Tech For Good - Issue 11

VERSION 1’S GUIDE TO A GREAT WORKPLACE MEET THE STARTUP FIGHTING CHRONIC DISEASE IN GHANA SHOULD COVID-19 TRACKING BE ENFORCED? WHY DUBLIN IS EDUCATING KIDS ON SMART CITIES

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HOW AI SAVES LIVES Artificial intelligence is changing the way we think about healthcare.

We speak to Intel to find out why it is dedicating resource and money to improving people’s health with responsible AI

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

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rtificial intelligence makes healthcare tick in many parts of the world. It’s not something for the future; it is here now, and it is making big differences. From early cancer detection to developing new medicines, and from improving waiting times to managing medical data, AI is helping to save lives that weren’t being saved before.

There are many who think the possibilities of AI in healthcare are endless. Intel is a company firmly in this camp. The tech giant has leveraged its expertise in AI with the goal of solving many of the world’s healthcare challenges. It is putting its money where its mouth is, too, with huge investments in several projects. Our cover story takes a close look at Intel’s £50 million Pandemic Response Technology Initiative, which

focuses on how tech can not only improve healthcare but enhance education and economic recovery.

From using AI to determine the severity of COVID-19 in patients, to early detection systems that help the visually impaired, we take a deep dive into how AI is improving the health of people across the planet.

Elsewhere, we head to the remote Orkney Islands, north of Scotland, which are proving to be an unlikely source of massive innovation in the renewable energy sector. We also take a trip to Dublin to find out about the council’s education scheme to teach kids about the future of smart cities, and we talk to Version 1 about how to build a great workplace.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

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From supercomputers to ending cancer, we round up the latest news

Should COVID-19 tracking be enforced?

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How Intel is using AI to combat the world’s biggest healthcare issues

We meet the companies behind a carbon-negative data centre of the future

GLOBAL GOOD

HEALTHCARE

GOOD OR BAD?

LEADERSHIP

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How Version 1’s core values have built a great place to work

Winston Poyton on the technology powering blended learning

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Behind the scenes at Dublin’s Academy of the Near Future

Redbird’s mission to decentralise healthcare across Africa

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EDUCATION

EXPERT INSIGHT

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TEEN TECH STORIES Alay Shah, 17, on his diagnostic tool that identifies brain disorders

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ENVIRONMENT

Why the Orkney Islands are leading the renewable energy revolution

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GLOBAL GOOD

UK Met Office and Microsoft team up on weather forecasting supercomputer The UK will be home to the world’s most powerful weather forecasting supercomputer after an agreement was struck between the Met Office and Microsoft. Data will be used to provide more accurate warnings of severe weather and to feed climate change modelling. The supercomputer, which is set to be up and running by summer 2022, will leverage Microsoft Azure cloud capabilities.

Biden proposes the creation of a new health research agency to help “end cancer” In his first major speech to Congress, President Joe Biden announced his plan of creating a $6.5 billion new health research agency within the National Institutes of Health to “end cancer as we know it”. The agency would be modelled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, and initially focus on treating cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. but with a view to expanding beyond these.

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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Kenyan startup Kidato raises $1.4m for K-12 “online school” Kidato, a startup which aims to bridge the education gap in Africa, has landed $1.4m in funding. Kidato’s “online school” offers private-level education through its platform.

Schools in Africa are often overcrowded and don’t cater to individual needs. Kidato’s founder Sam Gichuru founded the company after observing the experiences of his own children. His firm has been backed by a number of VCs.

NEWS DEBRIEF

Moscow details smart city projects Moscow has launched a catalogue detailing its smart city projects. The Russian capital has 68 ongoing projects, as detailed by ICT.Moscow and the city’s government. “The key goal of innovation is to improve the safety and quality of life of citizens,” said Eduard Lysenko, minister of the Moscow Government. A number of the projects explore use cases of 5G and artificial intelligence.

Google ramps up efforts to support India against COVID-19 Google is boosting its services in India to support the country in its battle against COVID-19. India is currently reporting over 350,000 infections every day. Google has applied updates to its Search, Maps, YouTube and Google Pay services to better display information in real time.

It will show vaccine information and is working on tech to display the availability of hospital beds and oxygen.

Huawei makes strategic push to electric vehicle market - report Huawei is deepening its commitment to electric vehicles with a domestic deal, reports Reuters. The telecoms company is in talks to acquire the EV unit of automaker Chongqing Jinkang New Energy Automobile. According to the report, the deal would allow Huawei to manufacture electric vehicles bearing its own nameplate. Neither company responded to Reuters to confirm the story.

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KEEPING SIGHT OF

AI

Over the last year, the world has faced unprecedented healthcare challenges. Tech For Good speaks to Intel about the company’s Pandemic Response Technology Initiative and its use of AI to diagnose and support the visually impaired all over the world, from Bristol to India AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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KEEPING SIGHT OF AI

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Eye images from a fundus camera

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s artificial intelligence the ‘holy grail’ of modern medicine? Intel seems to think so. The company is using this technology to solve many of the healthcare challenges of the world, from COVID-19 management to blindness prevention.

Although the trend towards the use of innovative solutions in healthcare is nothing new, the pandemic has significantly accelerated it, proving that many times it can make the difference between life and death. Experts predict that the healthcare AI-powered tools market will exceed $34 billion by 2025 and expect this technology to bring $150 billion in annual savings for the 10

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US healthcare economy alone by the following year. Already, the number of active AI startups has increased 14-fold since 2000.

However, startups are not the only ones leading the way when it comes to medical innovations. IT giants such as Intel have also taken notice of the potential of this field, and have leveraged its huge expertise to improve people’s health. Pippa Chick, Global Account Director in the Health and Life Sciences Industry Team, and Hema Chamraj, Technology Advocacy Lead at Data Platforms Marketing Group, at Intel Corporation have been working to develop and provide technology solutions that change

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people’s lives, from COVID-19 relief to helping the visually impaired.

“At Intel, we are committed to accelerating adoption of responsible and inclusive technology in key areas like health and safety,” Chamraj says.

As with many stories these days, it all started with a global pandemic.

In April of last year, Intel launched the Pandemic Response Technology Initiative (PRTI), a $50 million commitment to use technology to combat the impact of COVID-19. It was an ambitious project that wanted to provide the necessary relief, but also look into how similar crises could be avoided in the future, investing in medical innovations and education.

“The PRTI was designed to provide a 360-degree view of the challenges ahead, focusing on how Intel technologies can enhance healthcare, education and the economic recovery of businesses at all levels,” says Chick.

“The goal was to deliver immediate relief where it was needed most, develop innovative solutions to support the new normal and invest in technology that would limit the impact of future crises.

Nearly every piece of Intel technology was leveraged in some way.”

A year later, the PRTI has been able to deliver 230 projects spread across 170 organisations around the world. One of its most successful initiatives was the

The PRTI was designed to provide a 360-degree view of the challenges ahead, focusing on how Intel technologies can enhance healthcare, education and the economic recovery of businesses at all levels” Pippa Chick

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use of AI to analyse CT and X-ray images to determine the presence and severity of COVID-19 in patients, at a time when PCR tests were in extreme shortage.

Moreover, UC San Francisco leveraged Intel SGX to deploy a confidential computing platform that protects both the algorithms and privacy of healthcare data when building AI models.

“From a healthcare perspective, PRTI worked with partners across the sector, from universities and hospitals to equipment manufacturers and infrastructure partners, to maximise our impact at every level,” Chick says. “The tech 12

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solutions we supported spanned from using medical imaging to help diagnose and triage patients with COVID-19, to telehealth solutions which enabled access to medical care while minimising the risk for patients and clinicians to providing high-performance computer resources for COVID-19 research as well as research projects that go beyond the current pandemic.”

As part of the PRTI, Chick has worked with the National Health Service and with technology solution companies to deliver key infrastructure and end point devices as well as harnessing AI and

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machine learning for improved efficiency and patient outcomes.

To get the full picture of the benefits that this partnership brought, we need to travel to Bristol.

It is there, in the west of England, where Intel has develop one of the PRTI’s most successful partnerships, with University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust (UHBW). Last June, Intel helped these organisations to deploy its vPro platform, to respond to the high IT demands that came with the pandemic, and allow IT teams to manage the hospital systems remotely, therefore

reducing their risk of infection and the need to provide them with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), which was in short supply as of last March.

“One of the biggest challenges for IT teams working in healthcare settings is accessing areas where strict cleanliness standards must be upheld, particularly for ICUs or labs where PPE is mandatory,” Chick says. “Our vPro technology enables IT teams to manage devices remotely, giving them hardware-level access to everything from desktops and laptops to digital signs and display screens.”

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Intel is working to solve problems in medical imaging including visual impairment, which affects 285 million people today” Hema Chamraj

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These unique remote management capabilities have helped UHBW’s IT team to respond to technical issues in healthcare facilities much more rapidly.

As a result, they have been able to reduce downtime for critical departments such as ICUs and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

“The platform is helping to make IT support systems in ICUs and other critical departments ‘invisible’, so that frontline staff can focus on delivering a high standard of uninterrupted care,” Chick says.

