Tech For Good - Issue 08

DEFRA’S SUSTAINABILITY MISSION THE AI FIGHT AGAINST DEMENTIA IS ONLINE THERAPY HERE TO STAY? SPACE RACE: GOOD OR BAD?

RISING TIDES Global warming is causing the sea levels to rise at an alarming rate. We investigate how NASA and the European Space Agency are using satellites to lead the fightback

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

E

ight out of 10 of the world’s biggest cities are situated on the coast. Only São Paulo and Mexico City have expanded inland, away from the obvious benefits that a coastal dwelling brings: transport, trade and food. Take the United States. Forty percent of the population - over 140 million - live in coastal areas classified as densely populated. It just makes sense to be beside the seaside.

Increasingly, though, living on the coast comes laden with an increasingly stark reality: rising sea levels. You know how it works: global warming causes the Earth to heat, melting glaciers and icesheets, causing the sea levels to rise. And they’re rising rapidly. Since 1880, the rise has been nine inches, and over three inches in just the last 25 years. It puts coastal populations at risk of flooding, erosion and storm surges, plus the additional threat of sewage endangering public health and the ecosystems of wetlands.

This month’s cover story takes a look at how NASA and the European Space

Agency have teamed up to learn what can be done to halt the rising sea levels. And, as they’re both pretty big in the whole spaceship world, they’re doing it in the way they know best: using satellites. It’s a fascinating read, as they tell Beatriz Valero de Urquía how they’re measuring the rise of the ocean levels - and therefore climate change - from space.

This is only Tech For Good’s eighth issue, so I’m really pleased to say that we’ve already moved into a position where we’ve expanded our portfolio of writers. Ben East takes a look at how one social enterprise is using crowdfunding to get homeless people into employment, Stuart Hodge investigates how AI is being used to detect dementia and Alzheimer’s years ahead of current diagnosis, while Al Tyers dives into the world of online psychotherapy, and how automation and robots can play a role in the future.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

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

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From vaccines to fruit farming, we round up the latest news

A chat with 16-year-old Rishab Jain

GLOBAL NEWS

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NASA and the European Space Agency tackle global warming

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Can crowdfunding solve the homelessness crisis?

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HCL’s Kalyan Kumar on the tech helping to achieve sustainability goals

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PUBLIC SECTOR Defra and HPE’s global emissions partnership

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EXPERT INSIGHT

CitizenLab’s Wietse Van Ransbeeck on the rise of Civic Tech

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HEALTHCARE How AI is revolutionising dementia detection

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GOOD OR BAD? Yes or no to rocket launches?

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SOCIAL GOOD Analyse this: the future of online psychotherapy

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GLOBAL GOOD

Tesla, BMW and other companies approved to receive $35bn EU Battery Aid The European Union has approved a $35 billion European Battery Innovation project to support the production and development of electric cars and reduce imports. Tesla and BMW are two of the companies who have been approved to receive these funds.

Other firms that are awaiting confirmation include Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Arkema, Borealis, Solvay, Sunlight Systems and Enel X

Microsoft, Oracle and others team up on digital COVID-19 vaccine records Technology and health companies are collaborating in an attempt to establish a global standard for COVID-19 vaccination records. The ‘Vaccination Credential Initiative’ includes companies such as Salesforce, Microsoft, Epic and healthcare non-profit Mayo Clinic.

The platform will have to keep data secure, while also being verifiable and traceable

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

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Agritech startup Aerobotics raises $17m South African startup Aerobotics, which provides AI tools to farmers, has raised $17m in Series B funding.

Aerobotics, founded in 2014, uses AI, robotics and drones to analyse crops for fruit and tree farmers across the globe. Aerobotics has a database of over 81m trees and over 1m citrus fruit, which it says is the biggest in the world. Naspers Foundry led the funding round

NEWS DEBRIEF

Amazon launches online academy in India Amazon has launched an app and website which will offer training for aspiring engineers in India. The online academy will prepare students for the country’s most competitive college entrance tests, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). It will offer lectures, learning material and assessments, and will initially be free. The move is seen as Amazon wanting a slice of India’s booming edtech market

Western Australia to spend AU$1m to divert 1,000 tonnes of e-waste a year Western Australia will invest AU$1 million into nine initiatives that will divert 1,000 tonnes of e-waste per year. The recipients include Curtin University and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

WA’s Environment Minister said that the projects will “recover high-value material” and “divert materials which might have presented risks to human health and the environment.”

Saudi Arabia unveils smart city built in straight line Saudi Arabia has launched its vision for a zero-carbon city built in a 170km straight line. The Line will “reimagine and revitalise the future of urban living,” according to the Kingdom. The $5bn megacity will be devoid of cars and streets, with autonomous highspeed transits connecting communities.

Construction will begin this year, and all urban developments will be powered by clean energy

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HOUSTON, WE NEED TO SAVE THE

PLANET!

Last November, the Sentinel-6 satellite launched with a mission to monitor the Earth’s oceans. Tech For Good speaks to the project’s scientists from NASA and the European Space Agency about the technology used to measure climate change from space AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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ou can’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

Over the last few decades, scientists have been determined to obtain evidence of global warming that will convince policymakers around the world to make the transition to a green economy. Political leaders such as the United States’ Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro have considered climate change “nonexistent”, “an expensive hoax” or even “a Marxist plot” directed

by China. Nonetheless, global warming is a scientific reality and one that is endangering the lives of millions of people all around the world.

Over 90% of global warming is actually ocean warming, which directly causes sea-level rise. As the Earth heats up and glaciers melt, the amount of water in the oceans increases and expands.

Scientists estimate that every centimetre of sea-level rise exposes almost three million more people in the world to flooding. A shocking number, especially when taking into account that the global sea-level has risen nine centimetres in the last 30 years.

“There is unequivocal evidence, all around the world that the Earth is warming,” says Dr Craig Donlon, from the European Space Agency (ESA). “Our climate predictions now reveal unprecedented change is just around the corner.

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The reason climate change is so hard to predict is that we’ve never watched it before” Josh Willis (NASA)

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The Sentinel-6 team undergoing final preparations before the launch If steps are not taken immediately, then we expect significant societal problems in terms of water security, food security and indeed societal security.”

But where do these predictions come from?

Last November, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite was launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.

It’s the latest in a series of satellites that have been monitoring the Earth’s oceans from the sky for the last three decades. Topex-Poseidon, the first of them, was launched in 1992, and later followed by Jason-1, Jason-2, Jason-3 and, now, Sentinel-6, previously known

as Jason-CS but renamed after the death of NASA’s Earth Science Division Director, Michael Freilich.

“The reason climate change is so hard to predict is that we’ve never watched it before,” says Dr Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “These satellites measure the height of the ocean every second, so you can actually see global sea-level change every 10 days, and we are using this data to track the rise of the oceans due to humancaused global warming.”

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development of the satellite from both sides of the pond. Alongside them, members of NOAA, EUMETSAT, CNES, and the European Commission, as well as a consortium of 58 companies under Airbus Defence and Space Germany, have contributed to the success of the project. The satellite is also a fundamental part of the European Union’s Copernicus programme in support of climate change. “It’s a global ocean, and we need a global community to look at the data,” Willis says.

Although all agencies involved are now fully committed to measuring global

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warming, this was actually not the original intention of the Topex-Poseidon mission.

“We started flying these missions to do oceanography,” Willis says. “Whenever there is a current in the ocean that lasts for several days, it tilts the ocean surface.

We built these satellites to be able to measure that tilt and watch the currents as they change over time. But, because the satellites were so accurate, we were actually able to average the data together and have one of the clearest pictures of climate change you can get.”

The data collected by these satellites has shown that the rate of sea-level

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rise has doubled in the past 30 years.

While in the 1990s sea-levels rose about two millimetres per year, by the 2010s, oceans were rising almost five millimetres each year. Although these measurements were very exact in the open ocean, the rate of error was higher near the coastlines and in the glacier borders, a problem that Sentinel-6’s altimeter aims to solve.

“Even though we scientists are pretty good at predicting global warming, we’re pretty lousy at predicting sea-level rise and the reason for that is that we don’t know how the ice sheets are going to behave in a warming world,” Willis says. “The ice sheets are a big question mark and, right now, these satellites are the exclamation point.”

Sentinel-6’s Poseidon-4 synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) altimeter is the main tool involved in the monitoring of sea-level rise. Essentially, it sends millions of radar pulses to the Earth at the speed of light. These pulses are then reflected back to Sentinel-6, which measures the time it takes for each of them to return to calculate the distance that separates the satellite from the Earth’s surface. Any variations in this distance are indicators of sea-level change.

