Tech For Good - Issue 04

INTEL’S AI EDUCATION QUEST THE SATELLITES SAVING OUR OCEANS AWS’S ROLE IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR ANTHONY NOLAN’S LIFE-SAVING DATA

Issue 04

THE FUTURE OF FOOD FOOD For the first time, artificial intelligence is being used to explore the dark matter of the plant kingdom. We investigate how this is shaping what food and health will look like for the next generation

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

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n all of the centuries that have been spent understanding plants and their benefits to humanity, we have only recently revealed a very tiny fraction of all the goodness that plants can give people and health.”

That quote, from Lee Chae, CTO and co-founder of Brightseed, is quite the eye-opener. After all, humans have been eating plants for as long as we’ve been able to walk on two legs. But have we been getting plants wrong all this time?

Well, no, but like the oceans, they remain something of a mystery.

After all, we all know that when you bite into a tasty mouthful of greens, you’re taking in lots of goodness in the form of fiber, minerals and vitamins. What you may not know is that you’ll also be consuming phytonutrients – molecules that plants use to stay healthy. Increasingly, it is becoming clear they can also help humans stay healthy, too. However, only 1% of phytonutrients have been catalogued, which is where Brightseed comes in.

A startup that has recently raised $27 million in funding, Brightseed is using AI to uncover how best to use previously untapped phytonutrients. Its AI tool, Forager, identifies phytonutrients in plants and predicts how they will impact human health.

The potential of this has far-reaching consequences for the food and drink industry. We spoke to Lee Chae to get a deeper understanding of the science behind phytonutrients, and it’s a fascinating glimpse into the future.

Elsewhere, we plunge into the seas to investigate how illegal fishing – which makes up one in five of all caught fish – is threatening sustainability and millions of livelihoods. We speak to OceanMind, a not-for-profit that is using satellites and machine learning to help police the oceans.

We also chat to tech and computing giants Intel and AWS, as well as leading blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan, and look at the ‘fintech for good’ movement.

Enjoy!

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

CONTENTS 06

SOCIAL GOOD Why phytonutrients could change the future of food

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PUBLIC SECTOR AWS’s role in the small business revolution

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EDUCATION Intel’s Head of Education Stu Walker on AI for Youth

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GLOBAL NEWS From Tesla to Cambridge Uni, we round up the news

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ENVIRONMENT Satellites + machine learning = policing the oceans

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LEADERSHIP How ‘fintechs for good’ are driving inclusion

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EXPERT INSIGHT Rossana Bianchi on the importance of ethics in AI

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HEALTHCARE The story behind Anthony Nolan’s tech revolution

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SOCIAL GOOD

SHINING A LIGHT ON PLANTLIFE’S DARK MATTER Little is known about the health benefits of plants, but Brightseed is aiming to revolutionise the area. The company’s CTO and co-founder, Lee Chae, speaks exclusively to Tech For Good about Forager, the AI tool it has developed to discover the untapped health benefits of phytonutrients and the future of the food industry

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquia 6

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SHINING A LIGHT ON PLANTLIFE’S DARK MATTER

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ne of the first things we learn as children is that vegetables are good for you. But did you ever stop to ask why?

Turns out that adults are still not really sure.

Despite the hundreds of years that humans have depended on plants for nutrition, medicine and even tools and clothes, we have catalogued less than 1% of the phytonutrients that compose them. That other 99% is what is known as the “dark matter” of the plant world.

Phytonutrients are small molecules that have an explicit relationship with the human body, and can drive and maintain human health. A 2019 Global Burden of Disease study published in The Lancet last year looked at the eating habits of 195 countries over 27 years and found that one in five deaths are directly connected to unhealthy eating habits.

Moreover, people with a low-plant diet were found to be three times more likely to suffer a premature death.

All those diet-related deaths are preventable ones.

Brightseed is a startup that is using artificial intelligence to uncover the mysterious properties of plants and their connection to human health. It was created in 2017 and has already been named as a 2020 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Last month,

In all of the centuries that have been spent understanding plants and their benefits to humanity, we have only recently revealed a very tiny fraction of all the goodness that plants can give people and health” Brightseed raised $27 million in funding, from partners such as Horizon Ventures and Lewis & Clark AgriFood.

Brightseed’s aim is to “enable a healthier future by illuminating and activating deep connections between plants and people,” says Lee Chae, co-founder and CTO of the company.

“We had this hypothesis that there are these deep connections between people and plants, and that these things in plants can help maintain good health in a way that’s different from how health is approached today,” he explains.

Brightseed was created to demonstrate how technology can be used to tap into the natural resource that is the ISSUE 04

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plant world, and identify the nutrients that can be used to prevent and manage health conditions such as diabetes and fatty liver disease.

“In all of the centuries that have been spent understanding plants and their benefits to humanity, we have only recently revealed a very tiny fraction of all the goodness that plants can give people and health,” Chae says.

According to Chae, artificial intelligence is the key that will unlock the plant world’s potential.

Using traditional methods, it would take over 50,000 years to map all the active compounds present in the plant 8

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kingdom. Thanks to AI, this is no longer the case.

“If you think about it, plants are made up of tons of different molecules,” Chae says. “They are nature’s foremost chemists. And it’s hard to sort through all those molecules and study them.

But we think that the time has come because of the advances that have been made both in the molecular sciences as well as the computational sciences.”

Brightseed’s Forager is the first and only AI tool that can identify the presence of phytonutrients in species of plants and make a prediction as to how they will impact human health. Once

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a beneficial compound is identified, Brightseed cultivates it and creates partnerships with food and drinks companies to include them in their products.

“With AI, you can make insights at a scale and a pace that humans can’t,” Chae says. “So this dark space is a perfect opportunity, a perfect challenge, for AI to illuminate and activate those deep connections and do it at a scale that brings the world a wide variety of benefits.

“We’re illuminating the ‘dark matter’ of nutrition at the molecular level at scale, having Forager food to learn what plants are good for what areas of health and what’s the molecular basis for that.”

Forager has been trained with a plant database put together by the company and is able to identify different types of plants, look at which phytonutrients they produce and predict their possible applications for human health.

Using Forager, Brightseed discovered its first product, which is now undergoing trials: a phytonutrient compound that improves metabolic health and can be used to treat and manage fatty liver disease.

“We wanted to give Forager a hard problem to solve,” Chae explains. “And the problem we asked it to solve was: ‘Is there a plant out there that contains a

What we’re doing is illuminating the ‘dark matter’ of nutrition at the molecular level at scale” Lee Chae

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certain set of nutrients that will address fatty liver disease?’”

Chae and his co-founders asked Forager to find a natural compound that is already present in the human diet but perhaps not consumed enough, that could help prevent fatty liver disease, a condition that many medical specialists have said will become ‘the next diabetes’.

In only a few months, Forager returned a set of compounds found in over 80 different species of widely consumed plants which help the body reinvigorate the molecular pathways involved in metabolising fat in the liver. Brightseed has already started its first human nutritional studies with this nutrient and hopes to launch it into the market within the next two years.

“We believe it’s going to be a real solution for people who, without it, would be on a pretty poor trajectory of what is becoming the next epidemic,” Chae says.

In order for this and other future products to reach consumers, Brightseed is building partnerships with powerful actors within the food industry.

“I think what we’re most excited about is working with the food system that’s out there,” Chae says. “If we’re able to be the engine that drives discoveries around health into the food system, we 10

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will be able to have an impact that’s far greater than the footprint that we could ever have as a smaller startup.”

