably foreseeable future,” said Michael Lodge, secretary-general of ISA, speaking on The Deep-Sea Podcast. But ISA has postponed meetings set for July.

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Mining the CCZ could be one of the largest anthropogenic alterations to the surface of our planet that we engage in” Professor Jeffrey Drazen

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technology, it would take approximately 6,500 years for an underwater harvester to mine the entire mineralised area of the CCZ, said Lodge.

Billions of dollars of investment have gone in to developing huge robotic vehicles, some weighing in at more than 300 tonnes, to crawl across the sea bed. But early testing has been hit by glitches. In April a Belgian prototype became stuck on the seafloor after detaching from the cable connecting it to a ship above. In June, the European Parliament joined calls for a pause to deep sea mining until effects upon ecosystems were better understood, and some leading companies are calling for a moratorium.

These are the clearest, most untouched waters in the world. “Mining the CCZ could be one of the largest anthropogenic alterations to the surface of our planet that we engage in,” said Professor Jeffrey Drazen at the department of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, speaking on The Deep-Sea Podcast.

Some mining companies have kept their operations confidential, making it difficult to assess their impact accurately. But fine sediment will be stirred up and squirted up to the surface along with the nodules.

This must be discharged into the sea again - potentially choking delicately

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Dumbo Octopus

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Coral and Squat Lobster balanced marine life. “We don’t know how large those clouds of mud will be or how long they will persist - but it’s anticipated that mining will take place continuously,” said Drazen. “That could have a large impact beyond the direct footprint of mining … We don’t have hard numbers but we know the ecosystem will be affected beyond where the mining vehicles operate.”

Scientists estimate enormous plumes of silt could rain down at least 10 kilometres beyond the site.

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by vehicles on the sea bed remain for years, and ocean life in the upper layers will be crushed by weight of the vehicles. Once thought to host little life, these plains are a biodiversity hotspot, research is revealing, and much life is supported in part by the nodules themselves.

“These are complex communities that have taken millions of years to form,” says Dr Helen Scales, marine biologist and author of The Brilliant Abyss.

“Larger creatures depend upon them.

And we know these microbial commu-

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nities are important for storing carbon.

They won’t recover quickly.”

Our understanding of the CCZ is limited by its remoteness, says Scales.

“But we are finding that this is one of the richest areas in terms of diversity anywhere in the deep ocean. And the nodules are an integral element.

They’re the basis of the ecosystem.

If you remove them, you will fundamentally change it. It’s been likened to removing trees from a forest.”

Consider too, said Drazen, that these nodules will take millions of years to recover. “Life won’t evolve fast enough to deal with this loss of habitat.”

But the case for mining is strong. By 2050, the World Bank estimates we’ll need 500 per cent more lithium, for a predicted population of 9.7 billion, up from 7.9 billion today. Batteries will be essential to store energy generated by wind, solar and tidal, and the growth of electric vehicles will push demand for minerals. Much mineral wealth, cobalt in particular, is currently mined in countries with unethical working practices.

The case for deep sea mining is often made as a straight choice between good and bad.

“I wouldn’t say there are no alternatives,” said Lodge, on the Deep Sea Podcast. “We are not … going to run out of minerals on land, but you’ll have to spend more to access them. The environ-

Nodules are an integral element.

They’re the basis of the ecosystem.

If you remove them, you will fundamentally change it. It’s been likened to removing trees from a forest” Dr Helen Scales

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mental burdens on land are great… let’s not pretend that mining on land is environmentally friendly.” If deep sea mining is a technological and engineering challenge, companies can nonetheless avoid political and ethical problems of corruption.

In this case, at least science is playing catchup - in contrast to the devastation wrought by excessive fishing and trawling.

Researchers have time to assess the impact before deep sea mining begins.

“We’ve caught this one in the early stages, and that is reassuring,” said Drazen. Several large zones of the

CCZ are now officially protected from exploitation - in total more than 1.4 million square kilometres. But areas marked out for exploitation are those in the North Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico, where nodules are most densely scattered, and where there’s most life, says Scales: “It’s the sparser areas that are protected.”

Ultimately contractors will have to release some of their profits generated by deep sea mining, and ISA is considering how to disburse this, possibly funding marine research or efforts to combat climate change.

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Iridogorgia Coral In 2020 ISA was hoping to finalise regulations but has been delayed by the pandemic. There is optimism, however, that member states will reach some consensus this year.