“The altimeter is like a really big clock in space,” Donlon says. “Poseidon-4 is the best altimeter we’ve ever built. As

If steps are not taken immediately, then we expect significant societal problems in terms of water security, food security and indeed societal security” Dr Craig Donlon (ESA)

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an altimeter, it’s capable of measuring a distance of less than 1cm from 1,336km away, so that’s pretty cool. But that alone is not enough, we need to know where the satellite is in space. To do that we have a Global Navigation Satellite System [GNSS], which is basically GPS.” The GNSS confirms where Sentinel-6 is in space and provides the necessary data to pinpoint sea-level rise to a certain area.

Moreover, it’s also helpful when calibrating the satellite, as the other devices used to check Sentinel-6’s position from the ground are referenced to the same

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GNSS/GPS system. Sentinel-6 also has a Radio Occultation (RO) device , an antenna that scans through the atmosphere. By measuring the air’s resistance to its signal, the RO can figure out its temperature and humidity. These tools are incredibly useful for not only making predictions around global warming, but also weather conditions.

“The ocean is actually one of the most important things for driving the climate around the planet,” Willis explains. “The best examples of this are hurricanes.

Hurricanes get their heat and their energy

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The altimeter is like a really big clock in space. Poseidon-4 is the best altimeter we’ve ever built. As an altimeter, it’s capable of measuring a distance of less than 1cm from 1,336km away” Dr Craig Donlon (ESA)

from the ocean, so when a hurricane moves over a hotspot, it can actually speed up and go from a category one or two to a category four or five.”

Scientists are able to locate these hotspots thanks to a surprising characteristic: height. Since warm water stands taller than cold water, Sentinel-6’s altim16

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eter is easily capable of identifying hot water currents in the way of hurricanes and predict their size and impact. “It’s like peering into the interior of the ocean and figuring out how the heat is moving around,” Willis says.

Knowing where these hotspots are and being able to predict weather patterns is

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fundamental to protect the people that live in coastal areas. At the moment, around 11% of the world’s population lives in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (coastal areas below 10mm of elevation), the highest risk area in relation to climate change.

Moreover, most of these regions are not prepared to face the challenges that come

with accelerated global sea-level rise, as most coastal protections are several decades old.

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making is information on current and future events,” Donlon says.

One of these weather patterns that is likely to worsen is the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon. El Niño is associated with cold water moving towards the Eastern Pacific, creating droughts in Australia, India and Indonesia and rainfall in the United States. La Niña, in contrast, moves warm water towards the West, provoking droughts in California and floods in northern Australia.

These events do not occur every year, but their frequency and impact seem to be increasing. As a consequence of El Niño, in 2015 nearly 100 million people in southern Africa, Asia and 18

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Latin America faced food and water shortages and became vulnerable to diseases such as Zika.

Sentinel-6 won’t stop these natural disasters, but it can help us be ready for them.

“El Niño is very clearly seen from the big bulge of seawater warming,” Donlon says. “The more El Niño/La Niña events that we can capture with the altimeter for the long-term record, the better prediction that we can make of what’s going to come next.”

But how trustworthy are these predictions?

Willis and Donlon wanted to answer this question, and thus put their climate

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model to the test. Instead of asking it to predict future weather conditions, they run the climate model backwards in time, asking it to predict past events.

These predictions were then compared to independent records of altimeter data, which matched perfectly.

“If the climate model is able to reproduce the signals that we know exist when we run it backwards, we can trust its predictions for the future, or at least for the next 15-20 years,” Donlon says.

However, in order for these datasets to continue being useful in the future, all the variables used need to stay stable despite the satellite changes. This is achieved by keeping all the ocean observation satellites in the exact same orbit, at 1,336km over the Earth’s surface.

“The orbit is special because it’s always the same,” Willis says. “And that was actually a big deal because it’s not an easy orbit to fly in. It’s very high, which means the satellite gets a lot of radiation from the Sun, and it ages more. But it was chosen back in the ’80s to understand the tides.”

When you are measuring millimetres of sea-level rise, a three-meter tide can greatly disrupt the measurements. Most satellites fly in Sun-synchronous orbits, where they can always see the Sun, which also serves as its power source. However, since tides are driven by the Sun, if Sentinel-6 or any other of the previous Jason satellites were to follow this type of orbit, they would always measure the tide at the same spots. In order to understand

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the impact of tides on sea-level rise, Sentinel-6 flies in a non-synchronous orbit.

“Once we chose it the idea was to stick with it because that’s how you get the most accurate data from one satellite to the next,” Willis says. “When we jump from one to the other, we are always able to fly both satellites at the same time, in the same ground track, and make sure that we understand any disagreements between them.”

This is the phase that Sentinel-6 is currently at. Until next November, both Sentinel-6 and Jason-3 will be orbiting around the Earth and measuring sea-level rise, only separated by 30 seconds. If Sentinel-6 has been calibrated properly, the data captured by both satellites over the next year will be almost identical, and Sentinel-6 will be able to continue the mission on its own.

At least, until Sentinel-6B comes into the picture.

“Sentinel-6 is the satellite so nice we built it twice”, says Willis, jokingly. “We have been very lucky so far that we have been able to string together this record number of satellites one after the other.

But what’s amazing about Sentinel-6 is that we didn’t have to get lucky this time. We built it and planned it to have two satellites, to launch while the current satellite is still in good shape and to really commit to the fact that we have to keep

Sentinel-6 is the satellite so nice we built it twice” Josh Willis (NASA) measuring sea-level rise because it’s not going to stop any time soon.”

Sea-level rise is not stopping, but there are things we can do to slow it down.

The data collected by Sentinel-6 will be used to support the Blue Economy under the European Green Deal and, one day, it will be part of the evidence used to assess how well policies and decisions made today had a tangible impact on climate change and people’s lives.

“We have to change society, its very fabric,” Donlon says. “Sentinel-6 has demonstrated the importance of working together to try to bring the evidence base that policy-makers need to make good decisions, because the investments that need to be committed now will have a very long-reaching impact, far into the future. Without that, we’re lost.”

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CROWDFUNDING FUTURES Beam is transforming the lives of homeless people across the UK. We spoke to CEO Alex Stephany and Head of Engineering Julian Keenaghan about how the charity’s unique crowdfunding approach is grounded in technology

AUTHOR: Ben East

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I

t might be an alarmingly frequent sight in our everyday lives, but homelessness is one of those issues where it’s all too easy to look the other way, to pass off as someone else’s problem.

Alex Stephany, though, found he couldn’t ignore the man sitting outside his tube station any longer. He’d buy him socks, cups of coffee and they’d have a chat.

And then, one day, he totally disappeared.

“Six weeks he was gone for, and when he finally turned up again, he looked awful,” Stephany remembers. “He told me that he’d been in hospital after a heart attack.”

But it was what he told Stephany next which really hit home. Here was a homeless man in his fifties who’d been out of work for longer than he could remember.

“I walked home thinking, this is terrible,” says Stephany. “I’d been trying to help this guy, but not only had I failed, he was in a much worse position than when we first met. What did this guy really need? Did he really need another cup of coffee? Or a pair of socks? No, he needed the support and the skills to get back into work and provide for himself. I thought, well, that’s going to cost more than a cup of coffee… but what if we all chipped in?”

Looking for a solution, Stephany set about using his background in tech 24

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companies - he had founded JustPark, the app and website which now connects 3.5 million drivers with public and private parking spaces across the UK. Combined with a strong moral purpose that had come from time volunteering for a legal charity - “it was eye-opening to see the most extreme poverty and desperation that can exist in London” - Stephany devised an incredibly simple idea to get homeless people back into work: a crowdfunding platform that could make smart, life-changing investments into people, directing money towards courses, work equipment and qualifications for those who need it the most.

“When I was running JustPark, we did the largest ever crowdfunding round for

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So Beam became about using technology to effect scalable change, to support people to get new skills and get into work” Alex Stephany

a tech startup,” he says. “So I thought, look, I understand this model. I’ve seen it can work to raise millions of pounds for a parking app - what if we can raise just a few thousand pounds to change someone’s life? ” And so the idea for Beam was born, with Stephany as founder and CEO. As their website puts it best nearly four years on, “you help fund their training, we support them into a career, they get a bright new future.” Browsing the stories is actually a profoundly moving experience; at the time of writing 469 campaigns have been funded by 7,467 people, which has got 197 people into work. They’ve received over £1.6 million in donations and everybody’s campaign ISSUE 08

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Ryan’s story Ryan, one of Beam’s success stories, tells us how his life has been transformed Despite living and working in the US for 18 years, I was deported because of visa issues, which meant I ended up back in London in 2018, living on the streets in a freezing cold January with nothing but the clothes on my back.

I literally walked to central London from Heathrow because I didn’t have a penny to my name.