One of these partners is Danone North America. With their support, Brightseed is using Forager to identify possible health benefits present in compounds within Danone’s raw soy.

“Soy is something that has been appreciated and cultivated for four centuries,”

SHINING A LIGHT ON PLANTLIFE’S DARK MATTER

Chae says. “It’s been part of our sustenance for a long time. And the idea there is: ‘Is there anything we might have missed in soy that can deliver more nutrition or more health to its consumers?’”

However, Brightseed’s discoveries are not confined to the food industry, but can also be applied in other sectors such as agriculture, where they can support more sustainable ways of farming.

Forager’s ability to identify the properties of crops promotes a more biodiverse supply chain and more regenerative agricultural practices. In fact, Brightseed has already partnered with an unnamed company to evaluate an underused superfruit.

“Forager is in a great position to reveal the impact that agricultural practices have on plants,” Chae says. “Over time ISSUE 04

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we’ve kind of selected and modified plants around disease resistance. But we think that there are many many more rich things to select plants on.

And by doing that we will be able to create agricultural practices that are better for the plants, better for people and better for the planet as a whole.�

Brightseed is thus able to work with partners to have an impact in all levels

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of the food chain, from growers and producers to suppliers, to improve the quality of the food that we eat. This is part of the holistic approach to healthcare that the company promotes. “This holistic view of health comprises what we eat, what we grow, what we produce, what we deliver to consumers and how that impacts consumers and their health

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and lifestyle,” Chae says. “These things are all tied together. You can’t separate one from the other and just focus on one. And we think this is the impact that Brightseed can have: to create a virtuous cycle around all these components.”

To achieve this goal, Brightseed has recently raised $27 million, which it plans to invest in the company’s

If we’re able to be the engine that drives discoveries around health into the food system, we will be able to have an impact that’s far greater than the footprint that we could ever have as a smaller startup”

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growth, and actualising their ideas and potential.

“We will expand Forager’s capabilities, its knowledge base and the mapping that we’re doing to connect plants to human health via phytonutrients,” Chae explains. “And that will create a much richer data set in order to work with the food system and companies to develop products around the different discoveries we make.”

Chae states that he is really proud of how Brightseed’s technology has been received by investors and

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believes that this new funding will allow the company’s technology to develop to its full potential.

“What excites me the most about the future potential of Brightseed is this opportunity to have the impact that we created a company for, and that is to improve or enable a healthier future,” he says. “With the backing that we’ve got and the reception we’ve got from the food industry players, now we have an opportunity to make it real.”

This excitement on the part of the food industry is also likely connected

SHINING A LIGHT ON PLANTLIFE’S DARK MATTER

to COVID-19 and an increased interest in healthcare research. “I think what people are understanding now is how tied our immune system health is to the way we eat,” Chae says.

People who suffer from chronic illnesses such as diabetes and fatty liver are considered immunocompromised, and thus at an increased risk of facing COVID-19 complications. Although developing a COVID-19 vaccine and treatments is a priority, Brightseed’s goal is to promote preventative measures, to avoid reaching those dangerous health situations and reducing healthcare costs.

It promotes a proactive approach to healthcare rather than a reactive one.

“I think COVID-19 has really led to a big awareness on how we eat and how we treat our bodies,” Chae says. “Having a better diet and being in better metabolic shape greatly improves the resiliency of our immune system to illnesses.”

Understanding the food that we eat and shedding light on the ‘dark matter’ of nutrition are very important steps in enabling a healthier future for the world’s population, and this is Brightseed’s mission. However, one single company can’t change the way an entire planet eats. Or... can it?

“It’s going to take an entire ecosystem,” Chae says. “But we want to be a catalyst for that.”

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THE SMALL BUSINESS REVOLUTION The UK government is increasingly turning to smaller companies to run its services. We spoke to Chris Hayman, Amazon Web Services’ Country GM, UK&I Public Sector, to get an insight into the country’s current public sector landscape AUTHOR: Daniel Brigham

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THE SMALL BUSINESS REVOLUTION

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ince the UK government introduced G-Cloud in 2012, the public sector has changed dramatically. A standardised set of frameworks meant that the cost of bidding and procuring was reduced, allowing small businesses and startups to become involved without bankrupting themselves.

Where once government services were the domain of big organisations, now startups rule the land, with 71% of all contracts procured through G-Cloud won by small companies.

Amazon Web Services has been directly available through G-Cloud since 2013, and has spent the last seven 18

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years offering its platforms to many of the small companies, allowing them to utilise the AWS technology stack.

Chris Hayman, AWS’s Country GM, UK&I Public Sector, walks us through the public sector landscape of startups, healthcare, government and what problems need solving next.

ON... SMALL BUSINESSES AND STARTUPS “While we knew there was a big, beneficial impact of cloud on small businesses, there wasn’t really any data to back it up. So a while ago we engaged Public First to do a proper Impact Report, so

THE SMALL BUSINESS REVOLUTION

we could know precisely the use and benefits created by our services across the UK. It’s great for me as someone who works in the public sector, because I have all these anecdotes and I hear these stories about how beneficial moving to cloud is, but to have some of that validated has been fantastic – and that was the idea behind the research.

There are a few takeaways for me. I’m particularly interested in how there’s an opportunity for small businesses selling into government. So we’ve worked with small businesses like Mobilise, which is based in Swansea - it is providing contact centres for the DVLA, same with Arcus Global which is providing contact centres for NHS Business Services Authority, and we work with Kainos on the MOT service as well. So through the government’s G-Cloud, over 150 businesses have used AWS, which is worth over £1.3 billion to the government. It’s great to see that sort of data supporting some of these anecdotes that we’re hearing in the field.

It is massively important that startups and small businesses work alongside and provide services for the government. The government has only really been served, certainly in recent history, by a small number of very large providers. So having small providers

I think there are areas, certainly in government, where they’re really trailblazing with the adoption of cloud and doing some really impactful things” Chris Hayman

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who can create capability on top of cloud, who can provide consulting capability, this is massive for us, the government and the whole ecosystem.

The number of startups and small businesses involved in government has increased dramatically. There’s always room for grabbing a space; there’s always an opportunity. There’s also been a change in the geographical prevalence of some of these startups, with cloud allowing a more diverse geographical supply chain. There’s still a lot of work to do, though. For example, if we could increase the cloud prevalence in the north-east to match London, it would boost local productivity and wages by 2.6% or around 1.4 billion per year.

So there’s an opportunity there as well.

Overall we have over 100,000 customers in the UK, which is a great start, but it’s still early days.”

ON... WHAT NEW PROBLEMS CLOUD COMPUTING IS HELPING TO SOLVE “The changes around contact centres has been a big topic in recent months.

Not least because of the pandemic, but more broadly I think customers are trying to figure out how best to offer that sort of experience. It hasn’t always been great. It hasn’t always been perfect.

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A great example is NHS Business Services Authority. It is using chatbots to answer some of those really mundane but important questions, like ‘when is my prepayment NHS prescription coming through?’ Getting a computer to answer that is pretty straight forward. That frees up some of its contact centre staff to answer harder problems, and the harder questions. Clearly, if I need human assis-

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tance, then I want the machine to be able to recognise that I’ve got a more complex query and I’d rather speak to the human, but that sort of chatbot convenience can be really helpful.

The questions around how we look at sentiment analysis and how we better understand what citizens are asking for have really come to the fore through the pandemic. We’ve been talking

about AI and machine learning for a long time, right, and how to apply it in the public sector has been a real hot topic for a lot of our customers. A good example of that is our work with Transport For London [TFL]. We worked with TFL a while ago on developing APIs. It made a very conscious decision to outsource the development of its apps.