Less than a year later, UHBW has over 200 devices powered by the Intel vPro platform deployed across multiple sites.

The technology works with existing systems to provide a critical boost to remote management capabilities and has been something of a game-changer for the IT team during the pandemic. It has reduced onsite engineer visits which is helping to keep infection risk to an absolute minimum.

A year after the launch of PRTI, and in light of its achievements, Intel has decided to transition the project into a longer-term commitment: the Intel RISE Technology Initiative (IRTI), supported with a further $20 million. The IRTI will continue to review and fund projects related to healthcare, education and the economy with new dedicated workstreams for social

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Intel AI backpack equity and human rights, accessibility, and climate action.

This new initiative has a clear protagonist: artificial intelligence.

“While COVID-19 has put a spotlight on the inadequate public health infrastructure, data silos, inequity and mistrust in the health system, it has also accelerated technology adoption including AI in healthcare,” Chamraj says.

A July 2020 Intel survey of U.S. healthcare leaders found that 84% of those surveyed have already deployed or expect to deploy AI in their clinical workflow, compared to 37% in 2018. As the numbers show, AI is here to stay; and Intel is welcoming it with open arms.

Last September, Intel and Samsung Medison - an affiliate of Samsung Electronics - announced a collaborative project to leverage AI to measure fetal development during pregnancy and birth, reducing the risk of labour-related mortality. The solution has already received FDA approval and is in use in over 80 countries. Moreover, both companies have recently announced a second collaboration, also featuring AI but with a focus on anaesthesia.

The tool, called NerveTrack, helps doctors quickly identify the nerve area, reducing scanning time by 30% and increasing the safety of anaesthesia administration overall.

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All of these projects will help improve the safety of existing medical treatments.

However, there is one area of healthcare in which Intel is using AI to do truly groundbreaking work: vision loss.

“Intel is working with the industry to provide tools to solve problems in medical imaging including visual impairment, which affects 285 million people today,” Chamraj says.

Intel has many projects that aim to help the visually impared, from preventing diabetes-related sight loss to developing solutions to improve the day-to-day lives of people who suffer from these conditions.

One of the most common preventable types of visual impairments is caused by diabetes, which can lead to problems such as blurry vision, cataracts, glaucoma and retinopathy. The latter is particularly dangerous, as it is the major cause of blindness and vision loss in working-age people. This is the case because people with diabetes may not experience early symptoms of diabetic retinopathy until it is too late to treat them.

Diabetic retinopathy is particularly problematic in India, which has one of the largest diabetic populations of any country in the world and is predicted to reach 98 million cases by 2030. In a country where the majority of the population lives in rural areas with little or no 16

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Bristol city centre access to trained retinal specialists, early detection is incredibly important. This is why Intel has partnered with Sankara Eye Foundation to develop a solution.

“Diabetic retinopathy, if left undiagnosed and untreated, can lead to complete blindness,” Chamraj says. “Early screening with solutions like Netra.AI lead to timely treatment and can help prevent people from losing their eyesight.”

Intel-powered Netra.AI analyses images from portable, technician-operated fundus camera devices to detect signs of DR. The solution is able to show the results within two minutes of doing the

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Mumbai, India test, allowing doctors to provide instant diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Netra.AI uses cutting-edge AI algorithms, developed in collaboration with leading retina experts, with a four-step deep convolutional neural network that analyses the images.

Although the current situation in India regarding the pandemic has slowed down the development plans, Sankara Eye Foundation plans to roll out the solution across its network of 10 Indian hospitals very soon, and continue to expand from there. Nonetheless, the positive impact of the technology is already obvious.

“Currently 3,093 patients are being screened by this solution in India and we’re already witnessing the impact with 742 patients being identified as ‘at-risk’,” Chamraj says. “The long-term conceptual plan we’re working to is to build a small-form factor device to perform screening of patients locally removing the need for patients to have to travel to a hospital for screening. Netra.AI will be a powerful tool for screening retinal illnesses in large populations who have limited infrastructure and resources, and are faced with the challenges of an overburdened healthcare system.”

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The technology exists; we are only limited by the imagination of the developer community” Hema Chamraj

However, the work does not stop when a vision-related condition is detected. In that moment, the patient’s needs only increase.

According to the World Health Organization, there are over 285 million people who are visually impared across the world. Although there are some systems that try to support these people in their day-to-day lives, existing visual assistance navigation systems are fairly limited, ranging from voice-assisted smartphone apps to camera-enabled walking stick solutions. Moreover, they also often lack the depth perception necessary to facilitate independent navigation, something 18

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necessary to allow visually impaired people to walk and work by themselves.

Using Intel’s AI technology, developer Jagadish K. Mahendran created a surprising but very portable solution: a voice-activated backpack.

“With the AI-powered backpack, a Bluetooth-enabled earphone lets the user interact with the visual system via voice queries and commands, and the system responds with verbal information,” Chamraj says. “As the user moves through their environment, the visual assistance system audibly conveys information about common obstacles including signs, tree branches and pedes-

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trians, essentially facilitating independent navigation. It also warns of upcoming crosswalks, curbs, staircases and entryways to ensure the user’s safety.”

The backpack hides the visual system, powered by a host computing unit, such as a laptop. A vest jacket conceals a camera, and a belt bag holds a pocket-size battery pack capable of providing approximately eight hours of use. The computing unit is a powerful AI device that runs on Intel Movidius VPU and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit for on-chip edge AI inferencing, capable of running advanced neural networks while providing accelerated computer vision

functions and a real-time depth map from its stereo pair, as well as colour information from a single 4k camera.

“It’s incredible to see a developer take Intel’s AI technology for the edge and quickly build a solution to make their friend’s life easier,” Chamraj says.

“The technology exists; we are only limited by the imagination of the developer community.”

Using every type of technology, from AI to IT systems, and in every place from Bristol to India, Intel is dedicated to the mission of using technology to advance healthcare and make those in need feel seen.

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HOW TO BUILD A GREAT PLACE TO WORK Founded in Ireland, technology consultancy Version 1 is built differently. It’s a company that values its own people, customers and financial performance equally. CEO Tom O’Connor and People Success Director Jarlath Dooley take us behind the scenes

AUTHOR: Stuart Hodge

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HOW TO BUILD A GREAT PLACE TO WORK

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H

ow annoying is it when you go into a meeting and someone pronounces your name incorrectly?

It immediately makes you feel undervalued by the individual addressing you and it doesn’t make them look too clever, either.

A campaign to stop that from happening is just one of over 150 initiatives that digital, cloud and data-focused technology consultancy Version 1 has implemented to ensure its staff feels valued. The #StartsWithAName initiative has grown to such an extent that it has

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now been adopted by other organisations, such as various London borough councils including Harrow Council and global law firm DLA Piper.

Version 1, though, has for a long time been a trailblazer in terms of building a positive environment and culture that allows employees to thrive – and that is why it has been recognised as one of the best large workplaces to work for 10 years in a row by the Great Place to Work Institute.

The company, which currently has 1,500 staff working across its native Republic of Ireland (800 approximately), the United

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Kingdom (approx. 580 with multiple new joiners a week in its UK Digital, Cloud and Data practice) and India (120), has recently invested almost £1 million in its Welltech initiative to ensure that its workers have everything they need to work from home successfully.

Importantly, it trusted its employees to fill in its online ergonomic survey and did not put in place any checks or bureaucratic blocks to them getting what they needed, whether that be a new chair, a monitor, a headset or speaker. Instead, it gave its employees everything they felt they needed and sent out someone to install it in their home office.

Also, with India being so badly hit by COVID-19, the company has paid for staff to get vaccinated and has provided health insurance to cover their families and in-laws, too.

But the methodology behind Version 1’s approach to caring for its people goes much deeper. The company’s DNA is entrenched in the values of “Strength in Balance” between employee empowerment, customer success and business strength – and its core values. In fact, even the design of its logo is indicative of how the company operates, CEO Tom O’Connor explains.

“Our logo means something,” he says.

“It represents what differentiates us because the triangle imagery stands for

It’s very simple as a concept, but it’s also quite revolutionary in its attitude to say we will choose to invest more in people or in customers, than in ourselves or in our organisation if that’s the right thing to do” Tom O’Connor

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something. It’s our unique approach to achieving success quarterly across three commitments equally. One side represents Empowered Employees who are ‘wired for success’ and governed by our core values. The second side is Customer Success, and the other side is the business, our Strong Organisation. Each side fuels another, and the magic happens when they are equally successful.

“If our people feel empowered, then they go the extra mile for our customers.

If our customers see that we’re delivering for them, they’re loyal to us, and they give us more business. More business means we have more profits, and we can invest in bringing in more people,

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exploring more innovation and cuttingedge tech or acquiring more businesses.

And it just keeps continuing.

“But the trick is in the balance, and what really differentiates us is that we see no one side as more important than any other. That’s very unusual, because what we’re saying is our people are as important as our profitability. It’s very simple as a concept, but it’s also quite revolutionary in its attitude to say we will choose to invest more in people or in customers, than in ourselves or in our organisation if that’s the right thing to do to keep it in balance.”