It came to the point where a policeman saw me sleeping in a park, and suggested I get in touch with Veterans’ Aid as I used to be in the Household Cavalry. They got me a room in a hostel in east London, and helped me so much - psychologically as much as anything.

So when they referred me to Beam as a potential way to fund some support and get me out of my situation, I was like, “let’s get it on!” I wasn’t at all worried about being in the public eye, effectively being crowdfunded for - it was all about trying out an unusual approach. If it didn’t work there was no harm done. And if it did work, well, my story might also help other people in similar situations.

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We decided to put the money raised towards HGV training, as haulage was the industry I’d spent 18 years doing in America. I couldn’t get the support from Jobseeker’s Allowance, though, so that’s where Beam really helped. To know that 508 people raised £4,329 to get me the training is simply amazing.

I’ve been in driving jobs ever since, and I’ve got a flat now. I’m not joking, I would probably be dead if it wasn’t for Beam and Veterans’ Aid. I can’t thank everyone enough for what they’ve done for me: it just shows you that there are good people out there.

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gets funded within 100 days. In practice the average campaign size - £2,745 - is reached well within a month.

It’s interesting, though, that the usual aims of a tech start-up, to be disruptive, digital and innovative, were not entirely appropriate in the homeless sector.

After all, Beam would be dealing with people who no fault of their own are often vulnerable, isolated and excluded.

Stephany had to spend a lot of time talking to people in different stages of homelessness and liaising with other charities and organisations before going live; he remembers a conversation with Tony, a recovering addict who had been out of work for 21 years and spent time in prison. He would become Beam’s first success story.

“He wanted to be an electrician, so we explained the idea of Beam to him, that we would raise money for his training,” says Stephany. “He liked the idea, of course, but he had one question: ‘why would anyone help me?’

“I couldn’t promise they would, of course, but I also thought that if we could make people want to care about Tony, then we could get the support he needed.”

Essentially, Beam’s nuanced model wasn’t about raising money for a nebulous cause, but using technology to get Tony to both explain his story

online and emphasise what meeting his campaign total would mean to his entire future. Julian Keenaghan, now Head of Engineering and Product at Beam, built the first version of the website in his spare time, with the core idea of crowdfunding people into work through digital storytelling. He thinks this might be one of the reasons Beam stood out.

“This one-to-one model of support is unique to Beam,” he thinks. “For a standard charity website you’re often not making donations for an individual, so there’s a level of transparency and connection to Beam which has always stood out.”

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It’s a collaborative approach, working with government, with charities, with public and employers to build an ecosystem based around support and hope” Alex Stephany about this story of a homeless person crowdfunding to be an electrician. Within days Tony was on Sky News, BBC and Reuters, and the £4,378 he needed was quickly raised, with donations as small as £5. It transpired people did care.

“My goals at the time were to get some qualifications, get a job, come off benefits and get a flat, all within a couple of years,” says Tony in his emotional video on the Beam website. “And I’ve got them. So I’ll now set some more.

Without Beam I wouldn’t have been in that position… onwards and upwards.”

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it had been. It was a pretty cool experience, and we could have stopped there and been proud of how we’d helped one person in a really meaningful way.

But actually what we thought was how could we keep going, help more people who have never got a proper shot at life and give them a real opportunity to show what they can do.

“So Beam then became about using technology to effect scalable change, to support people to get new skills and get into work.”

It was this step change which transformed Beam from nice news story about Tony to a proper social enterprise with a charity arm, which ensures every penny donated goes straight to the homeless people who need it: for transport to get to work, training or tools.

Stephany believes this 100% giving model is unique in their sector.

Obviously it costs money to run Beam, though, which is why the social enterprise element, Beam Up Ltd, generates cash and builds sustainability and scalability, too. Greater London Authority, Nesta, Social Tech Trust and many other foundations and private funders have met the costs of delivering the services as Beam’s success stories have continued to build.

“There are hundreds of organisations in London providing food, sleeping bags,

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mental health support - what we do is work with them very closely to focus on taking these people out of homelessness for good,” says Stephany. “So it’s a collaborative approach, working with government, with charities, with public and employers to build an ecosystem based around support and hope.”

And that ecosystem has required a lot of technology to run efficiently, given there are so many stakeholders and users.

“Supporters, donators, beneficiaries, government partners, charities, our own team… we all use the Beam tech platform in a different way,” says Keenaghan.

“Managing operations is challenging,” he admits. “How we deal with refer-

rals, assessing people for suitability, and taking them on their journey through launching their campaign and supporting them through to work is complex and has a lot of moving parts. Building a product to support our team to run that, while keeping human contact at the core, has been challenging. But it’s also the way we can scale to support as many people as possible over the forthcoming years.”

And understanding that at the heart of the process were human beings with significant need has always been crucial to Stephany, too.

“Actually, a key part of what we do is give people who have been written off -

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and have often sadly written themselves off - some self-belief,” he says. “The real value here is the crowd of people, the supporters, who give money - but also send messages of hope and support when they do so.”

And so although the outward-facing crowdfunding model might seem straightforward - both technologically and emotionally - actually Beam has built something bespoke for its sector.

People can either donate as a one-off payment or, each month, and an algorithm allocates general donations to the slowest funding campaign.

“That’s really important because it allows us to fund all of our campaigns, and it also means about 1,300 people each month get an email about how the people they support are getting on,” says Stephany. “No-one is left behind.”

On average, each homeless person with a Beam campaign is backed by 250 strangers.

A quite extraordinary statistic, but it’s also fair to say the sheer sense of smallscale philanthropy anyone will feel when they pledge that day’s coffee money to, for example, Mae for her IT course that will hopefully lead to a career in e-commerce, or Kaim for his SIA course so he can be a security guard, is addictively altruistic. Such a targeted approach also circumvents that age-old (and incorrect) 30

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Building a product to support our team, while keeping human contact at the core, has been challenging.

But it’s also the way we can scale to support as many people as possible” Julian Keenaghan

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suspicion that donating to homeless people is somehow a waste of money.

And the tech helps the beneficiaries, too - if they don’t have a smartphone to receive these messages of support, that gets crowdfunded as well. Keenaghan is keen to make their experience even more fulfilling via developing an app over the next 12 months, Meanwhile, Beam’s recruitment arm works with employer partners such as Thames Water, NHS and Asda to handpick great candidates that have been through the Beam ecosystem.

What’s fascinating, too, is that the full, data-led transparency of their remarkable success stories has been incredibly useful to local government. Beam is by no means the only organisation, inside or outside government, to be supporting groups of people with employability. But their operating system means they’re probably the only ones who can track the impact that support has.

“Say a local authority refers 100 people to us,” says Stephany. “We can show them in real time how those people are progressing, so they can ISSUE 08

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make informed decisions on spending.

More generally it shows them the savings the Beam model generates for taxpayers by supporting people on benefits into work.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Beam’s award-winning model is coveted by cities around the world. For such a simple idea, it seems odd that there aren’t really other organisations attempting to replicate it, but Keenaghan reckons he knows why.

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“When it comes down to it, homelessness is a really hard problem to crack,” he says. “What we were proposing was a very difficult operational challenge; crowdfunding isn’t novel, but behind the scenes it’s a complex human issue which needs people who have a background in homelessness.”

As for Stephany, he’s certainly open to conversations about expanding Beam’s reach, but for now he thinks there’s still a lot more work to be done for homeless

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people in London first, and then the UK more generally.

“Ultimately we want to create something that feels local, so if you were living in Manchester and you opened the Beam app you’d be able to fund people in your local area. And those people would then get trained in local training centres and hired by local companies who need their skills.”

That’s for the long-term future. For now, Stephany is just happy that Beam

has made such a difference in London and is just as determined to tackle a homelessness issue that affects “literally every single person in the UK through their taxes”.

“You know, we’re really just trying to build a really elegant solution which means every person can live in a society that is more just and equal.

It’s been a really exciting period of growth - but it also feels like we’ve only just begun.”

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An intelligent future

Kalyan Kumar, a key figure at IT services giant HCL Technologies, talks about the scaling of artificial intelligence in enterprise and why new technologies can help businesses achieve their sustainability goals

AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer

K

alyan Kumar is speaking to us on the eve of the Test cricket series between India and England, and he is very excited. In some ways he has a foot in both camps: Indian born and raised, but a long-time resident of the UK in his role as a global Chief Technology Officer for HCL Technologies. It is a clash of two of the sport’s titans and Kumar is bubbling with anticipation.

Kumar - or KK, as he is known - is a man of passions, with cricket being one of them. Having played to a high level in India as a young man, he now volunteers 34

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to promote the game as a trustee of Capital Kids Cricket, a London-based charity. He is also a musician with a group called Contraband. According to KK, they specialise in “white collar rock”, which seems the perfect musical style for an ensemble that counts a corporate leader from a multi-billion dollar technology company as its drummer.