So, for example, Citymapper uses the ISSUE 04

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LETTING GO OF THE HEAVY LIFTING Digital technology solutions company Kainos partnered with AWS to move the national MOT system to the cloud, reducing costs and improving the service for testers. We spoke to its CTO Rory Hanratty about working alongside Amazon Why move to the cloud?

You simply wouldn’t be able to be agile if you weren’t using cloud platforms like AWS. To paint a little bit of a picture of how things have changed over the last four or five years, if you had to pick up a new digital services delivery seven or eight years ago, you would have been having a debate about whether or not you could use cloud. Back then you’d be having that discussion and you’d have stuff thrown at you like ‘it’s not secure’, or ‘how can you trust it?’ or ‘we can’t see it’.

You had all of these kinds of discussions where people were used to spending lots of capital expenditure to build a big data centre - ‘We can see it and we can touch it. And therefore we know what we have right now!’. These days, that conversation doesn’t even happen. We have moved on significantly in the last number of years to a place where it’s not a debate whether or not we should use cloud: it is the default. It’s 22

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basically part of the service standard for delivering services to government. That wouldn’t have happened without the level of investment and evolution that you see from these big cloud providers like Amazon.

They bring a level of expertise that you simply don’t have. For example, if you’re in the passport office, you are in the business of providing people with passports, you’re not in the business of running data centres. It’s not your core capability or skillset of what you really should be focusing on. But for AWS, that’s its core business - it’s running data centres and managing security to a level that’s beyond what you would get if you were doing it yourself.

It’s that kind of continual pace of taking away heavy lifting from you, which means that your technology teams and your user researchers and service designers can focus on the user outcome. The headache of running your own infrastructure and

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all that kind of stuff is taken away.

It doesn’t mean you don’t have to understand it, but that heavy lifting is taken away from you.

Has the public sector become less resistant to moving to cloud?

“I think it has changed. In terms of focusing on user outcomes, proper service design, and actually doing user research and understanding how the services work, the public sector ran way ahead very, very quickly. They had to because there was a real imperative to make sure that citizens out there who were trying to renew passports or get their car MOT’d or apply for universal credit were able to do that easily.

So some parts of the public sector are ahead of the private sector.

There’s a little bit more resistance in some pockets of the commercial sector where they’re still protective over their data centre. ‘We spent millions on this so why would we just switch it off?’ I think there’s a big wave of people who are kind of realising that’s actually an untenable position going forward. We need to switch these things off.”

The questions around how we look at sentiment analysis and how we better understand what citizens are asking for have really come to the fore through the pandemic” TFL API. So we went from being a cloud computing supplier, to helping it with its website.

We’ve helped TFL understand its data, and how to develop insights from its data. So it’s now got an API understanding cyclist injuries and fatalities, which is sadly a big topic in London. The data gives it insights into helping it, for example, stop lorries from turning into the path of cyclists – it’s using machine learning statistical prediction to do that. What are the road conditions going to be like on a certain date? What has the council got planned on the roads on that date?

All of that can lead to gleaning important insights.”

ON... HEALTHCARE “We’re seeing tremendous demands in healthcare. When we speak to customers, ISSUE 04

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THE SMALL BUSINESS REVOLUTION

they are absolutely exploring cloud.

I think NHS Business Service Authority, which I mentioned before, is a really good example of that, and we’ve helped it with cloud contact centres. We’ve also helped other NHS organisations, both from a data perspective, but also from a capability perspective.

It’s really encouraging to see such a demand for cloud technologies in healthcare – and not just from technology suppliers. You’re seeing it from NHS trusts too. And the ball was already rolling before the pandemic hit.

As well as the work we’ve been doing with contact centres, we’re also involved in the clinical side. We partnered with Imperial College London to help it create a global knowledge platform which pools together global data on COVID-19 from over half a million sources, and then extract the most important insights in real time. This is a massive area where we can help, using natural language processing to help people navigate that volume of data.

We’re also working with a small company called SkinVision. You can take a picture of your mole on your skin via an app you download and machine learning on the image will help tell you whether you need to go and seek professional help or not. So it’s a very broad field.”

ON... GOVERNMENT “Government departments are increasingly embracing cloud. I think there are a number of reasons for that.

Not least, some of the policy work that government has been doing to improve the mix of small businesses, and using G-Cloud as a procurement vehicle to make it easier for government organisations to buy cloud.

Simply recognising the benefits of being able to do these things has certainly been an enabler.

There are a number of examples where some of the larger departments are looking to use cloud in significant ways to either improve systems of engagement or to help some of their back office functions. And with the local government side, where citizen engagement is really important, we’re working with them on that as well.

The UK public sector embraced cloud early on and that’s been tremendous for it. And the demand has never been greater. I think there are areas, certainly in government, where they’re really trailblazing with the adoption of cloud and doing some really impactful things. So we’ll continue to support our customers in this space and listen to the types of things that they’re looking for.”

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EDUCATION

Empowering the next generation With the world’s workforce likely to become increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence, the focus on AI-readiness in education grows. We spoke to Stu Walker, Intel’s Head of Education UK & Ireland, about the company’s AI for Youth programme, which seeks to address this issue AUTHOR: Daniel Brigham

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rtificial intelligence may be big news, but is it big money?

Well, according to research from the McKinsey Global Institute, yes it is. Very big money. The report forecasts that AI technologies will add $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

No surprise, then, that there’s quite the scramble from some of the world’s leading organisations and businesses to invest heavily in AI across their workforces. However, the more companies embrace AI, the more a simple truth 26

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emerges: the global population simply isn’t AI-literate yet. The issue? Well, the number of roles needing to be filled by someone AI-educated are growing exponentially quicker than the number of people who are actually AI-educated. The World Economic Forum’s report on the jobs of the future highlighted AI-specialist positions as the fastest-growing new economy role.

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The AI skills crisis is now recognised as the biggest barrier for wider AI adoption, which is why governments and education systems are looking for programmatic models to address the shortage” Stu Walker

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Education is key to unlocking the financial benefits of AI, and Intel has taken the action to get ahead of the curve by launching its AI for Youth programme. In partnerships with governments across the world, the AI-readiness initiative has the objective of “empowering youth with AI skills in an inclusive way”.

As part of its goals for 2030, Intel wants AI for Youth to empower 30 million students across 30 countries with AI skills. It offers 176 hours of modular and experiential content to help the future generation develop social and technical skills. Intel believes demystifying and democratising AI is critical to accelerating the introduction of new tools, technologies and applications in industries such as high-tech, healthcare, automotive, industrial and aerospace engineering.

Launched in 2019, AI for Youth has reached nine countries so far. In India, Intel has partnered with the Central Board of Secondary Education, which looks after over 22,000 schools, to introduce AI as a vocational subject for colleges. They are also working together to integrate AI across subjects like maths, science, language and history.

In the UK, Intel plans to offer the resource to a relatively small group of early innovators in the education sector

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to gain feedback before honing it for a wider audience. In South Korea, the government is using the programme to develop AI textbooks and to build exemplar AI mode schools and vocational colleges, while the Singapore government has introduced AI as a co-curricular activity in many schools.