The approach is clearly working. It has led to a 98.5% customer retention ratio.

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Of course, that leads to more profit, and that profit is again invested in the company and its people.

The cycle continues and it has allowed the company to continue to grow from a team of around 30 people when O’Connor joined the firm in 2001, to a projected 3,000 in the next two years as the company continues a pattern of around a dozen significant acquisitions, which most recently included digital consulting firm Singlepoint last year.

Acquisitions are something O’Connor describes as the “most interesting and challenging” part of his job as he looks to integrate what is a very defined workplace culture across different organisations and territories. But what

is the “special sauce”, as he calls it, that provides such clear definition to the way the company operates?

“We’re obsessive about core values,” says O’Connor, who took up the post of CEO in May 2017. “Our ambition is that whenever the history comes to be written, hopefully a long time from now, it’ll be a case study in how an organisation used core values as the basis on which they achieved success. So it’s not about Version 1, the billion dollar company; it’s about ‘here’s a case study of an organisation that uses core values as a differentiator’.

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different – and we see it in our employee surveys every quarter – is people can see that they are treated with respect.

Their honesty and integrity are lived, and that goes to our Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging agenda.

“They can see that there’s a focus, there’s a drive there – another one of our core values – because drive means progress. And no matter what career people have within Version 1, the common thread that everybody has is that everybody wants to progress.

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“Then from the customer perspective, when we’re asked, ‘What makes Version 1 different?’ we talk about the ‘how’ we do business and the ‘why’ and not about the ‘what’. Now, we’re very good at the ‘what’, but you have to take that for granted as so are several other organisations, but the difference is how they behave and how we behave.

“It’s about that honesty integrity. If something goes wrong you confess to it, you explain it’s your fault and you fix it – don’t hide behind a contract or point the finger of blame, say it’s somebody else’s fault or a partner’s fault.

“Technology projects always have bumps and sometimes pretty big bumps. But if you have an attitude that ‘we will deliver this, we will get over it, and we will stand over it’, then you can see it through. ‘No Ego’ is also one of our core values, and that means taking a humble tone because there are a lot of egos in tech. We work hard to keep them out of our organisation because they’re not conducive to an environment of trust and learning.

“But ‘no ego’ also means people enjoy working with us because we fit in, we’re not coming in saying, ‘Stand aside, we’ll take it from here, we’ve got this, we don’t need you’. So when we talk to our customers, that really resonates because my industry as a whole has

HOW TO BUILD A GREAT PLACE TO WORK

Our ambition is that whenever the history comes to be written, hopefully a long time from now, it’ll be a case study in how an organisation used core values as the basis on which they achieved success” Tom O’Connor

not been good at delivering sustained customer value and success in a way that customers appreciate. That’s why people love working with us.”

It’s clear that taking care of its people has been prioritised from the very start

by Version 1, and there is always a representative on the board and the executive team who champions those interests. Since May 2008, the People Success Director has been Jarlath Dooley, a man who is passionately breaking the ‘live for the weekend’

culture his five older siblings described to him when he was younger.

Building great organisational cultures where people enjoy coming into work and feel they get something back from it is very much what drives him.

Ever since he took up the post, alongside O’Connor and former CEO Justin Keatinge, they made it their purpose to ensure the organisation remained balanced – and nurturing the six core values was the key to ingraining that culture.

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I firmly believe that companies who embrace going fully digital, and I use our term Naturally Digital, are the ones that can thrive post-COVID” Jarlath Dooley

“It was the first big and most important step,” Dooley says. “It’s not about talking about them, it’s about building the core values into your every practice on a daily basis.”

Dooley is also the person who oversees the quarterly employee engagement surveys which ensure Version 1’s staff remain happy and engaged. The company measures engagement across four categories: trust, empowerment, employee experience and, interestingly, psychological safety. A study carried out by Google showed the highest-performing teams were not those with the 28

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HOW TO BUILD A GREAT PLACE TO WORK

most talented people, but the teams which felt the highest level of psychological safety. Version 1 has scored that higher than 88% overall in the last five studies, something Dooley is proud of.

It’s clear that the company works hard to keep its employees onside across all of those categories.

“We have a profit share scheme that we pay quarterly to staff,” says Dooley. “When COVID broke out at the end of that quarter, we said: ‘Look, we’re not going to pay it this quarter because we don’t know what’s going to happen’.

“We managed to progress through COVID reasonably unscathed, and what we were due to pay in March, we paid at the end of October. We could easily have snuck that into profit and not brought it up again. People would probably have accepted it but the fact that we held it in reserve, then we paid it, those are the actions that create trust.”

The company has turned COVID to its advantage in other ways too, using it as the catalyst for the rollout of its Naturally Digital strategy to modernise the workplace.

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HOW TO BUILD A GREAT PLACE TO WORK

“Nobody questioned people commuting one-and-a-half hours each way, every day to an office, and the futility of that, the damage to the environment, the damage to mental health, the damage to kids who didn’t see their parents because they’re gone 14 hours a day,” he says. “I think the old model was a lot of mundane work on Monday and meetings, incredible inefficiency in terms of commutes, restricted working hours and unhealthy environments with hundreds of people crammed into a very small space. So, we’ve taken full advantage of the change that COVID has presented us with.

“I firmly believe that companies who embrace going fully digital, and I use our term Naturally Digital, are the ones that can thrive post-COVID.” The company believes it’s in a good position as it gears up for the future, and its ambitions remain very high. Its strategy is geared around growing to 10-times the size over the next 10 to 15 years, but growth isn’t a one-dimensional metric, as O’Connor

explains: “It’s as simple as 10-times,” he says. “It’s 10-times where we are now! So not just 10-times the size, but also 10-times better. How can we be 10-times better at what we do for our employees, 10-times better at what we do for customers and, ultimately, 10 times bigger?”

Sounds ambitious, but O’Connor provides some context, which underlines why he is confident it’s achievable.

“Since we were founded in 1996 by two people, we’ve doubled in size nineand-a-half times,” he says. “This is only another three-and-a-half doublings.

We’re starting from a base where you’ve got 400 customers, 1,500 people and it’s much easier to double from that than from two people in a small office in the middle of Dublin, in the middle of a recession in the late ’90s.

“We’ve doubled in size every three-tofive years. Can we do another doubling in the next four years? There’s no reason to think we can’t, and then you’ve got one of the doublings out of the way and suddenly, you’ve only got to go two-and-a-half times to get to 10-times.

So people say we’re crazy, but it’s not - it’s just a continuation of what we’ve always done.”

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ACADEMY OF THE FUTURE

ACADEMY OF THE FUTURE

An education programme in Dublin is teaching secondary school pupils and public sector workers the benefits of IoT and smart cities. Tech For Good speaks to Dublin City Council and Smart Docklands to find out more

AUTHOR: Joe Appleton

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oT is changing the way that cities are designed and built. For many citizens, the idea of vast sensor networks and smart technology is overwhelming at best, and nefarious at worst. Fortunately, a bold and exciting project led by Dublin City Council, Smart Docklands, and CONNECT – the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications department at Trinity College Dublin – is working hard to demystify the world of IoT, Big Data, and smart technology.

It’s called the Academy of the Near Future and it is a Smart City Education Programme that has been designed to educate secondary school students and public sector workers about IoT: how it works, how it can benefit citizens, building trust, and cultivating innovative thinking at the same time.

Dublin’s Smart City programme is one of the most exciting in Europe. Based around its Smart Districts model, Dublin is quickly becoming one of the most innovative capital cities in the world. Led by the cities Smart Docklands area, which is an advanced living testbed for Smart City initiatives and home to many of the world’s leading technology companies, it has proven itself to be one of the most forward-thinking regions in Europe.

Thanks to valuable partnerships between large tech companies and 34

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The problem with IoT and smart technology is that you need to make these tools available to everyone and understandable to everyone if you’re going to make a difference” Jamie Cudden innovative startups, and with incredible support for Dublin City Council, Trinity College’s CONNECT Centre, and other key stakeholders, modern technologies such as AI, Internet of Things, Big Data and more, have become a real part of Dublin’s everyday operation.

However, as these technologies become a larger part of our lives, it’s easy for those outside of the tech industry to feel lost and overwhelmed by the apparent complexity of these technological ecosystems. And that’s where the Academy of the Near Future comes in.

“Over the years, we’ve been very fortunate to learn a lot from big tech companies,” explains Jamie Cudden,

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Dublin’s ports could become better connected the Smart City Lead for the Dublin City Council. “We’ve managed to learn how to understand these technologies but also how to engage with people and communities. But the problem with IoT and smart technology is that you need to make these tools available to everyone and understandable to everyone if you’re going to make a difference.

“You can do the most amazing things with big tech companies and innovators, but if you’re not getting a buy-in from other authorities, then you can’t enact any real change.”

At first, the idea behind the Academy of the Near Future was aimed squarely

at upskilling and better-educating city workers. “How do you teach the decision-makers and budget-holders about the benefits of a technology that they don’t understand?” says Cudden. “If you’re investing in large-scale capital programmes, if you don’t know how something works, you’re not going to buy it. We needed a programme that can teach how IoT works in an accessible way. That was the original concept and it developed from there.”