Among KK’s other passions is, of course, tech. A systems engineer who moved into IT “just at the right time”, he has been part of HCL for more than two decades. Nowadays, he says his role

AN INTELLIGENT FUTURE

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is less about technology and products, and more about cultural transformation and the future of sustainable, tech-enabled enterprise. KK has been labelled “a champion of new technologies” but prefers a different term.

“I would use the word ‘evangelist’ for new technologies,” KK tells Tech for Good. “There are a lot of champions, and I don’t claim to be the master of everything. But what I’ve learned is that, as a business, you have your core strengths and then you really need to understand different technologies and how they could impact you, your industry 36

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and your outcomes. It’s about trying to find ways to put the jigsaw together.”

Much of KK’s time is spent on an area of increasing importance to companies: sustainability. For HCL, sustainability is an agenda at board level, and the firm publishes a comprehensive sustainability report each year. But the bigger picture is how the technologies that HCL helps integrate for its clients could support them in becoming more sustainable.

Up for discussion is the role of artificial intelligence (AI), often held as the great beacon of hope in this era of transformation. KK believes consumer AI is now

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It’s not just about enterprise using AI to make money, but also how businesses can achieve better sustainability and do good” Kalyan Kumar mainstream yet says there is still much potential in the area of enterprise - and not just for business optimisation and product development, but for sustainability too.

“There is a lot possible with the power of AI,” he says. “And I think it’s not just about enterprise using AI to make money, but also how businesses can achieve better sustainability and do good. The way I really look at this is that it’s not just AI, but it’s AI and computing at scale.

I really see cloud and AI as yin and yang.”

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Sustainability is often seen as something that cannot generate revenue, but once you integrate sustainable sourcing into your supply chain, or sustainability into the way you build products, you can use AI to take up a lot of the work” involved in some of the organisation’s SDG (Sustainable Developments Goals) initiatives - a programme of change tied to the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda” for sustainable development, and one that has been challenged and accelerated because of COVID-19.

KK believes the route to tech-enabled sustainability is two-phased, beginning with the tech companies themselves leading on best practice.

“Hyperscalers and IT infrastructure is surpassing many manufacturing energy consumption levels,” he says. “If you look at energy consumption of the AI GPUs, you’ll be amazed at what they consume, and even the energy they use for cooling. So charity starts at home, right? You start by yourself building sustainable capabilities and technology.

“The second part that I see is that can advancements in machine learning, deep learning, and to some extent quantum 38

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computing, drive this forward? So AI has a lot of use cases in areas like optimisation, supply chain, healthcare… but we’ve got some very interesting use cases in areas like water distribution, electric utility, health monitoring and food processing.”

Indeed, KK sees some of these efforts first-hand. Part of his remit at HCL is to work with its growing ecosystem of startups, where it aims to encourage innovation by connecting them to large enterprises and drive forward the creation of new products and services.

In the area of sustainability, HCL has been collaborating with a company called Winnow to build an AI solution which aims to solve the problem of food wastage. Chefs can take photos of food as it’s thrown away, and the tool recognises what is considered waste and should be kept. In the fashion industry, it has worked with TrusTrace on an AI-and-blockchain-powered platform

AN INTELLIGENT FUTURE

for product traceability and supply chain management.

KK says these examples and others serve to show that not only can AI create sustainability, but that sustainability can also drive business value.

“Sustainability is often seen as something that cannot generate revenue, but once you integrate sustainable sourcing into your supply chain, or sustainability into the way you build products, you can use AI to take up a lot of the work.

So I think AI and sustainability have a very good relationship because one can take away the load of the other. If you put sustainability at the core, AI can really help.”

KK is seeing a slow but concerted shift in emphasis with HCL clients, estimating that around eight out of 10 are now

making sustainability a strategic imperative. He also believes the onset of the coronavirus pandemic has led to more and more business leaders focusing on the matter.

“There is a very clear sensitivity now, and I think in the last 12 months because of the pandemic, many people have seen the atmosphere look very different to how it was,” he says. “The whole period has been a wake-up call really.

“The issue is how to be sustainable in a cost-effective way. And that’s what companies are trying to figure out. Still today, very few companies have board metrics that put sustainability right up there.

CSR [corporate social responsibility] has that, and I think it has to go to that level.

And tech can do a lot of good in helping with the whole sustainability journey.”

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HCL is certainly following KK’s mantra that “charity starts at home”. The company splits its sustainability strategy down into four areas: “responsible business” covers areas like governance and benchmarking sustainability, while it also has a society focus that looks at developing skills in young people and supporting the disadvantaged. Then it has its whole renewable ecosystem, and a dedication to redefining sustainability in the workplace.

An approach led by founder Shiv Nadar and chairperson Roshni Nadar Malhotra, HCL has clear lines of communication

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with partners, customers and employees around its sustainability efforts, according to KK. “This is something very core to us and it is driven right from the very top,” he says. “We now also have a sustainability chief whose job it is to work on all of these things across the company.

A key area for us next is sustainable sourcing; we do a lot of sourcing and a lot of our partners are now beginning to implement sustainability initiatives.

So it’s still a work in progress, but we are committed to doing all that we can.”

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There is not one industry that isn’t getting techified. If tech can pull together money and effort, it will at the very least have a big impact”

With the power of corporations like HCL, a renewed desire from businesses to tackle sustainability, and the rapid development of technologies like AI, surely society is set to take huge leaps over the coming years? KK agrees, and believes the tech industry at large will be at the forefront.

“It has a very, very significant role to play,” he says. “More and more things are becoming digital. Digital is taken for granted now, but with everything moving to the cloud, and AI being baked in, everyone in the value chain - the tech creators, the producers, the integrators,

the developers, and the operators - has a lot of responsibility.

“There is not one industry that isn’t getting techified. If tech can pull together money and effort, it will at the very least have a big impact.”

One thing that has been slowed down by the pandemic, not accelerated, is KK’s musical hobby. “Remote jamming hasn’t really worked for us,” he admits.

But with the packed cricket schedule providing escapism and the small matter of helping the world’s economy become more sustainable through the use of tech, KK has plenty to keep him busy.

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GOOD OR BAD?

GOOD OR

BAD? Great power comes with great responsibility, especially with innovation. Each month, Tech For Good discusses the potential benefits and dangers of new technologies. This month we ask: Are rocket launches damaging to the environment?

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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ROCKET LAUNCHES

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GOOD?

espite the non-sustainable nature of rocket launches, they are responsible for only 1% of the total ozone depletion caused by human action. This number is insignificant when compared to the total of industries like aviation. While the aerospace industry produced 22,789 tonnes of CO2 in 2018, the emissions of all commercial flights during the same amount of time totalled 918,000,000 tonnes of CO2.

Aerospace companies would need to fly 40,300 more rockets per year to equal airlines’ environmental impact.

However, just because rocket launching isn’t as bad as commercial aviation doesn’t mean that its environmental impact should not be addressed. In fact, aerospace companies are developing many innovative solutions to make rocket launching more sustainable. For example, SpaceX was the first company to develop reusable rockets such as the Falcon 9, and Blue Origin’s Shepard suborbital spaceship has a hydrogen-fueled engine. If these companies 44

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can create innovative solutions to reduce the impact of rocket launching at the same speed at which they create their satellite constellation, we can be hopeful about a future where humans can go to Mars, but they’ll still see clear skies.

What the expert says: “ Sometimes I get criticism for, ‘why are you using combustion in rockets and you have electric cars?

There isn’t some way to make an electric rocket.

I wish there was. But in the long-term, you can use solar power to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with water, and produce fuel and oxygen for the rocket” Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

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BAD?

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What the expert says:

hen a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches into the sky wrapped in a cloud of white smoke, its 27 engines are creating a thrust equal to 18 Boeing 747 aircrafts. By the time it has reached Earth’s orbit, it would have released approximately 400 tonnes of kerosene and emitted more carbon dioxide directly into the stratosphere in a few minutes than a car would be able to in 200 years.

There are currently no existing regulations that control rocket emissions, despite the meteoric rise in rocket launches over the past two years. In 2018, the number of rocket launches exceeded 100 for the first time since 1990. As a result of the commercial space race between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, experts estimate that the number of annual rocket launches will rise to 1,000 over the next few years, exponentially increasing the industry’s environmental impact. If we are so conscious about the environmental impact of cars -one of the drivers of Musk’s other company, Tesla- why should rockets be any different?