“An economy driven by AI requires a new approach to education, including ways to empower larger non-technical audiences with AI social and technical skills for real world applications,” says Stu Walker, Head of Education UK & Ireland at Intel. “What’s also clear is that public awareness and understanding of

AI will remain low if AI is limited to only large organisations, technology companies, research institutes and higher education communities. So there’s an urgent need to increase exposure to AI. “The AI skills crisis is now recognised as the biggest barrier for wider AI adoption, which is why governments and education systems are looking for programmatic models to address the shortage.”

Walker believes the impact of AI will be felt in all industries, which means the need to educate students in new technologies is no longer niche: it is integral across the board.

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“In health and life sciences the promise of AI is profound,” he says.

“It can help physicians and researchers prevent disease, speed recovery and save lives, by unlocking complex and varied datasets to develop new insights.

AI can increase genomics processing and make medical image analysis faster and more accurate for personalised treatment.

“Elsewhere, the retail industry is at an incredible time of disruption – and opportunity. AI technologies are finding and correcting massive amounts of inventory distortion and internal loss, while making supply chains and product development incredibly efficient.”

So how do you educate students in AI? Intel’s AI for Youth programme includes computer vision, and natural language processing. There is also a focus on non-technical elements of AI skills, too, such as problem solving, social science, critical thinking and solution development. Using AI ethically, and its social impact, is also taught.

AI For Youth has been structured in four stages: Stage one, ‘Inspire’, is introductory, stages two and three – ‘Acquire’ and ‘Experience’ – cover technical elements such as computer vision, and non-technical elements such as critical thinking and problem solving, while stage four, ‘Empower’, 30

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focusses on student solution development, teamwork including social impact assessment, workplace readiness and creates industry engagement opportunities. By the end, it is hoped students will have a wide-range of AI-related tech and social skills which can be applied to real-life social issues.

Key to it working is winning over students who may previously have considered AI education as too technical. Education-in-action often helps to demystify subjects, and it’s no different with learning AI. In the Indian city of Bangalore, student Rahul Jaikrishna took the AI for Youth programme and

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Having a diverse talent pool allows for that creativity and innovation to flourish.

But you have to also set up an ecosystem where those opinions are heard” Dawn Jones ended up developing Cyber Detective – an AI-based model that detects cyber bullying with an accuracy of up to 80%.

Just 14, Jaikrishna was moved to get creative after learning that ‘confession pages’ created by school students – social media diaries where young people post confessions – often make teens targets for bullying.

Another factor in its success is keeping inclusivity at its heart. It isn’t just targeting developed countries, but ensuring there is a broad spectrum of nations that will benefit from the programme. Dawn Jones, Director of Policy and External Partnerships within Intel’s Global Diversity and ISSUE 04

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We believe that being a catalyst for change comes with the responsibility of ensuring the world is prepared for the technological transformations we help usher in” Stu Walker

Inclusion group, believes that not only is AI for Youth investing in the future generations, but also in the future of diversity.

“The workforce by 2030 is going to be more diverse and it’s going to be more inclusive,” Jones says. “We’re focused on this being the generation that continues to drive innovation for the world. So when we look at the programmes like AI for Youth, it really is about the understanding that this will be the workforce of the future and how can we impact them so that it will be innovative and creative, and inclusive and empathetic to working in teams of great diversity.”

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A recent Intel D&I study found that over half of 18-24 year-old workers – Generation Z – surveyed said they will make career choices based on diversity and inclusion, and that is a fundamental part of the AI for Youth programme: ensuring it reaches everyone, regardless of gender, race or beliefs.

“I would say that having varied experiences and perspectives results in a better outcome for any business,” says Jones.

“If you have a group of people who have the same experiences who grew up in the same area who went to the same colleges, you start to get this ‘groupthink’.

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“Having a diverse talent pool allows for that creativity and innovation to flourish. But you have to also set up an ecosystem where those opinions are heard. It’s not enough to have that diverse talent in the room, they have to be able to contribute into that collective to encourage richer discussion, to flag different perspectives.”

There is another important role that AI for Youth has to play: demystifying technology to ensure the public trusts it. Without that, it all falls apart. “At Intel, we believe that being a catalyst for change comes with the responsibility

of ensuring the world is prepared for the technological transformations we help usher in,” says Walker. “This has never been truer than it is for AI. It has the potential to impact industries and workforces in profound ways, even as it unlocks enormous economic potential.

“In the lead up to 2030, there is an urgent need to demystify AI and democratise our understanding through appropriate AI readiness programmes for current and future workforce and wider citizens. A skilled and competent workforce is the foundation for growth of any nation and industries.”

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GLOBAL GOOD

Cambridge Uni scientists reveal VR tool for cells Software company Lume VR and Cambridge University researchers have revealed a virtual reality tool that allows scientists to ‘walk’ inside human cells. vLUME will allow researchers to view a cell’s entire roadmap

Amazon introduces Care Hub for families Amazon has launched a new service that allows people to monitor older family members.

Amazon Care Hub is aimed at senior citizens who want to live independently but may require assistance from family.

The tool works through Alexaenabled devices

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

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NEWS DEBRIEF

Volkswagen predicts 90% EV sales in Norway in 2021 Volkswagen hopes that 9 in 10 sales in Norway next year will be of its electric vehicles (EVs). It is also hopeful of EVs making up 100% of its offering in Norway by 2023. Norway aims to be the world’s first country to end the sale of fossil-fuelled cars by 2025

Honda will quit F1 to focus on zeroemissions tech Japan’s Honda Motor will stop supplying engines for the FIA Formula One World Championship at the end of the 2021 season. Honda has explained that their intention is to focus on zero-emission technology in order to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050

Intel and India set up research centre

Tesla in investment talks in Indonesia’s government

Intel has linked up with India’s government to build a new AI research centre in Hyderabad.

They are aiming to apply AI to “population-scale” problems such as healthcare and smart mobility.

The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad and Public Health Foundation of India are also involved

A government official in Indonesia has revealed that Tesla is in talks over a possible investment in the country. Ayodhia Kalake said the electric vehicle (EV) maker had made an informal enquiry about a venture. Indonesia is one of the world’s foremost producers of nickel, which is commonly used in the production of EV batteries

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POLICING THE OCEANS For every five fish that are caught, one is done so illegally. The impact of this on the ocean’s ecosystem is potentially catastrophic, and policing the problem is notoriously difficult. Not-for-profit OceanMind is leading the fight against illegal fisheries using satellites and machine learning, and its CEO Nick Wise gives us the lowdown on the fight to save the seas AUTHOR: Daniel Brigham

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POLICING THE OCEANS

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I

n 2018, 156 million tonnes of fish was eaten globally. To put that into some sort of context, it’s roughly the equivalent of 22 million African elephants. Or 427 Empire State Buildings. Or, to put it another way: it’s really rather a lot of fish.

The pressure this puts on the oceans has been widely reported. According to a 2020 report from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, there are 4.6 million fishing vessels in the water – a whopping 68% of them in Asia – and 39 million people are employed in fisheries. It’s an upward trend, too, with a 122% increase in fish consumption between 1990 and 2018.

As ever, where environmental and financial pressures collide, the rise of illegality is never too far behind. So, alongside that 122% increase, in the same 28-year period the percentage of fish stocks within biological sustainable levels fell from 90% to 65.8%. This is an alarming trend, and fueled by illegal fishing – unlicensed, noncompliant fishing that goes undocumented. It threatens sustainability, and puts at risk the food supply of thousands of communities, as protected areas end up being overfished illegally.

The UN report sums up the situation starkly: “More needs to be done to ensure fisheries and aquaculture around the world are sustainable. Failure to implement adequate measures 38

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threatens the contribution of the sector to food security and livelihoods.”