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futuristic. “We’re not talking about technologies from 10 or 15 years down the line,” says Cudden. “We’re talking about right now. But while we’re trying to educate the public sector workers in Ireland’s local authorities, we also thought ‘hey, if we’re teaching Dublin City Council staff, we could probably teach kids as well’ – and that’s no disrespect to the staff!” From there, the idea grew to include teaching transition year secondary school students to help excite and inspire them to look deeper into the potential of IoT technologies.

To learn how the Academy operates, we spoke to Caroline Boyd, the Engagement and Project Manager at Smart Docklands, who has been overseeing the project since December 2020.

“Originally, we brought together small groups of 10 or 15 students for two-hour workshops that introduced them to IoT and allowed them to experiment with a wide range of technologies to develop real solutions to real urban problems,” she says. “For example, we would use plug-and-play sensor kits and a drag-and-drop coding platform that allowed students to build functioning IoT sensor systems that were fully working and harvesting data by the end of the workshop.”

During the courses, both students and council workers have been introduced to 36

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cloud platforms, simple sensors, and reallife scenarios. “It was originally intended to be a very hands-on and physical workshop, but of course, COVID forced us to pivot,” says Boyd. “Currently, we’re running our workshops using a variety of online tools, but it hasn’t had a negative impact. We’re still sparking curiosity and getting kids to solve real-world challenges in understandable contexts.”

What’s more, participants – or Visioneers, as Cudden prefers to call them – can find solutions to their own problems. “These students have

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Dublin’s tram network great ideas of their own,” Boyd says.

“One student noticed a problem with speeding cars on the road outside his house, so he now understands how he could install a speed sensor that could count how many vehicles were speeding directly outside of his house.

With this new knowledge, he could gather a wealth of information that could potentially be used to push policy in the future. The last bit wasn’t his exact words, but it’s what he could do with it!”

The workshop leaders give examples of ideas and how IoT can be used to solve

certain problems, but the Visioneers come up with their own problems to solve, setting themselves a challenge and creating a viable solution to it all within a two-hour time frame. At the same time, students also gain a deeper understanding of smart cities, the acronyms, and buzzwords that go along with them, whilst cultivating an appetite to get more involved.

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Google offices, Dublin kits, the goal of the Academy of the Near Future is to demystify the world of smart cities and upskill communities at the same time.”

Words like smart cities, big data, and IoT might be the kind of buzzwords that the Academy is trying to educate students about, but the Academy has one of its own, and that’s demystify. The heart of the Academy of the Near Future is a commitment to demystifying how smart cities work.

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“A lot of people have no idea what the technology is that makes their city work,” says Cudden. “Even traffic lights - how do they work? People are always fascinated by this topic. ‘If I push the button does it make the lights change faster?’ We need to make this information available and really engage with people. There’s a lot of distrust when it comes to these technologies, and the truth is, everything is there to make the city a better place.”

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Distrust in these technologies has been one of the major stumbling blocks for smart city programs all over the world. However, with initiatives like the Academy of the Near Future, explaining these topics to a wide demographic about the nature of IoT and how it’s closer to Lego than it is to Orwellian science-fiction, is an important part of dispelling that mistrust.

“The Academy is a mechanism to build trust and facilitate the growth of inclusive cities. With the rise of these modern technologies there has been a growing lack of trust in the way that it has been going, with questions about data security and other issues,” Boyd

explains. “But the Academy gives us a chance to clarify our positions on those things and highlight the safety measures that we have in place.

Building trust is an important part of what we’re doing.”

While the Academy is currently a Dublin-focused initiative, it has plans to expand beyond the city limits. The long-term goal is for the programme is to spread to other regions across Ireland, with further plans to replicate its success internationally.

“Right now, our initial goal is to deliver the Academy to 1,000 students within Ireland. As this is a joint venture that includes CONNECT and Trinity College,

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One student noticed a problem with speeding cars on the road outside his house, so he now understands how he could install a speed sensor that could count how many vehicles were speeding” Caroline Boyd

we have resources outside of Dublin to make this happen, particularly around Cork, Limerick, and Waterford,” Boyd says. “We also want to develop a trainthe-trainer resource that we can share with other local councils, such as Fingal and Dún Laoghaire.”

“We’re starting with 1,000 kids,” Cudden adds. “But we’d like to run a larger challenge and combine the results that we’re seeing and recognise the different innovations and thoughts that are coming out of these workshops. From there, we can start to see the future of citizen science and 40

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develop real modules for supporting communities too.”

Though the Academy and its partners have only just started their journey, it’s already becoming apparent that it will be an important pillar of smart city development in the future. Currently, it’s taking part in the 2021 Bloomberg Mayors Challenge, and thanks to its innovative nature and partnerships with Connect, Trinity College Dublin, and the city’s Smart Docklands, it’s likely to do well. However, we’re only at the beginning of the story. The team is actively encouraging those who might benefit from the Academy to get in touch.

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“If this resonates with people, then reach out to us,” says Cudden. “We want to get as many people as we can to become aware of this technology and what underpins our cities. We need to ensure that the future of our cities is moving in the right direction. The Academy is not industry-led, it’s about people and communities. Our CTA is this: if you’re interested and want to find out more, or work with us, or even share your own ideas, then get in touch with us.”

The Academy of the Near Future is an exciting initiative with limitless potential that can upscale the capabilities of

council workers and inspire a new generation of innovators. Though there are a handful of other similar initiatives out there, few can boast city-wide backing that works together with schools and also in parallel with the people who are directly responsible for building cities.

It’s a unique narrative, and one that highlights the importance of prioritising inclusion in the urban planning process.

As Boyd nicely put it at the end of our conversation: “We’re building cities together with people, rather than doing it to people.” And that’s exactly what the Academy of the Near Future stands for.

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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: Alay Shah

Age: 17 Born: Texas, USA Achievements: Alay is a researcher, aspiring innovator and high school senior. He earned seventh place in this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search, for the development of a diagnostic tool that tracks eye movement to identify neurological disorders that he hopes can become a low-cost alternative to MRIs

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ALAY SHAH

M

y research surrounds how we can use the eyes and the way our eyes move in order to understand deeper brain function; things like how diseases work and what we can do to prevent them, treat them and diagnose them.

I’ve been working on this research for about three years, and I’m currently working on turning that research into a product that actually affects people worldwide.

My goal is to create the most portable diagnostic tool for concussions, that can be used in third world countries, or in places like the sidelines of sports games or the military.

My interest in eye movement stems from football, funnily enough. When a player gets hit really hard on the football field, they’re taken aside, and the medic does a quick test on the patient to determine if there’s some kind of underlying concussion or minor traumatic brain injury.

That made me think: If this works for concussions, why are we not using it for other similar neurological diseases?

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The first thing my device does is movement tracking. It has two cameras that go underneath the eyes and they’re basically tracking how the eyes move.

If there’s a tremor or a twitch in the eye, this is able to catch that.

The second step is called gaze estimation. And this is using information from movement tracking, along with the way a light reflects on the eye, in order to create this mathematical computation of where you’re looking at on the screen. So, if you put a picture of the Mona Lisa in front of you, gaze estimation is looking at whether you’re looking at the background of the painting or at the foreground.

To tie everything together, I use what’s called a recurrent neural network.

It’s a type of pattern recognition algorithm; and it’s taking both movement, tracking and gaze estimation metrics and attempting to find abnormal patterns between the two of them.

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Patients have to look at a dot that moves across the screen and complete a task. From that, the algorithm is able to identify these really specific and minute abnormalities that occur in patients. But, to test it, I actually did need human participants.

I worked with the Lone Star neurology clinic in Frisco. And they basically supplied me with any patient that was willing to take a really quick five-minute test, so I was able to get about 200 patients.

I noticed that Parkinson’s patients have a hard time reacting when the dot changes direction, and there is almost always a tremor that occurs. In dementia patients, their eyes kind of just wander around the screen. And then, for multiple sclerosis patients, when there are two dots on the screen, they tend to shift between looking at the two instead of choosing one to follow, like most people do.

ALAY SHAH

I’ve also been working on how we can use eye-tracking data to basically generate MRI scans. Everybody has heard of MRIs. But the issue is that it uses this big, clunky machine, and you can’t get it to the places that need it the most, like rural areas, third world countries and the military.

I want to create what’s called a functional MRI, which is basically a type of MRI that works on the brain that attempts to plot based on blood oxygen levels, where activities occurred.

I created this completely new tool that shows a patient 16 strategic images to induce different emotions and different kinds of cognitive and motor functions. And then, by looking at the way our eyes move, we can create a baseline for what normal eye behaviour looks like.

It can be pretty daunting for a 15-year-old to walk up to a clinic and be like ‘Hey, I’m a 15-year-old with an experimental neurological test. Can I test it on some of your most vulnerable patients?’ I had to work on things like pitches and proposals, and contact many people to make sure that the patients were safe.

The Regeneron Science Talent Search is like this big thing that everybody wants to get to, so I was very surprised when I got the top 300, and then even more when I got to the top 40.