“ As the rocket launch market grows, so will ozone-destroying rocket emissions. If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realised

by CFCs” Professor Darin Toohey of CU-Boulder’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department

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MOVING THE THERAPIST’S COUCH

MOVING THE THERAPIST’S COUCH COVID-19 has forced therapy online. Is it there to stay? We asked writer and psychotherapist Al Tyers to explore the future of therapy and the role of AI and robotics

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ould you tell a robot your deepest secrets, and how would that be different from talking to a person? Will technology change counselling and therapy? And could human practitioners be marginalised or even replaced?

The argument from psychotherapists and counsellors has traditionally been that there is no substitute for being in a room with another human being. To borrow from Mandy Rice-Davies: well they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Had you asked most psychotherapists, of which I am one, what they thought about technology and therapy a year ago, you would have had a lukewarm response.

But a year of lockdown, and moving therapy sessions out of the room and onto Zoom, has given professionals and service users alike a different appreciation of what can be accomplished via the use of technology.

Our membership body, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, released data in March last year that showed 88% of client sessions were face-to-face. But like almost every other area of our lives, that has changed dramatically during COVID-19.

A University of Michigan study during the pandemic has found that fewer than 2% of local psychiatric patients have 48

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South Korean developer Ybrain aims to treat major depressive disorder with wearable electric stimulation, and to use scans to measure electrical activity in the brain” opted to delay treatment until face-toface becomes possible again. There is an appetite for therapy without the physical presence. Older patients were more likely to favour phone, but 83% chose video chat. Across all ages, half reported themselves keen to continue with virtual sessions even after the pandemic is over.

The advantages of online therapy are the obvious ones: convenience, the ability to access the therapist without travel, and that costs might be lower.

Practitioners, for example, might not have to rent consulting room space and could pass on those savings to clients.

The question is whether online works.

That data is still coming through but

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anecdotally, clients and therapists alike are reporting that the transition has been easier than hoped, and that therapeutic change can certainly happen online.

For patients who have complex needs, or challenges separating out reality from phantasy, online can be problematic.

And an online “disinhibition effect” has been noted, whereby clients find themselves opening up much more, more quickly: this could be encouraging for the work, but can also be overwhelming for clients. Some have also talked about a flattening-out of experience, which comes from switching from Zoom call to Zoom call, family, work, friends, therapy, work, more work; all taking place in the same screen and room.

But those are the times in which we are living.

Therapists, naturally enough, have tended to prize human contact highly.

While some schools of therapy, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, have been welcoming of data and technology, the more hifalutin approaches (psychoanalysis, for instance) have been sniffy or slow or both. The Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, in a game – if perhaps not quite cutting-edge – article called ‘Integrating Technology into Psychotherapy Practice’, suggests that one function of technology for practitioners could be to “type a client’s report on a computer.”

Let’s not rush into anything here…

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Therapy, requiring as it does self-understanding and life experience, tends to be a career people come to later in life, and continue into their fifties, sixties and beyond: perhaps that is also a factor in why practitioners have been tech-averse.

But overall, there is a strong sense in the mental healthy industries that therapists and clients alike have proven willing and able to adapt.

All of this suggests that Zoom could be the thin end of the wedge. Articles about therapy and tech in the press have for years tended towards a rather arch sci-fi take, but online therapy has proved that the future is now. In the fields of wearables, AI, robotics, personalisation via data and augmented reality, progress is being made in leaps and bounds.

Wearables already on the market include devices like the TouchPoint, which issues micro-vibrations on the skin that can shift the brain from the ‘fight or flight’ sympathetic nervous system to the calmer parasympathetic nervous system, reducing stress and aiding sleep.

Schizophrenia patients can be prescribed medication with a sensor in it that can remind users and their doctors if it has been taken.

South Korean developer Ybrain aims to treat major depressive disorder with wearable electric stimulation, and to use electroencephalogram scans to measure 50

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electrical activity in the brain and thus gather data to treat mental health issues.

In California, Sentio Solutions offers wearable tech to gather heart rate, perspiration, skin temperature and relay this to a user’s app. The user then identifies their mood from a menu, and the app suggests some breathing exercises, coping techniques, or online resources.

A person could make this data available to their therapist or doctor, and treatment tailored to go with the findings.

Perhaps this sort of triage could be helpful to someone with a specific,

MOVING THE THERAPIST’S COUCH

If artificial intelligence could assess something enormously complicated like the emotion in a voice then the sky is the limit, although experts remain to be convinced”

low-level issue – what sort of physical state are you in when you reach for the cookies? – but the instinct is that this is a blunt tool. For instance, while some people might well experience sweating when anxious, not everyone does, so measuring perspiration levels might or might not be helpful. And for broader and deeper human distress, the current tech seems inadequate: someone in serious crisis is surely going to need more than a helpful app? It might well be that wearables could deliver meaningful and reliable mental health data

and interventions in the future, but that is still in its infancy.

It’s interesting to note that some of the companies operating in this space are not scrappy start-ups but the biggest commercial entities on the planet. Apple is offering an app called NightWare on its watch that could help PTSD users wake from nightmares; while Amazon has a voice analysis function on its Halo watch that monitors a user’s tone of voice and claims that it can judge emotional state.

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enormously complicated like the emotion in a voice then the sky is the limit, although experts remain to be convinced.

Dr Sandra Wachter, associate professor in AI ethics at the University of Oxford, said: “I doubt that a system (at least at this point) is able to crack this complex social code.” The professor’s point is that something like the emotion in a voice is subject to so many factors: racial or cultural inflections, and perhaps sarcasm, irony, ambivalence – all of the subtle gradations of social interaction that might well be clear to a person but enormously difficult to teach, or even to quantify.

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The history of AI and therapy is a long and, as yet, still rather unconvincing tale. In 1964, researchers at MIT developed Eliza, which was able to respond to users via linguistic pattern-matching but was essentially a scripted bagatelle. Indeed, it was created partly as a parody of the much-lampooned therapist habit of turning a question back at the patient. For instance, “I am feeling sad.” Eliza: “Do you believe it is normal to be feeling sad?” And so on and on.

Eliza creator Joseph Weizenbaum grew aghast at how much authority people chose to confer upon the machine.

MOVING THE THERAPIST’S COUCH

But progress has been impressive.

A multi-university random controlled study in 2018 found that students self-reported mental health improvements after using an integrative psychological AI, called Tess, to reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety via supportive chatbot messages.

For instance, a user who said they were feeling lonely might receive the response: “I’m so sorry you’re feeling lonely. I guess we all feel a little lonely sometimes.” A substitute for therapy?

Perhaps not. But potentially very accessible, cheap, and endlessly available.

Robotics have of course been a factor in physical therapy and rehab for some time: aiding people with paralysis, for instance, but the science is now coming to the fore in neurological work. Robotic toys have been helpful in children with cognitive and developmental impairments; or in children and adults with apraxia of speech and other motor speech disorders with a neurological basis.

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interactive artificial intelligence. The journey from robot dolls and supportive chatbots to embodied AI that can replicate the human experience is underway.

The USC Institute for Creative Technologies project, Ellie, showcased an on-screen digital therapist that can read and react to micro-expressions, build rapport by sympathetic gestures and respond to cues. American soldiers describing PTSD revealed more symptoms to Ellie than to an anonymous form. Ellie’s creators explain that she is a decision-support tool, not a replacement for a therapist but… well, she’s pretty good.

Virtual Reality and Augmented are already offering exciting possible treat-

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ment options: for instance, a Shanghai study that allowed mental health professionals to recreate via VR and AR the experience of an elevator for patients who had claustrophobia with a view to exposure therapy. VR and AR applications allow monitoring of patients and treatment of them in a controlled environment.

Therapy, like every other endeavour, both seeks to benefit from the data revolution and has concerns about it. It might be that personalised treatment could come about from data gathering and usage but given the personal and sensitive nature of the therapeutic environment, this is not without its ethical considerations: what happens to all the data, and is it safe?

Also, research suggests that people are

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A study found that students selfreported mental health improvements after using an integrative psychological AI, called Tess, to reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety” more compliant when instructed to do something by a robot than they are when a human tells them what to do. On the plus side, some people might find there is less stigma about sharing intimate or shameful feelings with a robot. As an anonymous user (presumably a human, but who knows?) comments on the website of mental health app Woebot: “I have had therapists before, but I love the lack of insecurity I feel when sharing with Woebot.”

Mental health services are under serious pressure in the UK: the NHS is not sufficiently resourced to offer people what they need, which means that those of us who work in private practice are contacted by clients who have complex presentations that would normally require a multidisciplinary team. The system is creaking, and the effects from COVID-19 are only still filtering through.

Whatever support that technology can provide would be welcomed, or at the minimum be worthy of serious consideration for clients and practitioners. While it is true that there are ethical considerations with data and robotics, there are also opportunities in that access to therapy could be improved, made cheaper, de-stigmatised. Will that remove the human desire for contact? No. There will always be a place for the supportive and containing environment that person-toperson therapy can provide, but it could be augmented, improved, and democratised by technology. So: tell me about your motherboard.