Despite vigorous campaigns and an emotional plea by environmentalist and broadcaster David Attenborough, many believe harvesting the sea floor is a question of when, not if. “There are certainly companies that would have you believe the only alternative is to mine the deep sea floor [rather than mining the land],” said Drazen, “but that’s not really true.”

We need more imagination, says Scales, in our vision of low carbon technologies of the future, and more research into alternative materials for a low carbon future. “I think it’s naïve to say that all the technologies we have currently are those we will use in large numbers in the future,” she says. “Are we just going to replace our fossil fuel dependency with a metal dependency?

There’s no easy answer. But there’s an awful lot more to discover in the deep ocean, which is just as important as rain forests in the biodiversity and health of our planet.”

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TEENAGE TECH STORIES

Teenage tech stories Each month, Tech For Good speaks to one teenage entrepreneur about their incredible achievements in the world of tech, and how they’re contributing to making the world a better place

Name: Michelle Hua

Age: 16 Born: Michigan, USA Achievements: As a coder and competitive gymnast, there’s little that Michelle can’t do. The 16-year-old has won the $75,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award for her movement-tracking algorithm, that she developed during lockdown to help her with her gymnastics training. Her research for this project was later published in the journal Computer Aided Geometric Design

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MICHELLE HUA

I

started doing gymnastics when I was really young, around seven or eight years old. My parents wanted me to do something outside of school to keep me active so they gave me the choice between more popular sports, like soccer and basketball, but I chose gymnastics, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

I was inspired to do my project due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since we were in lockdown and we had to stay at home, people had limited opportunities to go out to gyms to exercise, including myself, because my gymnastics training was moved online.

I wanted to create an algorithm to recognise movements and then give feedback, which can be used in our coaching, and also in a lot of different real-world applications including physical therapy, sport analysis, autonomous driving and public safety.

Dilated Silhouette Convolutional Neural Network Basically, you can give my algorithm a video of anyone doing an action, and it will first extract the silhouette’s boundaries, so like a line around the human for all different frames. Then, my algorithm uses dilated point convolutions to find patterns and features in action, and through those features and patterns, it can recognise what category the action belongs to.

I use silhouettes, which is a novel representation that no one’s ever been using in deep learning for action recognition before. They normally use skeletons. And those are actually less robust than mine, because they require a lot of knowledge about the location of joints, for example, where your arm is located, where your legs are located, and its orientation. But for silhouettes, all I have to do is separate the human from the background it’s in. And then through this accurate representation, I’m able to more accurately recognise action.

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The hardest part was probably designing my dilated point convolutions, because normally for things like AI and deep learning, people just use regular 2D convolutions. It’s like a really traditional method to extract features. But then since my silhouettes are stacked into a 3D-point cloud, it’s in 3D. So I have to use a novel 3D method to extract these features and patterns, instead of normal 2D methods.

To train my algorithm, I used three benchmark datasets. They’re just collections of different videos of different actions, and it can all be found online and publicly available.

Some types of movements weren’t available in the dataset, like my gymnastics moves or some physical therapy moves, so I had to create my own data. I filmed myself doing those movements and labeled the video with the action that is occurring, so I could put it in my algorithm and train it.

My project is focused on my algorithm, because that’s where I spent most of my time. And the app is a real-world application or a practical need that I applied my algorithm to.

It can definitely be used for a lot of different things like sports training, and general exercises, just to keep yourself healthy and active, especially during the pandemic. And I also included some physical therapy exercises, so if you can’t go to any physical therapy clinics, you can practice at home and receive real-time feedback about how well you do the exercises.

Right now, the app detects around 20 actions. In the next few months, I hope to keep adding different exercises and different sports that you can practice. And I’m actually thinking of submitting my app to the Apple store so that more people can download it and use it.

In my science and math classes, there tend to be more males. But I think it hasn’t discouraged me because I know that I work hard and they work hard too; so we’re all on the same

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MICHELLE HUA

page. And for the research paper, two of the people that presented in the conference with me were females, so I think things are getting better.

It was my first time publishing a paper, so it was definitely a lot of work.

Even after writing the paper, they would come back with comments, and they’ll have to revise it over and over. But it was very exciting.

I want to continue doing research, specifically in AI and deep learning.

I think AI can help out and influence

and benefit a lot of different fields of science. And I’ll definitely continue throughout high school and college doing competitive gymnastics. Last month, I actually competed in the USA National Gymnastics Championships, and I want to go again next year.

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