I’m going to Yale, under the Hahn scholarship. And there, I want to work with professors at the Wu Tsai Institute and the Yale New Haven Hospital so that any concussion patient that comes through the hospital can be matriculated into my clinical trial.

My plan is to make the biggestever concussion clinical trial with eye-tracking technology so that, when I come out of college, I can attempt to do FDA approval and take it to market.

I want to work on democratising healthcare and collaborate with companies and startups that can effectively bring healthcare to the masses rather than keeping it for an elite few.

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INNOVATION AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD The Orkney Islands, off Scotland’s north coast, may be remote but they are home to some of the world’s most experimental forms of renewable energy. From whisky distillery to powering sea, air and road transportation, we find out how the magic happens AUTHOR: Helena Pozniak

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INNOVATION AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

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S

tep outside and you can feel the energy on the blustery shores of Orkney. Gales and waves hammer the coastline and fierce tides surge around the 70-odd islands north of the Scottish mainland. While the Gulf Stream softens the temperature here, it’s nearly always windy. “No other region in Great Britain can compare with it for the violence and frequency of its winds,” wrote Magnus Spence in 1908 in The Climate of Orkney.

“Energy is visible here,” says Dr Laura Watts, an ethnographer and senior

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lecturer at the University of Edinburgh who’s made her home on Stromness on the Orkney mainland. “You feel it on your body – the pressure of the wind and the force of the sea. Electricity and energy are a topic of everyday conversation – it’s literally in the air.”

Awash with natural power, the islands are renowned as a testing site for dozens of renewable energy technologies. There are huge turbines anchored off shore to harness the tides and a number of experimental waves devices being put through their paces. But the biggest draw for

INNOVATION AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

energy geeks – who, in a normal year, would be visiting the islands – are the emerging hydrogen technologies.

From fuelling planes to powering ferries, experiments with hydrogen here are breaking new ground. Even one of Scotland’s most famous exports might one day be carbon neutral, if whisky can be distilled with the cleanest of fuels: green hydrogen, made from excess renewable energy.

Of the various methods of extracting the gas, this method used on Orkney is the cleanest – others involve burning fossil fuel for grey hydrogen, or storing carbon underground during production to give blue hydrogen – and production requires hefty amounts of energy. But on the Orkney Islands, the surplus electricity from the abundance of natural power is used to electrolyse or “split” water into its composite hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen burns at the same temperature as natural gas, with water as the only by-product. It can be burned to produce heat or used within a fuel cell for applications such as transport – fuel cells are typically more efficient.

But hydrogen – now heavily championed and funded by the UK government – has plenty of detractors. It’s the most common element on earth, says Dr Thomas Baxter, honorary senior lecturer

HYDROGEN EXPLAINED Hydrogen, the lightest and most plentiful element in the universe, acts as a chemical energy carrier which can be piped or transported. It stores three-times as much energy per unit of mass as petrol.

Most hydrogen used today isn’t made from clean electricity.

Grey hydrogen is made from fossil fuels via a process using steam reformation. Blue hydrogen uses carbon capture storage to bury emissions from production, although an estimated 10% of emissions aren’t captured. Green hydrogen – which creates no emissions – is made from electrolysers powered by renewable electricity.

Pure hydrogen can then be stored and used in fuel cells – a hydrogen fuel cell provided in-flight power to the 1969 Apollo 11 space mission.

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Energy is visible here.

You feel it on your body the pressure of the wind and the force of the sea.

Electricity and energy are a topic of everyday conversation” Dr Laura Watts

in chemical engineering at the University of Aberdeen, but it doesn’t come for free – energy is required to break the chemical bonds from compounds which contain it. “Anyone working to reduce the carbon footprint has to be patted on the back,” he says. “But could there be better ways of using surplus energy - looking at battery storage or 50

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compressing air, or moving to greater electrification?” Unless the rest of the UK has access to large supplies of low carbon, it’s not a climate solution – and it’s never been used at scale before.

To use hydrogen, you have to put in more energy to make it, move it and convert it, says Baxter. Dangerous to store, tricky to transport, it’s expen-

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sive too. It has a place, critics say, in industrial processes, such as steel and petrochemicals manufacture.

“It’s not a silver bullet,” says James Walker, who as hydrogen development manager at the Orkney-based European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) oversees projects on Orkney. “It’s best to get that out there… but the flexibility that

comes with being able to handle energy in a different form can be really quite compelling. I think we need a mix of solutions to deliver what will be an incredibly challenging energy transition.”

And on the islands, green hydrogen can offer extra power on a cold winter’s day – or a backup for erratic supply or a surge in demand. One of ISSUE 11

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It’s technically challenging just being able to handle hydrogen in the current distillery systems. But it’s an important sector for Scotland and Orkney.

Making a distilled liquid from hydrogen would be a UK first” James Walker

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EMEC’s projects looks to store variable but predictable tidal energy in Scottish-made “flow” batteries, and power from these will then be used to make a steady supply of hydrogen. Another project is looking at using artificial intelligence to optimise production of hydrogen, drawing on weather and consumer data. “So you can make and discharge hydrogen at the most cost effective time,” says Walker.

This is because there’s too much natural energy for the islands to make use of. On windy days, islanders lose money as community wind turbines must be disconnected to avoid overloading the limited infrastructure of the energy grid. This is why EMEC and the islands began looking into hydrogen in the first place.

“Community turbines have gone on the grid on what’s called a ‘non firm’ connection,” explains Watts. “This means they can be switched off by an active network management system.

If your community turbine is no longer generating revenue,well that’s a serious event for fragile, vulnerable island communities of 300 or so.”

Since 2013, Orkney has generated more than 100% of its electricity demand from renewable power sources.

But even though it’s all generated locally, energy bills are still high. Orca-

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dians are charged 2p more for every kilowatt of electricity they use because of steep transmission costs.

Since the first hydrogen project began in 2015, more innovations have followed.

An early initiative used renewable power to electrolyse hydrogen on the island of Eday and transport it in bespoke gas canisters to the mainland. In Kirkwall harbour on the mainland of Orkney it was converted via a fuel cell back into elec-

tricity and used as auxiliary power for the ferries when they were in dock.

Frustratingly for those involved, demonstrations activities for clean ferries – fuelled by a new hydrogen and diesel dual fuel conversion system – planned this year have stalled because of a hitch in regulatory approval. To date the project has been fraught with technical challenges, but ultimately could lead to renewably powered ferries on routes ISSUE 11

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GREEN ORKNEY • Since 2013, Orkney has generated more than 100% of electricity demand from renewable power · 300 jobs in Orkney are lined to renewables · 10% of Orkney homes have wind and solar microgeneration (compared to 2.8% UK average) ·O rkney has more than three times as many electric vehicles per home than the UK average · Orkney has 2.0 kW of renewable energy capacity per home - nine times more than the UK average ·F ossil fuels still account for the lion’s share of Orkney’s annual energy use, with electricity accounting for just 138.1 GWh of a total 755.7 GWh (18.3% of power)

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around Scotland’s island and remote communities, and clean up local sea journeys, currently powered by diesel.

If you knew the whisky or gin you sipped was carbon neutral, would it taste better? This is another EMEC project, and part of a wider UK push, together with a couple of distillery partners, to use hydrogen rather than fossil fuels to power the malting and distilling process.

A feasibility study has been successful, says Walker, and hydrogen could serve the remoter distilleries well.

“It’s technically challenging just being able to handle hydrogen in the current [distillery] systems as it behaves very differently from the fuels they currently use,” says Walker. “And this in heritage buildings – where currently much whisky is distilled – is a challenge. But it’s an important sector for Scotland and Orkney. Making a distilled liquid from hydrogen would be a UK first.”

You can’t escape innovation around the islands. On Shapinsay, there are plans to use locally created hydrogen to heat the community school; the fuel has to be transported by road as there’s no gas pipelines on the islands. There’s a fleet of hybrid electric and hydrogen council vans powered by hydrogen and a hydrogen refuelling station (currently out of order) on the main island. But in transport, says Walker, hydrogen has

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more value in long-distance haulage and heavy-duty transport such as trains, lorries and shipping, where it could be used to boost battery power.

Hydrogen planes have already flown successfully, and the islands have their part to play here. In a world first, a commercial scale hydrogen plane HyFlyer 1 has already flown in the UK, developed by US startup ZeroAvia in collaboration with British partners.

A 19-seater hydrogen-electric aircraft is planned to fly in early 2023. “Our involvement is on the hydrogen supply side,” says Walker. “We’ve partnered with Fuel Cell Systems to provide a mobile fuel solution – a truck with a hydrogen production unit off the back with which we can dispense fuel into the aircraft. It’s a really cool bit of kit.”

All these projects are developing new skills within the community, says Watts:

EMEC onshore substation and hydrogen plant, Caldale, Eday ISSUE 11

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Building the future is not just about the technology, it’s people’s jobs and being ready for how they will change in the future. This is the leading edge - at the edge of the world” Dr Laura Watts

from ferry crew learning how to handle hydrogen, to creating new ways of storing and transporting the gas over the winding island roads to becoming literate about energy policy.