Al Tyers is a psychotherapist in London and online. www.altyerstherapy.com

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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: Rishab Jain

Age: 16 Born: Portland, Oregon, USA Achievements: At 13, Rishab developed an AI tool to improve pancreatic cancer radiotherapy, for which he was named America’s Top Young Scientist. Three years later he is the Founder of Samyak Science Society, a non-profit organisation that fosters the interest of children in STEAM - science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics - and Café Society, an indie company that makes Discord applications

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RISHAB JAIN

E

ver since a young age, I have loved technology. My older brother was an avid programmer so since I was really young I got to see some of those things and I started to pick them up for myself.

A couple of years ago, I started to get interested in artificial intelligence. It was really changing the industry and I wanted to see what I could do with it.

Coincidentally during this same, I was visiting my brother in Boston and there I got to visit a lab that worked in pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal cancers out there. It was really devastating to hear that this cancer has such a low survival rate, so I started wondering if I could find a solution.

Pancreatic cancer is treated using radiotherapy. I wanted to see if I could make some sort of computer programme to improve this. At the time I was interested in AI so I chose deep learning.

To develop the Pancreatic Cancer Deep Learning System (PCDLS) first I worked on getting datasets with medical images of CT scans of patients with pancreatic cancer. I got it from hospital datasets such as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and opensource data.

I used a convolutional neural network technique to train my AI to locate where the pancreas was in the CT scan and segment it out so that doctors would be able to apply radiation more effectively.

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The Pancreas Detective is a project I did a year later, in 2018. Pancreatic cancer is one of the hardest diseases to detect early, so I was interested in finding a way to detect the disease early or improve some portion of the process.

It can often take weeks for patients to get a proper diagnosis that includes all of their mutational information. This mutational information is really important because doctors can tailor treatment for the patient based on it.

I wanted to look into ways I could use AI to extract features from the picture of a tumour biopsy. I decided to use a technique known as radiomics which allows us to extract image features that the human eye simply cannot really tell.

The system was sensitive when detecting a couple mutations: P53, KRAS, CDK2NA mutations and a few others, which are very important mutations in cancer formation. In fact, some of them are really known for affecting the cell cycle, so knowing that the patient has these mutations weeks earlier can help doctors get the treatments to the patients faster.

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I knew that, if I could do it, other kids around the world could too. But many kids out there don’t have the same opportunities and the same resources available to really get them ignited and inspired in STEAM. I created the Samyak Science Society’s to spark inspiration in STEAM for children regardless of their background, age or gender. We allow kids to experiment on all five STEAM fields.

We have been hosting virtual workshops over the last few months, because of COVID. We’ve had a couple of hundred attendees and we have been able to teach them about various aspects of STEAM. It’s been really great.

RISHAB JAIN

When I was learning about AI, I came to know about this platform called Discord. It’s a messaging and VIOP platform where users can communicate over text and voice. One of the cool features that Discord has are bots. I was really intrigued by them so I created a few.

One of the bots I created recently is called Detox AI. It’s intended for schools, to prevent toxic messages or spamming occurring within Discord channels. It uses AI and Jigsaw’s Perspective API to detect the tone of a message and it has been quite good at detecting toxicity and removing it.

I think that Discord is going to be the next big social media platform. It’s already becoming one of the biggest, but we’ll have to see where it goes.

Being named America’s Top Young Scientist in 2019 and one of Times’ 25 most Influential Teens meant a lot and it shaped my journey. It got me really passionate about continuing down this field, especially in the area of medicine.

I have been able to spread awareness for pancreatic cancer through my efforts, but a negative side would be that some of the research that I’ve done maybe hasn’t been recognised as much in the technical space.

I am interested in becoming a doctor because medicine has really been able to create an impact in people’s lives. I’m also currently working on another project that involves AI to try to improve certain aspects of vaccine manufacturing.

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PUBLIC SECTOR

A WASTE

OPPORTUNITY The carbon footprint of electronic waste accounted for 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions in 2019, and it’s only going to increase unless action is taken. We sat down with Mattie Yeta, Sustainability Lead at the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and Mateo Dugand, Technologist, IT Efficiency & Sustainability at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), to find out how the public and private sectors are working together on ambitious sustainability targets

INTERVIEW BY: Daniel Brigham

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A WASTE OPPORTUNITY

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FG: I want to start by asking about collaboration between tech leaders and governments.

Is enough of that happening?

Yeta: So I think a new report on private sector released by the United Nations shows that progress on bringing about a sustainable future for people and the planet is still a bit patchy. The majority of companies, primarily those involved with the United Nations Global Compact are doing OK, but there’s still room for improvement. Incremental change by individual companies or organisations will definitely not deliver

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the business contribution needed to reach a sustainable future. However, there are organisations that I believe are taking leaps, and giant steps, and therefore the collaboration between governments and private sector is getting better as a result of that.

TFG: Is it fair to say that large tech organisations are realising the scope of what they can do, and that sustainability is being taken more seriously than it was five or 10 years ago?

Dugand: I think in the last, say, five years there have these strong relation-

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ships between governments and the private sector, especially in tech. The COVID crisis has just highlighted that through a whole variety of projects, such as using supercomputers to accelerate vaccines, and different governments around the world - from the EU to the White House in the US - putting together taskforces that include a lot of tech companies to help them tackle the crisis. In the last couple of years, I would say the private sector has gone from being a provider to a real partner for governance.

TFG: Moving on to why Defra and HPE have collaborated, how did that come about and what are the goals of the collaboration?

Yeta: I think we’ve collaborated for a number of reasons. I think it’s important for me to highlight that HPE are one of Defra’s key suppliers within our supply chain. HPE have ensured that we, as Defra, are achieving our zero-landfill targets, and making sure that we are more circular with the use of our IT and technologies. Furthermore, I think we recognise that there is a lot we can do together and a lot that we can achieve by working together on so many fronts.

I think as part of that collaboration, we do both understand as organisations

In the last couple of years, I would say the private sector has gone from being a provider to a real partner for governance” Mateo Dugand

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that we bring different and sometimes similar expertise to the many challenges of sustainability. We tap into that different expertise that we both have in order to help resolve those global sustainability challenges, as well as those UK sustainability challenges. We really put our hands together to innovate and develop those solutions together.

Dugand: We share a lot of goals. We share similar goals in terms of climate, in terms of circular economy, in terms of biodiversity. So it made sense to come together to try and solve these challenges together. I think both organisations can be considered leaders in

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the environmental, social and governance aspects, in the public sector for Defra and in the private sector report for HPE. And we both have our own powerful platforms to communicate on these kinds of topics. So it really went further than just partnering together. It was also about being thought leaders and trying to move the needle for the rest of the industry and the rest of the government organisations.

TFG: What drives HPE to get involved in sustainability projects?

Dugand: There are always very different drivers, but our customers are asking

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achieve a sustainable future and we cannot achieve the sustainable development goals – the 25-year environment plan, achieving net zero by 2050, and some goals as early as 2025 and 2030 – by working alone in a silo. It’s about increasing our sustainability efforts in frequency, in magnitude and sophistication; being able to share the burden and navigating a very complex world.

So it is about collective problem solving.

I cannot stress how important partnerships are. It’s recognised as a strategic approach to achieving sustainable development globally.

for this: how can you help us be more sustainable and drive our sustainability agenda? We also have a board of directors and a board of investors that is looking to invest into companies that are responsible. Our employees are also key, asking us how HPE aligns to their own values, while regulators and policy makers are still asking us to do this.

There is also business value in it.

TFG: And Mattie, from your perspective, how crucial are these kind of partnerships to government now?

Yeta: So partnerships are really important for us in government. We cannot

TFG: It’s always an ongoing process, but are there already examples of how this sort of collaborative process is helping to meet sustainability goals?

Dugand: I think what Defra has been doing is working with partners, including HPE, to reduce the environmental footprint of IT across Defra by working on the zero-landfill initiative and by refurbishing as many IT assets that are coming to end of life as possible. But we’re also looking at the other side, which is really how can we apply technology and digitilisation to certain sectors where we could gain some efficiency, where we could gain some carbon reduction, using open data platforms. So there are two sides ISSUE 08

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Partnerships are really important for us in government.

We cannot achieve a sustainable future and we cannot achieve the sustainable development goals by working alone in a silo” Mattie Yeta

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of the coin here, where Defra is really pushing us to reduce the environmental footprint of what we provide to Defra as a group, but also how can we leverage technology in order to achieve sustainable outcomes?