All well and good, of course, but there is one quite pressing snag: policing illegal fishing isn’t simple. The ocean is, after all, enormous. Often the political will isn’t there. The challenges are significant, but meeting them is integral to ensuring the oceans aren’t pillaged.

Leading the fight against illegal fishing is OceanMind, a not-for-profit organisation that helps authorities to enforce regulations, and seafood buyers to make more responsible decisions. Partners include the UK government, the Thai government, the Seafood Task Force, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Conservation International, and Humanity United.

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Using satellites, machine learning and artificial intelligence to track and monitor fishing vessels across the globe, it’s been going since July 2018, and has been led by CEO Nick Wise.

A software engineer by trade, Wise started out at Citrix Systems before getting involved at Satellite Applications Catapult, a UK-based technology and innovation company that offers satellite-based services. One of his first big projects was seeing how satellites could help in the maritime sector, which led to marrying the tech world with the world of illegal fishing. In 2018, when he was sure the tech could be applied effectively to help reduce this problem, Wise launched OceanMind.

Over three billion people rely on seafood for their source of protein, so being able to sustainably fish is essential for their food security. On top of that, 12% of the world rely on the seafood industry for their livelihood�

Nick Wise

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Slavery on fishing vessels is a significant problem all around the world” Two years on, and OceanMind is working with governments, local authorities, and the seafood industry.

It provides surveillance and enforcement support, identifying suspected noncompliance vessels, location verification, legality of catch, provenance of fish and plenty more.

“It’s estimated that 20% of all fishing is done illegally,” Wise tells Tech For Good.

“So that’s one in five fish caught illegally.

That’s a significant problem. Over three billion people rely on seafood for their source of protein, so being able to sustainably fish is essential for their food security.

“On top of that, 12% of the world rely on the seafood industry for their livelihood. That means if fishing isn’t sustainable and we’re not continuing to

produce the food that the three billion need, we’re impacting the livelihood of the rest, potentially increasing poverty – particularly in some of the poorest places, because that’s where the bulk of the fishing and many of the industries are actually located.”

In order to achieve sustainability, the amount of fish caught by all fishing vessels has to be predicted across different areas of the oceans, and then documented. Therefore illegal fishing, which goes under the radar, means keeping tabs on the amount of fish being taken from the ocean becomes a guessing game – and reduces the chances of achieving sustainability.

As well as the impact on billions of livelihoods, the long-term environmental effects could be catastrophic: overfishing can reduce biodiversity and damage ecosystems. Half of the air we breathe comes from the oceans; if the health of the oceans decline then the planet will become much less hospitable for human – and all – life.

So it is perhaps surprising that no one was really doing what OceanMind does – using tech to connect the main players in the fishing industry. The fact there’s not a great deal of money involved in the industry, especially compared to defence – where satellite technology is often applied – means ISSUE 04

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Track of a Large Scale Tuna Longline vessel (LSTLV) fishing in close proximity of the Pitcairn Islands boundary and the speed-graph associated with the transmissions

it’s usually down the list of priorities for governments.

“One of the other major problems is fishing often happens out of sight, out of mind, it’s over the horizon and far away, so it’s very difficult to actually police,” says Wise. “And so the idea now that we can use satellites to find out what people are doing and then use AI to work out exactly what they’re fishing for and where they’re fishing and how it’s happening allows us to start to put that picture together and provide the intelligence that people need in order to enforce it.”

Using satellites means we’re talking about a lot of data – up to a petabyte a year. There’s no way any human is ever going to process that amount – which is where AI comes in. It filters through the data obtained by the satel42

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lites to find noncompliant or suspected noncompliant fishing activities or vessels, so efforts can be focused on these suspected problem areas far more efficiently, rather than spending valuable time investigating vessels and activities that turn out to be compliant.

In order to scale up massively, OceanMind is moving its data to the cloud. “We haven’t been able to scale these sorts of capabilities to this degree before,” says Wise. “So while machine learning algorithms have been around for decades, and while people have been doing data science for longer than it was called that, we can now bring all this data together in one place to start to aggregate it and cross-reference and use algorithms to learn from all of it together.

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“To do that in the cloud makes it valuable and makes it possible for us to look at the global scale. So it’s our vision to become truly global and look at everything everywhere, all of the time.”

OceanMind has had help from Microsoft’s AI for Earth programme, which backs organisations and non-profits looking to address global environmental challenges. OceanMind partnered with the programme in January 2019, using Microsoft Cloud and Microsoft AI to process all of the world’s vessel-tracking data in real time.

This volume of data processing allows OceanMind to increasingly work on a global scale. One of the most eye-catching projects it is involved in is Blue Belt, which is run by the Marine Management Organisation. It has established a network of marine protected areas around the UK’s overseas territo-

ries in the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. It totals over five million square kilometres, and OceanMind provides intelligence gathering and patrol support.

“The big challenge is that these areas are remote,” says Wise. “So tech is necessary to know what’s going on, and without the surveillance that you can get from satellites you wouldn’t know what was happening. And that was the challenge in the past: we just didn’t know. Therefore, declaring those areas as marine reserves was difficult.

So technology is the reason why marine reserves exist in the blue belt because now you can see what’s going on.

“That really has allowed us to focus the data analytics on those areas and therefore cut down the amount of data that you need to look at. So we can just look at things that give us reason for

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suspicion and start to understand why vessels might be ‘going dark’ near to the zone or crossing the boundaries.

What are they doing? We build a sort of fair intelligence profile, a sort of threat profile, that can then be acted on. And what we have found is that through publicising that we’re looking - whether it’s diplomatic or whether it’s in the media - it has had a deterrent effect on illegal fishing around those zones.”

As well as working alongside governments to patrol the oceans, one of the key strategies for achieving sustainability is working with major supermarkets to ensure they are buying their fish from compliant sources. OceanMind helps UK 44

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chain Sainsbury’s verify that its FAD-free tuna has been caught in the correct way.

FAD-free means fish caught by vessels that don’t use a Fish Aggregating Device, which attracts schools of fish underneath the boat. FADs don’t discriminate, though: they also attract plenty of other marine life, such as dolphins, turtles and sharks, which get scooped up alongside the fish.

So Sainsbury’s offers a responsibly-caught source of tuna to its customers.

“The problem for supermarkets is how do you tell for sure that its supplier hasn’t just said ‘yes, of course it’s FAD-free,’” says Wise. “Most of the traceability mechanisms in the seafood supply chain are essentially taken on trust. So what

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One of the other major problems is fishing often happens out of sight, out of mind, it’s over the horizon and far away, so it’s very difficult to actually police”

we do is we look at the movements of the vessel and determine whether, on balance, it was likely to be catching tuna FAD-free. So if Sainsbury’s is told it was caught without FADs, we can check it and confirm or otherwise. And if there’s any conflict, it has a stern discussion with its suppliers to find out what’s going on.”

OceanMind has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. While many challenges remain – particularly relying on philanthropy to fund its work due to sustainability of fishing being low down on the list for most governments – Wise says its long-term vision is to use the technology to expand beyond fishing. OceanMind has part-

nered with the Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust in the UK to help monitor the illegal salvaging of war graves, and it is also moving towards using satellite imaging to tackle another major area of concern in the oceans: detecting labour abuses on vessels.

“Slavery on fishing vessels is a significant problem all around the world,” says Wise. “It’s not just an issue confined to places like Thailand. It’s well documented. We’ve even had migrant labourers in Scotland who have been working against their will and not being paid. So modern slavery is a real issue.