“I can’t talk for the 22,000 islanders but these projects are starting to train people up with world-leading skills,” says Watts. “Building the future is not just about the technology, it’s people’s jobs and being ready for how they will change in the future. This is 56

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the leading edge - at the edge of the world.”

In her book Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga, Watts revisits the islands’ rich geography and 6,000 years of history, and pioneering efforts to harness the wind. Some six decades ago, mainland Orkney hosted one of the UK’s first wind turbines on the bleak and gusty Costa Head, where winds can rise above 125 miles per hour.

“The islands have been at the forefront of

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how we can change the energy system,” says Watts. In 1951, engineers built a 78ft tower, topped with blades made from spruce and plywood, and protected with plastic. Now the islands host some 700 micro wind turbines supplying 10% of homes on Orkney, and 12 larger turbines.

There are three times as many electric cars here than on average across the UK. “This is what the energy future looks like when it’s lived,” she says. “And it’s being made locally by the people here.”

In fact, the islands still have a heavy carbon footprint, relying on carbon-emitting diesel ferries and planes – with diesel back-up generators – which might one day be replaced with hydrogen fuelled systems. Most houses have electric heating but some more remote homes still burn oil. As well as solving the cost of lost energy, hydrogen can help islanders decarbonise. “If Orkney want to move to net zero – which we really do – we have got to come up with different vectors for our fuel,” says Watts. “And that means moving away from fossil fuel for our transport.”

Last year Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Orkney in person, celebrating the islands’ potential as a “long-term generator of green jobs” after announcing investment to be shared with Shetland and the Western Isles.

Orcadians took this in their stride, says Watts. “If you look where we are on the map, you might think ‘my goodness that’s far north’. But here it feels like the centre of the universe – dynamic and well connected across the sea. There’s a standing joke here - ‘which film crew is here this week?’

Everything here moves incredibly quickly. Islands, with their geography and sensitive ecosystems, are on the frontline of climate change.”

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GOOD OR BAD?

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COVID-19 TRACKING

GOOD OR

BAD? Great power comes with great responsibility, and that is particularly true of new technologies. Each month, Tech For Good discusses the potential benefits and dangers of technological advances that are coming to market. This month we ask: Should COVID-19 tracking be enforced?

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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GOOD?

s privacy worth a life? Probably not, and much less millions of them.

China, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, many of the countries that have been most successful in controlling the spread of the coronavirus, have been those who have mandated the use of COVID-19 tracking apps. In contrast, most European countries made their use voluntary, making them ineffective in the fight against the virus.

A July 2020 study by the University of Oxford stated that contact tracing apps reduce infections, hospitalisations and deaths related to COVID-19. Moreover, the countries which have enforced their use have assured citizens that this technology would be used only for the purposes of contact-tracing. Despite the importance of the right of individuals to

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privacy, these countries decided that, in the midst of an international health crisis, the health of their citizens should come above all else. And, so far, they have been proven right.

What the expert says: “ There’s such a level of anonymity there, that I think the benefits really outweigh the risks” Janet Hamilton, Executive Director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists

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lthough many people understand the exceptional situation that the world has lived through during the pandemic, which might justify COVID-19 tracking, allowing this technology to be put in place raises many questions regarding the future. If this data were to fall into the wrong hands, the consequences could be catastrophic.

A survey conducted last June showed that 71% of Americans would not use contact tracing apps, citing privacy as their main concern. COVID-19 tracking allows unprecedented access to personal information, which could be exploited by governments as means of population control, but also by thirdparty companies, expanding the already enormous datasets that Big Tech has over internet users, and utilising it to make a profit. Last January, Norway suspended its COVID-19 tracking app, Smittestop, after Amnesty International accused it of exposing people’s information. The organisation also warned that Qatar’s app could allow hackers to acquire the name, national ID, health status and designated quarantine location of users. Without adequate privacy laws in place, the use of this technology could be a great threat.

BAD? What the expert says: “ When considering the quantity of personal data at play and the opportunities for them to fall into the wrong hands, individuals have more than enough reason to think twice about downloading COVID-19 apps or consenting to share their data” Pollyanna Sanderson, Policy Counsel at Future of Privacy Forum

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THE CARBONNEGATIVE DATA CENTRE OF THE FUTURE An ambitious blueprint has been unveiled by a consortium of companies for a carbon-negative data centre of the future, addressing the sustainability issues that come with the colossal growth of data.

Tech For Good speaks to the team behind the plan

AUTHOR: Stuart Hodge

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THE CARBON-NEGATIVE DATA CENTRE OF THE FUTURE

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D

ata centres are already responsible for a vast amount of global energy consumption as well as considerable carbon emissions, and experts say this is poised to increase exponentially.

The proliferation of data and connected devices alongside a rapidly growing demand for information services and compute-intensive applications such as AI means that sheer demand will begin to offset the efficiency gains that have historically kept data centre energy use in check.

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Until now, the information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem’s electricity consumption has stayed nearly flat, while energy usage and carbon emissions have been kept in check by proactive changes such as ditching older facilities in favour of ultra-efficient and greener and more modern data centres, but that is no longer going to be enough.

According to most scientific modelling, the best-case scenario is that ICT energy consumption will grow to around 8% of all energy use by 2030, but if

THE CARBON-NEGATIVE DATA CENTRE OF THE FUTURE

growth occurs at the rate most scientific models are predicting, it could be more like 20% – with data centres using more than one-third of that. Moreover, the amount of data needing to be stored is growing at a compound annual rate of 10.6% per year, according to the latest figures. As data multiplies, so do carbon emissions resulting from the need for that data to be housed somewhere.

So, how can all of this be dealt with?

Step forward a highly ambitious and innovative new proposal for a carbon-negative data centre based

on a circular model focused on both decarbonisation and dematerialisation.

The blueprint, released by a consortium headed up by OpenUK, proposes an edge-enabled, 5G-based data centre model focused on sustainability, alternative energy sources and circular economy.

OpenUK’s new sustainability chief Cristian Parrino spoke to Tech For Good about the exciting plans for what the group is calling the “data centre of the future”.

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KEY STATS ON ENERGY USAGE AND EMISSIONS Already, data centres use an estimated 200 terawatt hours (TWh) each year.

That is more than the national energy consumption of some countries That total also amounts to 1% of current global electricity demand Data centre electricity use is likely to increase about 15-fold by 2030, to 8% of projected global demand Data centres currently contribute around 0.3% to overall carbon emissions, but by 2030 that is expected to rise to around 7% The ICT ecosystem as a whole accounts for more than 2% of global emissions.

That puts ICT’s carbon footprint on a par with the aviation industry’s emissions from fuel.

Some models predict electricity use

by ICT could exceed 20% of the global total by the early 2030s (Source: Nature.com)

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able Digital Infrastructure Alliance, ITRenew, OpenCompute, Octopus Centre for Net Zero, and the Scottish 5G Centre.

Parrino is hopeful that by having such a forward-thinking group of partners onboard, they can tackle this problem at its root by targeting all key stakeholders and forcing them to think differently.

“One of my biggest frustrations in the environmental sustainability world is that environmentalists are the first ones to latch onto science when it comes to climate change, but they’re also the first ones to forget about science when it comes to behaviour change,” says Parrino.

“It has been proven time and time again that raising awareness of something doesn’t lead to changing individual behaviours. Nobel Prize-level researchers [Thaler and Kahneman, the so-called grandfathers of behavioural economics] have indeed demonstrated how one doesn’t lead to the other.

“Behaviour change requires making the desired behaviour more compelling or just as compelling as the alternative negative behaviour, and just as easy, if not easier, than the alternative competitive behaviour. And you need a mechanic to help people repeat that behaviour enough times so it becomes part of your regular routine. Only then is that behaviour actually changed.

THE CARBON-NEGATIVE DATA CENTRE OF THE FUTURE

One of my biggest frustrations in the environmental sustainability world is that environmentalists are the first ones to latch onto science when it comes to climate change, but they’re also the first ones to forget about science when it comes to behaviour change” Cristian Parrino “So, when we talk about carbon-negative data centres, this isn’t just for those who build data centres or use data centre services – this is also for your prosumer, your consumer and your regulators. It is basically something that everyone needs to look at because the data behind it is enormous, and perpetual growth and the desire for it is obviously a driving factor.”

Clearly, the group behind the proposal believes this blueprint is both scalable and readily adoptable enough to become that ‘mechanic’ Parrino speaks of.

“Driving real change hinges on great leadership, it’s not a management problem,” says Lucy Yu, CEO at Octopus Centre for Net Zero. Having a real cause to believe in and get behind and to ignite people’s intrinsic motivation is one of the things that helps leaders build brilliant teams and movements for change.”

Parrino’s views and concerns over the issue are reflective of the fact that more data, as mentioned earlier, equals more emissions.

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purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling) sources while ignoring Scope 3, which includes all other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain.

“Many people in technology jump straight into the solution. I like to start with the problem and helping people understand how big the problem actually is,” says Parrino, as he begins to talk us through the graphic detailing the blueprint.

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“That very first dark blue rectangle at the top, under the title, is really framing the problem. And the problem is the exponential growth that we’re going to be seeing in data services over the next few years. And it’s basically doubling every couple of years.