Yeta: You’re spot on. So in terms of quantifying this, we’ve been able to reduce our carbon footprint within Defra by 40%. And we’ve been able to save £1.6 million as an organisation when we calculate the reduction of carbon footprint energy consumption and energy use. This is really as a result of the work that we’re doing firstly through the Defra e-Sustainability Alliance, where we have received awards for driving forward strong, ambitious sustainability targets.

TFG: I think it’s fair to say that there may be a bit of a knowledge gap about the impact on the environment of technology industries and of e-waste. Does there need to be an education campaign on this subject?

Yeta: I would agree with you, yes. I think we all do need learning and development around e-waste and sustainability - even those of us that are in this field.

So I do think that there is more work to be done on the learning and development front, and it is an area that we are investing in with our many partners to ensure that those that are in IT under-

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stand and are able to incorporate sustainability and sustainable ways of working within their processes and their core practices. We have to remember that IT does not exist in isolation to the global challenges we face.

Dugand: There is clearly still a gap in information when it comes to e-waste.

And it’s up to us really to evangelise that topic. And I think what Defra has been doing in the last five years is extremely important because they’re basically spearheading this topic in the media.

It is super important that we keep discussing that topic, because there is a reality that the IT sector is respon-

sible for a large portion of greenhouse gas emissions and for a large portion of electronic waste as well. We have to be aware of that, but at the same time, also make sure that we are working intensively on finding use cases where IT and digitalisation can help the transition to a more sustainable world.

Yeta: And, and also to add to that, if we look at areas like responsible sourcing – the social side of sustainability and moving away from the environment side – there are gaps there in terms of actually understanding the impact of IT on communities, and on people. It is a very complicated space in a complicated

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area that I know a lot of organisations do struggle with, but also a lot of organisations are making giant leaps and steps towards understanding their need to be a social pillar of sustainability.

TFG: You mentioned those giant leaps and steps there, Mattie, but I was wonder if you, Mateo, as someone who works at an IT company, if you think the IT sector is doing enough?

Dugand: I feel when I look at other industries that the tech sector is pretty advanced. We can always do a lot more and we need to do more in the tech sector, but there has been a very rapid increase of sustainability commitments from the entire tech industry. I think it’s an industry that has moved very fast across a lot of topics and tried to catch up with it’s responsibility to change things in the right way. I think you would agree, Mattie, that the tech sector is doing well compared to other industries?

Yeta: I 100% agree. I do think that the IT sector has definitely progressed at a rapid pace over the past five years and actually our maturity level in terms of the wider sustainability objective is a lot higher than what you would expect to see. So I can only say that we are incredibly proud of what we have achieved as the tech sector, but also recogne that we have a lot of room for 68

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improvement and we will be continuing on that journey together.

TFG: How positive are you about attaining a zero carbon future?

Yeta: Perhaps I will start off with a bit of a technical overview. Global greenhouse gas emissions, including from land-use changes such as deforestation, have definitely hit a high. If you look at the figures, it’s about 55.3 gigatons of CO2 in 2018 despite commitments from

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It is super important that we keep discussing that topic, because there is a reality that the IT sector is responsible for a large portion of greenhouse gas emissions and for a large portion of electronic waste as well” Mateo Dugand

individual governments and companies, and figures have shown us that emissions have risen by 1.5 per year this past decade. Should this trajectory continue, the world is projected to warm by over three degrees by the year 2100. So I think, going back to your question and looking at the science, I think we need to move at pace. I am very optimistic and from what I’ve seen in the IT industry, with our very bold and ambitious goals, I do think that the IT

sector will be able to achieve that 45% reduction by 2030. And we do need to achieve it.

I am optimistic about that. However, I don’t want to say that it is not a challenging journey. It is. We can only achieve it by working together; we cannot achieve it alone. And I think that is where the biggest challenge comes in for us, in terms of being able to pull together, to progress together, to achieve that very, very ambitious goal.

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EXPERT INSIGHT

EXPERT INSIGHT:

Civic Tech

Wietse Van Ransbeeck, co-founder and CEO of e-democracy platform CitizenLab, on how Civic Tech can help local governments revive democratic participation during the pandemic – and beyond

T

he international health, economic, and social crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic show no signs of abating.

Every day, there’s a new fire to douse, a new problem to tend to, a new void to fill. Responding to these pressing matters is, understandably, everyone’s top priority.

We can’t afford to lose focus now.

But we also can’t afford to lose sight of what’s ahead. We can place our hopes in mass vaccination to tackle the virus, but the damage it has done to our communities and social fibre will require organised efforts for deep and genuine healing. Now is a moment to reflect on how we will recover and move forward, as communities united by solidarity and shared determination.

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WIETSE VAN RANSBEECK

Without doubt, among the casualties of the pandemic is local democratic participation. On account of in-person elections, town hall meetings, and collaborative decision-making processes being more complicated (or altogether impossible) to access or organise, the democratic fabric of our communities has taken a hit. The show must go on, but unfortunately, it often does so from the top-down.

While we’re tied to necessary safety and social distancing measures (which are, of course, life-saving and must be followed to the best of our abilities), there’s little room for citizens to start bottom-up initiatives, contribute to innovative solutions, or have constructive conversations with their representatives.

This further erodes the trust between councils and residents and weakens the legitimacy of policy-making, leading to limited support among residents and a more profound sense of being unheard.

In turn, this will lead to cynicism, causing more residents to grow reluctant towards engaging in participation projects once the situation changes.

It doesn’t look like things will radically change anytime soon, and that’s a problem. The core structures of our democratic societies are gradually unravelling. Without concrete action, we might lose a whole generation of participating

In an era ruled by distance, Civic Tech managed to build bridges and connect communities” residents, voices we sorely need to improve and co-create our communities.

However, as we’ve seen so many times in the past year, people tend to show surprising and nearly superhuman resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. Within every crisis lies an opportunity, a need to fulfil, a change to be made; and in this case, this opportunity lies in reinventing the way citizens and councils connect. Councils across Europe have already begun to seize this opportunity, working to compensate for the lack of in-person participation through pioneering Civic Tech projects.

In the London borough of Newham, COVID-19 disrupted the second round of the administration’s consultation project. The administration aimed to involve citizens in multiple urban planning and regeneration projects, such as the Queen’s Market Good ISSUE 08

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Technological innovations in Civic Tech offer both councils and residents an online alternative to traditional ways of collaborating, co-creating, and conversing”

Growth Programme, a £5.3 million initiative to redesign the Queen’s Market and the Queen’s Square, and provide affordable and high-quality spaces for work, culture and creativity.

As offline events (which are often used by councils for launching the platform and boosting engagement in the first few weeks) became impossible, the entire process was swiftly moved to the online realm. Through links on the council’s website, newsletters, printed posters and vinyl signs in shop windows, flyers and forms in public buildings, etc., residents were guided to the city’s online platform, which central72

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ised and automated the process and allowed them to voice their opinions.

Analysis of the data shows that 89% of all traffic to Newham’s online platform came from links - scanned QR codes, social media posts, and specific online ads.

In the French commune of Rueil-Malmaison, the administration’s participation platform quickly evolved from a practical nice-to-have to a central hub. During the first lockdown period, the council used the platform to share important information about safety measures and local regulations. It quickly became an online space to

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connect with peers and neighbours, which pushed it beyond the limits of its initial purpose. The platform became the online place-to-be to coordinate communal solidarity efforts, such as the distribution of 30,000 home-sewn masks, the delivery of 6,000 meals to vulnerable people, and citizens volunteering to help neighbours out with a wide range of tasks and errands.

In an era ruled by distance, Civic Tech managed to build bridges and connect communities. Online workshop features allowed residents and policymakers to maintain in-depth synchronous dialogue, ensuring democratic continuity

in the process. Citizen proposals permitted them to take initiatives and share their ideas for the betterment of the whole community.

And the numbers don’t lie. Between January and October 2020, the number of active citizens on CitizenLab’s digital participation platforms has grown by 72%, proving that people are now more willing to get involved with local affairs on a virtual level. Over the same period, we’ve seen a 26% growth in the average percentage of citizens in a city or municipality using our platforms.

Technological innovations in Civic Tech offer both councils and residents an online alternative to traditional ways of collaborating, co-creating, and conversing. This is crucial to collectively tackle the crises we face today, and will prove to be equally critical in rebuilding and healing our communities.

To ensure an effective democratic process in the years to come, we all need to make it an absolute priority to make residents feel seen and heard by their representatives and use their input to make effective, accurate, and informed decisions. Civic Tech tools will continue to play a starring role in the re-engagement of swathes of the population in local decision-making processes and, thus, in the restoration of democracy as we know it.