And we think that we can do something about that.”

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FINTECH’S GREAT PROMISE Bringing more people into the digital economy remains a huge societal challenge. Tech For Good speaks to four industry experts about the rise of “fintech for good” and asks if financial services leaders are doing enough to drive inclusion

AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer

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intechs. If any businesses best represent the era of digital transformation, it is fintechs.

Before the world of financial services got serious about technology, we relied wholly on a small cluster of corporate and banking giants to manage our money. The relationship between these entities and us, the customers, changed very little as generations came and went. It was an 46

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industry held up by established structures and traditional practices.

The advent of the internet, however, along with the exponential growth of new technologies, marked the beginning of a different era. Smaller, nimbler players, born digital-native, began to redefine the customer experience. Today, fintechs are altering the delivery of financial services.

According to Accenture, investment in fintech ventures hit $53 billion last year.

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We recognise the limitations to financial inclusion, which can become a bit of a tickbox exercise. Like with opening bank accounts; you can say x number of people now have bank accounts, but it doesn’t say much about their financial wellbeing” Marta Zaccagnini But despite the irrefutable rise of tech-powered financial services and products, the human race is still confronted by big issues in this area.

Financial exclusion has reduced in the age of fintech, but the most recent figures suggest 1.7 billion people globally remain unbanked. And while work is ongoing to close this gap, many groups in society still feel underwhelmed by the quality of financial services on offer, even if they have access.

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Are those steering the ship doing enough? Is the financial services ecosystem, rich with talent and technology, on the way to solving these problems?

Tech For Good sought out a selection of experts to chart the fintech revolution.

The first was Merlyn Holkar, a Senior Research Officer at the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. MMHPI is a UK charity which aims to break the link between mental health problems and money problems.

According to the institute, an individual suffering from mental health issues is three-and-a-half times more likely to run into financial trouble. MMHPI, which was founded by journalist and campaigner Martin Lewis, conducts research and develops policy solutions on this topic.

It has done a lot of work around the potential of fintech to support those with mental health problems, and Holkar sees a “massive opportunity”.

“When people are unwell, they tell us that they find it harder to manage their finances in a practical sense,” he says. “This is an area where fintech, and better designed financial products, could make a huge, huge difference.”

A report from MMHPI, titled “Fintech For Good”, took a deep dive into how fintech could serve this section of society.

Among other proposals it suggested

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better tooling around money management, more development of products with stringent control settings and the utilisation of data to spot problems early.

By working with a pool of 5,000 people who have directly or indirectly been impacted by poor mental health, MMHPI is able to keep on top of what is needed to support sufferers.

“We see some progress, and generally I’m hopeful,” says Holker. “When it comes to fintech and mental health, it’s not a minority issue. One in four of us each year experience a mental health problem. There’s a massive opportunity for fintechs or banks if they can understand those issues and try and address those needs.”

Holkar goes on to say that the design of tailored tools for those suffering with

mental health problems could be helpful in supporting other groups. The capacity for fintechs to cater to smaller population segments with niche services is widely acknowledged, with these groups - the LGBT+ community and migrants in this instance - often dissatisfied with the standard of support on offer.

Elias Ghanem is Global Head of Capgemini’s Financial Services Market Intelligence Group, and echoes the point. He introduces the example of Be Money, which is set to become the first LGBT+ challenger bank in the United States when it launches next year.

According to Be Money’s co-founder Rob Curtis, only 20% of LGBT+ people can rely on financial support from families and friends. Separate research from Iowa State University also found ISSUE 04

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that same-sex couples were 73% more likely to be denied a mortgage than heterosexual couples with the same socio-economic background.

“This is a fintech that has adapted its business model, its risk profile and its approach to serve this population,” says Ghanem. “This is ‘fintech for good’, because this group as an example needs specific support, it needs specific funding, and it needs specific networks.

“Another group would be migrants.

Migrants have several problems: language, cash, and even temporary IDs. If a migrant goes with a temporary ID to a traditional bank, there’s no way 50

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they would accept them as a client.

But I know another fintech that has adapted its approach to better tackle this situation. These are two examples where tech for good isn’t changing the world in one shot, but it’s changing the world, block by block.”

Marta Zaccagnini knows all about the struggles migrants and refugees face when trying to access financial services.

As Europe programme manager for Village Capital, she co-authored a report on the availability of fintech solutions for refugees. The report referenced a recent survey of European banks that found many were not equipped to deal

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with the “specific needs” of refugees.

Zaccagnini cites an example from Germany, where the financial system fell short in supporting this population.

“N26 became the default bank for migrants and other vulnerable populations in Germany when it started out, because they could pass their KYC [Know Your Customer] requirements,” she says. “But then when N26 became a licensed bank, they couldn’t use them anymore because they then had to go through the German Postbank. So the refugees were back in the situation they were in before.

“Other reports have shown that the majority of traditional financial institu-

tions have just not been interested in refugee clients. It’s definitely about an interest and willingness there. Fintechs do have the opportunity to be those more nimble players and cater to more niche client segments. But there has to be the intention.”

Zaccagnini actively supports the fintech ecosystem at Village Capital, which is one of the world’s largest venture capital firms for seed-stage startups. She manages initiatives that aim to support young companies and entrepreneurs. Village Capital’s goal is to “democratise entrepreneurship” and it is focused on solving major global problems, like financial inclusion.

Finance Forward is a fintech accelerator set up by Village Capital which Zaccagnini has been heavily involved in since it launched last year. With programmes running in the United States, Latin America, MENA and Asia as well as Europe, Finance Forward offers training and access to grants for fintechs with products tailored to low and moderate income populations.

The programme is supported by PayPal and the MetLife Foundation, and the top selected startups receive a MetLife Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Grant of up to $75,000. Fintechs that made this year’s shortlist in Europe include PiP iT, which enables migrants ISSUE 04

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to send cross-border payments, and Elifinity, which uses AI to predict future financial challenges. Zaccagnini believes the strength of the accelerator is that it goes beyond the surface issues in the battle against financial exclusion.

“We recognise the limitations to financial inclusion, which can become a bit of a tick-box exercise. Like with opening bank accounts; you can say x number of people now have bank accounts, but it doesn’t say much about their financial wellbeing,” she says. “This accelerator is about taking a broader approach to financial health. Beyond fintechs, we’ve got insuretech products, wealthtech products… it’s about taking that broader look at financial inclusivity.”

The Europe programme this year attracted more than 80 applications alone. There is clearly no shortage of fintech entrepreneurs out there, even 52

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if their efforts to break through into the mainstream might have been hindered by the COVID-19 outbreak. But is it fair to place all our hope for solving these issues in these ambitious but earlystage companies?

Ghanem believes not. In his work at Capgemini, the entire financial ecosystem comes under the microscope. Capgemini’s “World FinTech Report”, published in June, stressed the need for traditional financial institutions to embrace collaboration with fintechs in order to become more agile and meet the demands of a wider cross section of customers.

“Banks can’t do it alone. They have skills shortages, they have technology challenges and they have cultural challenges to move fast,” says Ghanem.

“Skills are in the fintechs, agility is in the fintechs, the only thing the fintechs don’t have and what banks have

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is scale. If we can orchestrate this ecosystem, it’s a win-win for everybody.

Capgemini wants to play the role as the orchestrator of an ecosystem that aims to deliver innovation at scale.”

It is now generally accepted that collaboration holds the key to the umbrella objective of bringing more people into the financial system. And collaboration is happening, with one new initiative in Latin America being a perfect example of financial players coming together for a greater, social good.