“The reason why it’s doubling is because there are more connected devices, be that from the IoT space, that’s

THE CARBON-NEGATIVE DATA CENTRE OF THE FUTURE

just meant to double over a few years. If you just want to hone in on the narrow emissions aspect, over the next few years, by 2025, I think we’ll be at around 8% of emissions just from data centres and their supply chains. So, it won’t be long beyond that where we get to 10%.

“And that’s another key point. Most organisations out there are looking at Scope 1 and Scope 2, the emissions from energy consumption that your operation generates. So, electric usage, heat, all of that – those amount to like, 5% of the overall emissions of a data centre. 95% is their Scope 3, which includes the entire supply chain.

“Imagine having to not just decarbonise but also dematerialise through a circular model an entire supply chain around the data centre. It’s a massive thing! Then, imagine the role something like open software, open data and open hardware can play in achieving that.”

Parrino naturally segways to where the opensource element of the plan comes to the fore and he credits the whole idea to OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock, who previously spoke to Tech For Good last year about bringing the open source community together in response to the pandemic.

The plan emerged during a call between the pair just over seven months ago, and then Parrino and Brock began to leverage their respective contacts

Driving real change hinges on great leadership, it’s not a management problem” Lucy Yu, CEO at Octopus Centre for Net Zero

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and expertise they could tap into to make the blueprint a reality.

The pair brought together experts who could help with different aspects of the project, such as California-based ITRenew who do a lot of work with the hyper scalers, circular hardware and services; the Open Compute Project which has done a lot of the research behind carbon-negative data centres; the SDA Alliance which is doing similar things in the Netherlands; Octopus Energy who recently created a new foundation to look at innovation in the green energy space.

“We have the tools, the technology, the systems and the solutions to transform the way we build, deploy, and manage the massive and booming scale IT and data centre infrastructure,” says Ali Fenn, President of ITRenew.

Very quickly, the roadmap and vision for the carbon-negative data centre came together, and the role of the three opens (software, hardware and data) is right at the heart of making it work.

“There’s a lot included in this vision for a carbon-negative data centre,” Parrino says. “In terms of hardware, if it’s open-source, it means organisations could produce it locally and eliminate travel times behind the supply chain. It also means that they can repair it and it means that when it reaches end of life, 70

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they can recycle components because the planet has a limited set of minerals to meet this increase in demand for hardware around the world.

“In terms of data, consider for a minute the amount of transparency that you require to understand whether a data centre is truly clean or not. What about the 95% of emissions that are part of the supply chain?

“So, imagine the role open data and open-source software can take on to enable transparency and accountability around emission monitoring, carbon monitoring and all of that. If all of

THE CARBON-NEGATIVE DATA CENTRE OF THE FUTURE

a sudden it comes back down to people like you and me, and I want to use services that are backed by carbon-negative data centres, that would be an easy way for me to know who’s clean and who’s not.

“And then, the other role that open has is obviously learning and sharing best practises. There’s a lot of stuff going on already, with the hyperscalers and ‘greening’ the data centre. But why is everybody trying to reinvent the wheel every time? Why isn’t that knowledge shared? Why isn’t it public? Why isn’t it transparent? Why can’t a small govern-

ment cell phone data centre somewhere in Scotland go and do the same thing the hyperscalers are doing because it needs to happen in a proliferated way?

“If you look at those different aspects of software data and hardware, I think open technology per se is essential in the sustainability world. It is absolutely essential in carbon-negative data centre solution, which is why we’re creating that blueprint. It’s a blueprint that adopts open technology, hardware, data and software wherever possible.”

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We have the tools, the technology, the systems and the solutions to transform the way we build, deploy, and manage the massive and booming scale IT and data centre infrastructure” Ali Fenn, President of ITRenew

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existing infrastructure instead of constructing anew, and even repurposing derelict or simply unused buildings. The blueprint also seeks to leverage emerging technologies such as edge computing and 5G to help narrow the distance on computation and servicing, which is also critical in lowering emissions.

It all ties into the circularity of the model, which is made clear by the diagram, and the team behind are looking at concepts such as using the heat generated by the data centre and looking to feed that back into the power grid.

What certainly rings true when chatting with Parrino is that this plan is very much looking at the overall societal impact as well. It is thinking of sustainability, not just as a climate change or environmental issue but very much as a social inclusion and financial inclusion issue as well.

That ties in very much with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and Parrino points out that goal 17, which he cites as “the most commonly forgotten” is “working in partnership” to reach the rest of the goals.

The carbon-negative data centre roadmap appears to have come together at a serendipitous time, with the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) being held in Glasgow in November. The consortium has submitted its proposal and is hoping

THE CARBON-NEGATIVE DATA CENTRE OF THE FUTURE

to be chosen to present at the iMax cinema to allow them to showcase their blueprint at the conference, but also plans to showcase at the COP26 Fringe event if they are unable to make the shortlist.

Parrino, who has been passionate about sustainability ever since he saw the values of the daily life he grew up around in Sicily gradually erode away over the years, is a firm believer in the concept and enthusiastic at the potential prospect of being able to showcase it to the world at the conference.

“COP26 is that moment in time that can magnify something a hundred-fold, a thousand-fold,” he says. “There’s attention to it, there’s a concentration of minds, there’s a concentration of

funds, so from that perspective, it’s essential to leverage COP26, both in the build-up, during the event itself and in the aftermath.

“If we can achieve circularity and 90% dematerialisation, we will also achieve 80% decarbonisation while, at the same time, looking at some positive impact aspects. Things like reducing costs and accessibility of solutions, be those blueprint-related, hardware-related or software-related to less privileged countries.

Also bringing excess heat and energy created to communities which need it.

“There’s an eliminating the negative impact side of the story, but there’s also a creating positive impact part of the story.”

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EXPERT INSIGHT: Blended learning Winston Poyton, Senior Product Director for Education at IRIS Software Group, reveals what technology teachers need to cope with blended learning

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he events of the past year saw almost 1.6 billion children worldwide out of the classroom as the education sector delivered blended learning during the national lockdowns.

And while in England schools were reopened from March 8, we should still expect some level of blended learning to remain.

Education technology (edtech) has become the centre-point for students, staff and teachers in successfully delivering blended learning and as such will remain more important than ever before.

Undoubtedly, 2021 will be the true turning point for its adoption across the sector.

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The current state of edtech Existing edtech solutions need to support time-stretched teachers and Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) leaders much more than they currently are. They are losing valuable time and bandwidth they simply don’t have, adding to the already significant challenges involved in delivering blended learning.

Traditionally, Management Information Systems (MIS) have been kept behind the locked doors of school administration offices up and down the country. This forced teachers to waste precious time and energy looking for and extracting information such as academic results, attendance and safeguarding notes. Without this insight easily accessible, it was difficult for teachers to plan effectively, step in at the point of need, and fairly assess their students. A situ-

ation exacerbated when COVID first hit early last year, with teachers and senior leadership teams unable to access the critical data they needed while working and teaching remotely.

Edtech needs to support blended learning It’s been announced that A-Levels and GCSEs are once again out for another year in England, and one in two schools plan to let their pupils sit “mini exams” for their GCSE and A-levels marked by teachers. Given the importance of these exams for students’ futures, it’s imperative that teachers have the intelligence they need to moderate, level and benchmark students fairly and consistently.

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What’s needed is a realtime intelligence system that provides teachers with one single source of trusted data - regardless of how big the school or MAT is, or where it is located”

their classrooms. This technology is crucial for senior leadership teams as they look to make delivering blended learning easier for both teachers and students in the coming school years.

However, MIS technology that delivers to the level SLTs and teachers need has been hard to come by in the education sector. They need an intelligent cloudbased MIS, driven by automation, that enables senior leaders to track students across their learning career so they can easily step in at the point of need. For 76

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example, understanding why a student is good in physics when they struggle in maths will enable them to proactively provide the best help and ensure they are improving the life chances of that student.

What’s needed is a real-time intelligence system that provides teachers with one single source of trusted data - regardless of how big the school or MAT is, or where it is located. One where academic results, attendance, behaviour and safeguarding notes are all stored on a centralised, easy-to-access-and-use

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enabling them to realise their objectives.

However, to make blended learning really successful, teachers and senior leaders must be empowered to use the technology at their disposal. They must also be armed with the correct know-how in handling and getting the best out of these systems. A level of support not currently provided is required to ensure MIS is being used well. This will be incredibly helpful to have in 2021 to ensure senior leadership teams, teachers and students can benefit as much as possible from continued blended teaching.

system. This technology would provide education professionals with the genuine valuable insights required to inform their decision-making, plan more effectively, step in at any point if needed, and – arguably most importantly – accurately predict grades for their students.

Only by harnessing an integrated platform that acts as a technology backbone will schools and Trusts gain one single source of truth that encompasses academic, financial, staff wellbeing and parent engagement -

MIS for blended learning The world is changing and it’s not a question of going back to normal, but rather of embracing the next normal. And nowhere is this clearer than in education.