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TECH VS

DEMENTIA Dr Sina Habibi, CEO of Cognetivity, tells us about a potentially groundbreaking screening solution and how it could revolutionise detecting the early signs of Alzheimer’s and dementia AUTHOR: Stuart Hodge

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TECH VS DEMENTIA

T

he Alzheimer’s Association believes “the first person to survive Alzheimer’s Disease is out there now”.

The truth of the matter, though, is the medical profession is not much better at detecting the early signs of the condition than way back in November 1906 when Dr Alois Alzheimer reported “a peculiar severe disease process of the cerebral cortex”.

Since then, many forms of testing have been developed which are able to identify what we now know as Alzheim-

er’s Disease as it progresses to its more advanced stages, but figures estimate only one in four people with the condition receives a proper diagnosis.

According to Dr Sina Habibi, CEO of healthcare company Cognetivity, a huge reason for that is that detection methods are “crude”, comprising fairly standardised memory tests.

But alongside his partner and co-founder Dr Seyed-Mahdi Khaligh-Razavi, a computer scientist who obtained his PhD from the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, they have

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developed and commercially marketed an AI-based test that is capable of early detection of the disease and is now being rolled out at hospitals in the UK. “I think one major reason that we have failed, over the past 20 years, to come up with a cure for Alzheimer’s is because of a lack of sensitive tools to pick up the disease at an early stage or to show efficacy of any drugs,” says Habibi. “We use these old and rudimentary cognitive tests. For example, in MoCA [Montreal Cognitive Assessment], you’re asked to tell a rhino from an elephant, or you’re asked ‘who was the president of the 76

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United States who got assassinated in the ’60s?’

“So, first of all, by the time you don’t remember those, your condition is probably at an advanced stage. And if you go on a course of treatment in a clinical trial, first time, and you don’t remember these ones and they tell you what they were, then the second time they ask you these, you probably do better, even though the drugs have not had any impact.

“The third time, you probably do better again so the assumption is ‘okay, my drugs are actually working’. But, before

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you know it, it’s late phase 3 of the drug trial, which is the worst time you want a trial to fail, because you already spent a billion dollars on it and then they realise that it all went wrong because of patients getting better at doing repetitive cognitive tests.

“So we can play an important role in picking early stage signs, where the drugs can be more effective, and also we can show efficacy of drugs in a short period of time.”

The ‘learnability’ of the current testing methods is a factor, as are biases such as language, culture or education which can all affect the outcome. In addition to that, all of these existing tests are focused primarily on a single part of the brain, the hippocampus, so it becomes easier for other areas of the brain to compensate, once again affecting the accuracy of results.

Cognetivity has built a solution, the Integrated Cognitive Assessment (ICA) tool, which is far more sensitive and stimulates multiple areas of the brain simultaneously. The product’s AI then compares an individual’s responses with a previous data spectrum which has been built in from a group of around 400-500 individuals, some of whom were suffering with the disease at varying stages, and some of whom were healthy. It’s this vast range of pre-recorded responses and the inge-

I think we will see, as a result of what has happened, a huge paradigm shift in behaviour of clinicians” Dr Sina Habibi

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KEY NUMBERS • Worldwide, nearly 50 million people have Alzheimer’s or related dementia. (Bright Focus Foundation) • Alzheimer’s and dementia is most common in Western Europe. (Alzheimers.net) • Only one in four people with Alzheimer’s disease has been diagnosed. (Alzheimer’s Disease International) • Alzheimer’s and other dementias are the top cause of disabilities in later life. (Alzheimer’s Disease International) • By 2050, costs associated with dementia could be as much as $1.1 trillion. (Alzheimers.net)

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nuity of the product’s AI – which builds a vector with 100 multi-dimensional data points that can all be measured at every stage of the screening test – that allows the test to be so accurate and so sensitive, particularly in terms of early detection of the disease.

For the individual taking the test, a succession of images is displayed, some more distorted and adapted than others, and the idea is to activate different parts of the brain in a short period of time. The key to a participant’s success is in the speed and timing of their responses; it happens in such a short timeframe that it’s very difficult for the brain to cheat the test in any way. This, combined with the AI, is what allows the test to become more acutely sensitive to minor deteriorations.

So much so, in fact, that even during the co-founders’ time as students at Cambridge University, none of their fellow boffins were able to beat or cheat the test.

“We wrote a very basic code and we gave it to our friends, who were aged between 18 to 35, and we asked them to take the test every other day, each morning, in the same basic conditions,” Habibi says. “None of them could improve their score and we’re talking about the most active and very, very sharp brain performances here, even though they took the test every other day for a course

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Images used in testing of a month. That’s when we realised this is something seriously important.”

Habibi’s entrepreneurial spark – since 2010 he has been an active member of Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, the most successful entrepreneurial student society in Europe – then kicked into gear.

From that point onwards, driven and guided by the fact he suffered his own personal loss to dementia through the passing of his grandmother, he set about rigorously raising the $4 million required in funding to put the test to trial, in order to achieve the relevant medical certification.

The ICA software was approved as a CE-marked medical device, allowing for its deployment across Europe just over a year ago. Now, in the UK, Cognetivity has partnered with North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust – one

of only two Centres of Excellence for mental health in the country to use the technology in their memory clinics – as well as Sunderland GP Alliance, a leading federation of 35 primary care practices in the north-east of England. Overall, these partnerships cover almost 750,000 patients, many of whom are 65 or over.

Habibi is clearly excited by the potential of the partnerships in terms of helping the team prove they can help detect the disease at an earlier stage in patients and, from a more holistic perspective, he hopes it can spark a change in the culture of how clinicians think about the testing process.

“This is to triage and prioritise the patients that need to be seen,” he says.

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can come in and change, and that’s where we’re going to be used in Staffordshire, sending people through the funnel that need to be seen before others.

“Ideally, we envisage a scenario where, in a few years’ time, we become a screening tool at primary care: as part of an annual checkup, everyone who is above a certain age and has a certain risk profile takes the test. And as soon as we pick up signals that show they might be at risk, they’re sent to secondary care, so we can look at a screening programme where people are discovered at very, very early stages.

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“I think we will see, as a result of what has happened, a huge paradigm shift in behaviour of clinicians. We were showing our technology to the physicians: they like it, they say it works well. But you’re dealing with people who are very risk-averse and they don’t want to have any change.

“However, as a result of what happened [through COVID-19] and closure of the clinics and the fact that you don’t want to bring patients to clinics unless you absolutely have to, then the whole appetite to use our technology increased significantly.”

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Screening, though, is only one part of the battle against the disease.

The fight against Alzheimer’s received a huge boost when in October 2019, US biotech giant Biogen and Tokyo-based Eisai announced plans to pursue regulatory approval for their drug Aducanumab.

In a subset of patients who received a high enough dose of the drug, it has been shown to provide significant benefits, which could be a hugely important step towards the cure for the condition.

The decision by the FDA (United States Food and Drug Administration) on the drug application was expected on March 7 this year, but is now delayed until June 7, but Habibi remains hopeful and knows that Cognetivity is ideally placed for exponential growth should a cure hit the market.

“They have managed, for the first time in the history, to slow and stop the disease and this is going to play a hugely

important role, because this drug has been shown that it is effective in helping and stopping patients with mild cognitive impairment [MCI], versus mild and severe AD. So, they will be looking at MCI patients, because that’s where the drug is effective and we are very much capable to detect that stage of the disease, so it’s a perfect alignment.

“Now, we need to build the evidence, both clinical and health economics evidence, for both clinicians and also policymakers – who look at the whole problem, both clinically and economically – and make the case that, if we do this, we will save the patient’s life or improve the patient’s outcome, and also, in the process, save a lot of money for the NHS.” Cognetivity is also continuously working to ensure that their solution can be applied in as many different contexts as possible, by ensuring it can be integrated ISSUE 08

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We continue innovating in order to get this technology out to as many people as possible, because we believe it’s a game changer and it can play a significant role in mental health”

Image used in testing

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directly into existing hospital systems.

The company is also trialling smartphone-based remote cognitive assessment and exploring options to make the tech accessible for as many people as possible in these challenging times.

It is also working on utilising the technology to screen for other diseases such as HIV and multiple sclerosis as well as mental health conditions such as depression, all with positive early results.

Habibi is excited about the potential of adapting and scaling the technology to provide a range of solutions which can make a difference in the world.

“We are a small but innovative company,” he says. “We continue innovating in order to get this technology out to as many people as possible, because we believe it’s a game changer and it can play a significant role in mental health. COVID was initially something that shut down everything.

But as a result, we ended up building our remote capabilities.

“The fact that our technology is a platform technology, it enables us to build new solutions around the core.

This is going to be a sector which is going through a lot of disruption in the next decade, so there’s a lot of change coming and we are ready to adapt and innovate so that we continue scaling up and reaching out to more people.”

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