In September, Mastercard announced that it is joining forces with a number of institutions to launch the Tech for Good Partnership, a first-of-its-kind private sector agreement to accelerate digital and financial inclusion in the Latin America and Caribbean region. PayPal is one member of the group, which also includes Bancolombia, Banco Galicia, Citibanamex and Mercado Libre. In Latin America, 45% of the population is financially excluded.

“That leaves tremendous growth and opportunity for every single one of these companies,” says Kiki Del Valle, Mastercard’s SVP of Digital Partnerships in the region. “Through the partnership with these players, we can believe we can create new ideas and new innovative platforms.

“We need to develop new products to appease different segments. Think about

Banks can’t do it alone. They have skills shortages, they have technology challenges and they have cultural challenges to move fast.

Skills are in the fintechs, agility is in the fintechs, the only thing the fintechs don’t have and what banks have is scale. If we can orchestrate this ecosystem, it’s a winwin for everybody” Elias Ghanem

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Mexico City: In Latin America, 45% of the population is financially excluded

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gig workers, think about women, think about the agricultural sector - they could all benefit from tailored products. This is one of the areas that we need to focus on. The other area is around education.

We need to drive greater trust in the financial ecosystem, but education also because we want to drive greater use of financial solutions. It’s not enough just to give somebody access to a card.”

The partnership, which is hoping to deploy initiatives before 2020 is out, will first focus on expanding basic financial services. Over time, Mastercard hopes to be able to share best practices and outcomes with the wider financial services community. This is an important programme for the company, which earlier this year committed to bringing 500 million people globally into the digital economy by 2025.

“That is a commitment we don’t treat lightly, and we realise we can’t do it alone,” Del Valle adds. “We need to do it in partnerships. We’re part of a connected system. There will be competition between fintechs and traditional banks, but there will also be collaboration between the two. And I think it’s our role to make sure that we allow everybody to succeed, but most importantly we allow society to develop and to grow.”

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We need to drive greater trust in the financial ecosystem, but education also because we want to drive greater use of financial solutions.

It’s not enough just to give somebody access to a card” Kiki Del Valle

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of learnings and data are only made possible because the financial services sector is slowly beginning to embrace open innovation. A movement that has gathered momentum after the introduction of open banking, open innovation, or as Capgemini terms it “the open experience”, is a “super-accelerator” for fintechs according to Ghanem.

“It has never been accepted delightfully by banks, let’s just say. But it was maybe day one of fintech - I’m exaggerating, but it’s a super-accelerator to fintech. Now, instead of me building my database, I can tap into yours. You have spent billions of dollars building yours, and now with consumer consent, I have access to it.”

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Perhaps open banking will prove to be the catalyst that finally ushers in a new dawn for the financial excluded?

Ghanem is hopeful, but he still sees plenty of challenges.

He believes technology remains an issue, with many influential organisations still failing to successfully integrate the platform-based approach he deems so essential to digital excellence. And he also believes regulators must be more inclusive when setting the rules frameworks, and that they should learn the lessons from how organisations have had to react speedily during the coronavirus pandemic. But the greatest barrier, he thinks, will be culture.

“Many traditional players have grown into the mindset of, ‘I am big, I am strong and I don’t need to learn anything from anybody else. Who are you - small, young and nimble - to come and teach me how to do it?’” he says. “So bridging this cultural gap is critical, and you need to bring in an orchestrator to make it happen.

That’s the role Capgemini wants to play. We want to sit at the table, and level the playing field and make them work together.”

Zaccagnini takes an optimistic view.

She talks about Next Generation EU, Europe’s pandemic recovery plan that has seen digitalisation placed front and centre of a funding programme worth €750 billion. With social issues like financial inclusion high on government agendas because of COVID-19, she thinks we stand on the cusp of change.

“I think we’re in a really exciting place right now where we’ve had the money agreed upon and it’s going to focus on digitalisation. So if not now, then when?

There’s going to be, for the first time, the ability to channel it and develop digital products for everyone. I think the possibilities are there.

“After all, it’s in the interest of governments to make sure that all of their populations are included in the financial system.”

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EXPERT INSIGHT: ETHICAL AI Rossana Bianchi is a consultant in AI and Data Ethics Capability, working with some of the world’s biggest brands, as well as academia and policy makers. Here she tells us why developing practical approaches to responsible innovation and ethics in AI is vital not only for businesses, but for the greater good

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round two years ago, I had a realisation. I had been working in the field of technology driven innovation for a few years, and what became increasingly apparent was the potential for emerging technologies to improve our lives. However, alongside that was another, starker, realisation that new tech could also exacerbate unfair societal dynamics – such as inequality and discrimination – and our physical and mental health vulnerabilities.

When I had this realisation, I wanted to help organisations innovate responsibly.

I wanted them to have an ethical framework in place to ensure tech was always used for good, not bad.

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In my role, I spend a lot of time collaborating with the broader ecosystem – including academia and no-profit thinktanks – to drive research in this rather uncharted field. I also work closely with my colleagues to develop approaches that operationalise and make ethics real, with the ultimate goal to help our clients embed ethical practices throughout their data and AI lifecycle.

While the implementation of tech may have a bad reputation among the public, it is important to say that most people working in the tech space do so with the intention to make a positive impact on the world and drive positive change.

Sometimes that’s not enough, though.

With investment in AI growing strongly in all regions of the world, and with many governments showing an appetite to be first in class, the adoption of an ethical principles framework is critical.

Without an ethical framework, AI can be used for bad. You’ve only got to look at recent cases in the U.S. where algorithms are exacerbating racial bias, or read reports of big tech companies using CV modeling to discriminate against female applicants for jobs purely on the basis of gender, to know that AI poses a threat to human rights.

On top of that, it can threaten our democracy through the sharing of fake news and creation of fake accounts or

With investment in AI growing strongly in all regions of the world, the adoption of an ethical principles framework is critical” fake personas throughout election campaigns.

So part of my role is banging the drum for the benefits of ethics in data, AI and other technologies. If it isn’t seen by the public as ethical, you will then struggle to gain public confidence in the digitisation of public services.

It’s therefore important to ensure that the public is aware that the deployment of these technologies can work for great social good. It can drive greater transparency and meritocracy, lowering barriers to access quality services. An example of that is in the health space, where we now have apps that can run blood tests with high levels of accuracy at almost zero cost. Tech can also be used as a source for good in poorer countries where technologies help with fundamental challenges such as cleanliness and scarcity of water, or access to quality education.

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The bar for what good looks like and what bad looks like can depend on social norms and cultural values, which vary from country to country�

AI and data can hold a mirror up to society, and help us to understand hidden and unconscious bias. If we are willing to embrace ethically-driven technologies, we have a unique opportunity to transform our communities and how we live for the better.

It is crucial to involve these communities in designing technology-led systems. But in order to have a meaningful and efficient public engagement on the design and adoption of AI to solve specific problems, we need to invest in digital and data literacy. This is vital to future-proof our societies and ensure people are prepared for the next waves of innovation and disruption.

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So, I see ethics as an accelerator to the adoption of effective data literacy programmes.

However, trying to ensure this framework is adopted is also very challenging.

For a start, cultural diversity makes it difficult for a global standard for ethics in AI. The bar for what good looks like and what bad looks like can depend on social norms and cultural values, which vary from country to country.