What teachers need from technology to deliver blended learning is a powerful MIS to gather the intelligence required to deliver on what truly matters in the classroom – improving the life chances of their pupils. With access to real-time, integrated data, teachers will be able to make informed decisions for the betterment of their students. Bringing MIS out of the school office and into the hands of teachers will ensure their precious time is focused on teaching, delivering blended learning, and ultimately improve the life chances of children.

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TESTING TIME

Testing time

Tech For Good sits down with the founders of Ghanaian digital healthcare startup Redbird to find out how they are fighting chronic illnesses and advocating for a more decentralised healthcare model in the country AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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I

t all started with a hackathon, and ended with a healthcare startup in Ghana.

Patrick Beattie, a founding scientist at a medical diagnostics startup in Boston, and Andrew Quao, a trained pharmacist, met in a hackathon in Accra, where they found out their shared interest in improving access to medical testing in Ghana, a country where a centralised and oversaturated healthcare system has turned pharmacies into the primary healthcare point. Soon after they brought in software engineer Edward Grandstaff, and started to develop the tech for

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a project that would provide a solution to this situation: Redbird.

Redbird is a Ghanaian healthtech startup that allows easy access to convenient testing for chronic diseases and ensures that doctors and patients can view the details of those test results at any time.

The company has recently raised $1.5 million from investors including the Johnson & Johnson Foundation to create a decentralised model that will support Ghanaian pharmacies and give people back control of their own health.

We sat down with Redbird’s three founders to talk about the company’s

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mission, and the future of healthcare in Africa.

TFG: Before we go into what Redbird does, can you give me some context about why there was a need for a company like yours in Ghana?

Beattie: “There’s a couple of important things to know about the current state of healthcare in Ghana. The first thing is that chronic disease is exploding across the continent. When people outside of Africa think of Africa, they tend to think of things like malaria, tuberculosis, HIV; infectious diseases. But the reality is that one of the biggest health crises here right now is just the explosion of chronic diseases; things like diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol.

“When you look to the future, this is becoming a bigger and bigger health burden. And it is important because, from a testing standpoint, someone who has an acute disease hopefully gets tested once and then is diagnosed and treated immediately so that they can move on. Whereas with a chronic disease, the way you stay healthy is getting tested repeatedly. You monitor your health for the rest of your life; and that’s very different. So your testing needs become much more frequent.

“The other thing to note is that the health systems here were set up to care

Ghana in focus The burden of chronic diseases in Ghana:

•C hronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for 60% of the estimated 58 million global deaths each year and 44% of premature deaths.

• Over the last decade, hypertension, stroke, diabetes and cancers have become top 10 causes of death in Ghana.

• The burden of NCDs in the country is projected to increase due to ageing, rapid urbanisation and unhealthy lifestyles.

• Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that mortality from NCDs will increase, overall, by 17% in the next 10 years.

• NCDs are projected to become the commonest cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa by the year 2030.

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Our goal is to make healthcare much more convenient.

Convenience can be the difference between life and death” Patrick Beattie

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for acute diseases, but in no way ready for chronic diseases. It’s very centralised and there are long waiting times. But if you need to be monitored frequently, daily or even more often than daily, you can’t imagine going into a health facility and waiting for the whole day just to do that.”

TFG: What is Redbird’s mission?

Beattie: “Our goal is to make healthcare much more convenient. Convenience can be the difference between life and death; maybe not today but down the line. We look for ways to make healthcare more convenient for patients so that they can manage their health.

“When we looked at it, people were already going to pharmacies often as their primary care because it was much more convenient. They were even doing some degree of testing in pharmacies like malaria tests. What we do is we help pharmacies offer not just malaria testing, but now instant or rapid diagnostic testing services for 10 different disease areas. Some of those are acute areas like malaria or typhoid, but a lot of them are more chronic diseases, things like blood sugar testing for diabetics, cholesterol testing and anaemia testing.

“Every pharmacy that partners with us can now offer these 10 different diagnostic tests. They are existing already approved diagnostic tests, we’re not

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Redbird’s founders Patrick Beattie, Andrew Quao and Edward Grandstaff developing the tests themselves. What we do make is the software, which is a place for patients to store their records, so that when they do go into a hospital to visit a clinician, they can show them their full health history.”

TFG: So how does the process work?

Grandstaff: “We supply the pharmacies with the tests, and we set up with a tablet device that connects to a local network. When patients come in to take a test, we get them registered on the tablet. We do it by phone number so that we can uniquely identify people because we have found that, even though smartphone penetration is growing fast, it’s still not fully there.

“We very purposely take the approach of different levels of tech sophistication of our users. For those that do have a smartphone, we do have a patient’s application that gives you all the insights right there, but we also allow the option of not having to interact with the tech at all, it’s the pharmacist who does that.

We think that’s important because, if you only serve the top layer and expect your patients to learn how to use the software, you’re keeping a lot of people from having access to healthcare.

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“normal” range. So that’s an instant feedback that the pharmacy can provide a patient. But the key thing is that that result is remembered over time so that when the patient comes back, there’s no need for any registration process, they’re already connected to that particular pharmacy. And now you’re building a trend, not just a single data point.”

TFG: What has been the most challenging part of the process?

Beattie: “The main difficulty is under84

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standing the needs of the patients.

Because we obviously look at the tech and see everything that you could do with it, but that doesn’t always align with what our patients want, so it’s important that we respect that. So a lot of our learning has been around understanding what actually does create value for these groups.”

Quao: “The challenge is not the tech; it’s using the tech, and getting people to switch and amend the workflow to incorporate that tech seamlessly. We

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We aren’t trying to solve this problem from the top down.

We’re where people go to get healthcare and we’re partnering with the facilities that provide it” Edward Grandstaff train partner pharmacies and we expect that when people come to get tested, they see the need to ensure that they’re no longer writing the results on paper, and use the software. But we don’t get 100% usage of that, which is the challenge and it’s something that we are working on to fix.”

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Cape Coast, Ghana still develop a connection with their patients. Because, when patients have a health problem, they’re not wanting to go to the hospital, they go to the pharmacy first. I think that’s also one of the things I really like about what we’re doing, because we aren’t trying to solve this problem from the top down. We’re where people go to get healthcare and we’re partnering with the facilities that provide it.”

TFG: How does the business model work?

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vice provider. The pharmacies buy the rapid diagnostic tests from us, and while they continue to do that we provide the tablet, the software and the training for free. So what’s how we have set it up, to make money on the tests that are used.

We wanted to avoid asking people to pay for a software even when they don’t use it for a month.”

TFG: Redbird has participated in accelerator projects including Founders Factory Africa and the Alchemist Accelerator. What have you gained from these experiences?

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Beattie: “The Alchemist Accelerator was really the beginning of Redbird, because at the time, the three of us were not even now in the same location yet. But it was a great experience. It really helped kickstart us early on and create a network of investors that were not just in Africa, but also in the US, Europe, and India. At the time we were in just two pharmacies and we had 37 by the end of that year, so that really helped us get that early traction, which was really valuable.

“Founders Factory was last year around this time. And obviously, we’re at a different place now, but they are

also a different type of accelerator there. It was more about how can we experiment and really find better ways of doing things? And that’s really where Founders Factory excels in, bringing a lot of expertise that you don’t have, and helping you go through that design thinking process. We’ve been incredibly happy with both programmes. They’ve offered different things, but each of them offered what we felt we needed at that time to get to that next level.”

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The challenge is not the tech; it’s using the tech” Andrew Quao

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congratulations. What are your plans moving forward?

Beattie: “The first thing that we’re so excited about is not just the funding, but who came in with it. These are great partners that we feel are really good and their expertise set us up for success straight away. The Johnson & Johnson Foundation is obviously a huge name and has a very broad healthcare expertise.

And Newtown being a well known VC on the continent as well, we just think that they will really help us get to that next stage that we’re looking to get to, as far as where we’re looking to go.

“We want to continue to expand in numbers of pharmacies and also geographies. We are looking to replicate this model in similar markets. In addition, though, we’re very focused on not straying too far from what has been a strength, which is getting to know our customers better so we can maximise the value we’re providing them and therefore, really build the strongest relationship. So a lot of our focus now is just understanding how we can improve our relationship with the pharmacies and patients coming in so that we can offer the most value to them.

“We recognise pharmacies are a very convenient and widely used point of healthcare. But they’re not the only one. We want to make sure that we’re

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helping these patients benefit from everything we do in a pharmacy but that when they go anywhere else in the healthcare system, they have convenient options for them as well.”

TFG: Where do you see the healthcare industry in Africa going in the future?

Beattie: “There is one thing, just because I think the more we talk about it, the more likely it’s also to become true, which is the concept of leapfrog events on the continent. We strongly feel that decentralised digitally-enabled healthcare is that next leapfrog opportunity for Africa. The existing infrastructure

is, you know, really struggling under the chronic diseases exploding everywhere, and you can’t rely on it, so you are forced to innovate. And that is why a lot of exciting innovation in the sector is happening here.

“I think that you’re going to have this situation where an ecosystem of players is going to create a healthcare model that’s much more decentralised yet provides high-quality care, because it’s also leveraging digital technologies. And countries all over the world are going to be looking towards the ecosystem here and say: ‘Oh, we need to replicate that’.”

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