The Global Partnership On AI will hopefully go some way to recognising that problem. Launched in June this year by the governments of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the

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Republic of Korea, Singapore, Slovenia, the UK, the USA, and the European Union, it has a mission statement to: “Support the responsible and human-centric development and use of AI in a manner consistent with human rights, fundamental freedoms, and our shared democratic values”.

It brings together experts from academia, industry, and governments, and it shows there is a fundamental understanding that ethics has to be at the forefront of AI in order to build public trust and get the most societal change for good out of it.

It’s not perfect, though. It needs more collaboration from developing

and poorer countries. And it needs to address the issue that what is classified as ethical today may not be deemed ethical in the future.

In the wrong hands, technological change and innovation can increase inequality across societies. It’s critical, therefore, that while AI and the use of data is still at a relatively early stage, that ethical frameworks are implemented. There is a lot of work still to be done, and a long way to go, but governments have shown they are willing to lead on it – and that’s the first step on the road to using technology to create a fairer, more equal society.

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CHARITABLE DONATIONS From open sourcing algorithms in order to search for stem cell matches, to using identity data intelligence for tracing donors, leading blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan is embracing technology. We spoke to Danny Attias, its Chief Digital and Information Officer​, and Dr Zabeen Patel, a Bioinformatics Specialist​, to get two different perspectives on how tech is saving lives

INTERVIEW: Daniel Brigham

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CHARITABLE DONATIONS

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T

FG: Let’s start off with the problem Anthony Nolan was trying to solve when it partnered with global data intelligence specialist GBG? Danny: The major issue was data going out of date. For example, people joining the stem cell register when they’re at university and giving us their university email address and home address.

So, inevitably, 15, 20 years later, these people are now no longer in the same place or using the same email. So the technology allows us to make sure that we’re reaching out to the right donors and reaching out to the right people in a good amount of time by populating any missing data – such as an email or a mobile phone number – that they may not have collected originally. So when we do need to reach a donor, it means that they are identified in much quicker time.

TFG: Without wanting to sound glib, this software is directly helping to save lives, yes?

Danny: Absolutely. We’re not using this technology for marketing purposes, we’re using this type of tech for saving lives, and it is a mechanism that we use to try and find people based on the legacy credential. So thankfully if we call someone up and their details are out of date, we can use GBG’s identity data to try and track them down.

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It feels like we’re on the front line rather than just lagging behind” Zabeen Patel

CHARITABLE DONATIONS

When you’re searching for a stem cell donor there are a very, very small number of matches out of a very large number of potential donors. So you’re searching in a total quantity of 40 million donors globally, and you might find only one person that is a good match. So you don’t want to miss out on that transplant because they’ve changed their details and it’s not been updated in our system.

TFG: Tell us more about the global database of 40 million – how many different databases is that made up of, and is the tech helping to streamline them?

Danny: So there are probably three different levels of datasets. Anthony

Nolan has approximately 800,000 donors of our own; there are four different registers in the UK but Anthony Nolan manages that aligned registry. So any hospital in the UK that needs to find a donor can come to us – we joined all four databases together and provided a single view of that and a single service for that. And then all of that dataset goes into a global dataset, which is pulled together by an institution called the World Marrow Donor Association [WMDA].

We’re founding members of the WMDA and part of the governance, but the WMDA pulls together databases from over a hundred registers. That makes up the 40 million donors that we talk about whenever we search for a donor.

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TFG: And it’s just as easy to search the global database as it is your own database? Are they connected?

Danny: We’re implementing technology in the next few weeks actually. Currently we do a local search on our own aligned registry and then we’ll go to a web portal and we’ll manually type in all the patient details all over again. So we’re implementing software, which we helped develop, that means when we do a local search, those details are immediately ticked off on the international search. It saves us a lot of time – time for our highly specialised transplant search coordinators, and also the time it takes to receive details from the hospital and the patient to identify the best donor. It’s crucial.

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TFG: Zabeen, can you tell us about the open source algorithm to search for stem cell donors that you’ve been working on?

Zabeen: For the last two or three years we’d been working on it internally and then we had an opportunity to help WMDA. As Danny mentioned, their register is enormous and growing every day, so their needs are much greater than ours. So one of the goals of the project was performance improvements and things like looking at how best we can leverage technology for things like horizontal scaling and trying to get the most out of the algorithm and rolling it out to a global audience.

CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Danny: There are 40 million donors. How are we going to do that? You look at the scale and the capacity of Google and Facebook who deal with huge amounts of data, so we start off by using the same platforms and the same technologies that these huge organisations are using to crunch enormous quantities of data.

So we’re going to start on the basis and the principle that this is possible, and there is no reason why we cannot deliver a high-performance solution. We started from zero, and Zabeen led the project technically and wrote the two components to this algorithm.

TFG: One of the criticisms labelled against the public sector, particularly in healthcare, is not having the resources to scale up. So is it easier for a charity such as yourselves or for the private sector to be able to implement this?

Danny: I think the NHS and the like are now making far better use of cloud scaling technologies. However, over the coming weeks we’re implementing an enormous pipe into Google Cloud.

And we are building a set of functions in Google Cloud to be able to receive up to half a terabyte DNA file, unpack it, do its work and deliver a result.

We’re going to be live on that by the beginning of next year. That’s huge because only five years ago the

You’re searching in a total quantity of 40 million donors globally, and you might find only one person that is a good match” Danny Attias

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approach was ‘we need a big box’.

Now, it’s ‘we need a big pipe’. You don’t worry about the box.

Zabeen: Now we are using infrastructure as code and we’ve taken full advantage of that. And I think that really helps as a developer to test new ideas. And especially when combined with the current environment, I think it made us be a lot more flexible. My own personal experience now is that if we have an idea of how to either optimise something or introduce a new piece of clinical information that will potentially have a huge impact on how donors are selected, we can test that 68

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very quickly and roll out any changes very quickly. Whereas before we didn’t have a safety net to make those kinds of radical changes very quickly, but now we do so we can make changes. We don’t have to worry about breaking anything.

I find that really exciting as a developer; to see that ability to make changes and see them come to fruition very quickly.

TFG: Has the COVID-19 pandemic helped open minds to tech?

Danny: I think it’s made business people and charities less scared about technology. So we were trying to do

CHARITABLE DONATIONS

short period of time, just a few weeks, to now check donors for additional neurology, additional viruses that are really important to the outcome of a transplant – stuff that we know really matters.

some stuff right at the beginning of the pandemic, where the charity was trying to figure out a way to make changes without relying on technology. And we were saying ‘just tell us what you need’. Historically they would say, ‘I want such and such’ and it would take three years until that could be realistically manifested. And now we say, ‘No, just tell us what you want.’ And within three days we’ve got solutions live.

One of the things that we did right at the beginning of the pandemic is we put in a mechanism that allowed us to fundamentally change some of our operating practices. And it’s enabled us in a very

TFG: Since COVID-19 hit, it seems that there is less resistance to potentially life-saving tech being open source.

Has that always been your policy at Anthony Nolan?

Zabeen: It makes much more sense.

Something that can be potentially expensive for smaller charities, who don’t have the money to have a big development or tech team, should have access to what we’re doing at Anthony Nolan.

As it’s actually all agreed that there are specific rules for matching donors, let’s just get together, and minimise and share resources. It seems sensible to release open source because we’re not doing anything very special in terms of how we match donors – we’re going by the latest clinical guidelines and no one disagrees with that.

It’s very exciting as a developer because it feels like we’re on the front line rather than just lagging behind as we might’ve done a few years ago.

Coming from a science background, I did work in research and I’m used to being on the frontline. It’s nice to be back there again.

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