Tech For Good - Issue 18

TIME’S KID OF THE YEAR GITANJALI RAO TALKS GLOBAL ISSUES WHY SCIENTIFIC DATA NEEDS SAVING HOW ESTONIA BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST DIGITAL SOCIETY IS NUCLEAR ENERGY THE KEY TO DECARBONISATION?

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CHANGING LIVES EY’s Health & Human Services team works with the public sector to provide strategic data support for vulnerable people. We head to the US, UK, and Australia to take a look at its vital work

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

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’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.” Bill Gates knows a thing or two about a thing or two, and here he is encapsulating what is at the core of allowing people access to freedoms: communication.

Our cover feature this month tells the story of how EY’s global Health & Human Services department has applied this mantra to their work in helping governments, states and public sector agencies improve people’s lives. EY combines data from multiple programmes, enhancing communication to ensure vulnerable people don’t fall between the cracks, and allowing them greater access to basic human rights and freedoms.

From using predictive analysis to aid someone spiraling towards homelessness before it’s too late, to helping children stay out of care and offering them alternatives, EY’s work spans the continents.

It’s an inspiring tale, as is our interview with 16-year-old Gitanjali Rao, who has graced the cover of TIME magazine as its Kid of the Year. She tells us about how she’s applying technology and science to some of the planet’s greatest challenges.

In next month’s issue we’ll be speaking to technology, health, and sustainability leaders to get their thoughts on the future of the planet, the trends for 2022, and what we’ve learnt from the global pandemic. Ahead of that, though, thanks for reading Tech For Good, have a great New Year, and see you in 2022!

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From Ancient Olympia to the metaverse, we round up the news

Estonia’s government CIO on its digital revolution

GLOBAL GOOD

PUBLIC SECTOR

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Behind EY’s global mission to improve the lives of the vulnerable

Is nuclear energy the key to decarbonisation?

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GOOD OR BAD?

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What did COP26 achieve? We ask the experts

16-year-old Angela Zhan’s ecofriendly plastics

TIME Kid of the Year Gitanjali Rao on changing the world

ENVIRONMENT

Labstep’s mission to save scientific research data

TEEN TECH STORIES

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Construction begins on US’s first large-scale offshore wind farm The US’s fledgling offshore wind farm sector received a huge boost when construction started on Vineyard Wind on November 18th. The site, 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, is the US’s first offshore wind farm. Built by Vineyard Wind LLC, the wind farm will use 62 turbines and produce electricity for over 400,000 homes and businesses.

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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Greece partners with Microsoft to digitally preserve Ancient Olympia Microsoft and the Greek government have launched a partnership to digitally preserve Ancient Olympia. The collaboration will use artificial intelligence to map the site and augmented reality to help restore the place where the Olympic Games were born. The project will allow viewers to experience an immersive tour, exploring the area as it stood more than 2,000 years ago.

Africa Health Holdings raises $18m for tech services Healthtech startup Africa Health Holdings (AHH) has secured $18m in Series A funding. Based in West Africa, AHH will use the funds to build its “tech-forward healthcare system” across Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.

“Currently, the telemedicine system is only in Ghana, but soon it will be expanding to Kenya and Nigeria,” said AHH CEO Sangu Delle.

NEWS DEBRIEF

Seoul plans to be the first city to join the metaverse The Seoul Metropolitan Government has revealed its plans to become the first major city to enter the metaverse. ‘Metaverse Seoul’ will create a virtual communications ecosystem for all areas of its municipal administration. The $3.3m investment is part of mayor Oh Se-hoon’s 10-year plan for the city, which aims to improve social mobility among residents. Metaverse Seoul will be fully operational by 2026.

Astroscale raises $109m to clean up orbital altitudes Astroscale, the startup which helps orbital business be more sustainable, has raised $109m from a new funding round. Its products and services ultimately help clear debris from orbital altitudes, meaning satellites last longer.

Astroscale said the cash will help it “dramatically accelerate its ability to make on-orbiting servicing routine by 2030”. Japan’s The Fund led the funding round.

Australia proposes laws to prevent online trolling and defamation Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced the introduction of new legislation to address online trolling and defamation.

The new laws would make social media giants provide details of users who post defamatory comments. The news comes following the ruling by the country’s highest court that stated that publishers can be held liable for public comments on online forums.

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GIVING HOPE EY’s Health & Human Services team is helping governments across the world use data and technology to improve the lives of vulnerable people. We find out how

AUTHOR: Ben East

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GIVING HOPE

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ndrea Danes shakes her head at the thought of it. EY’s Global Human Services Leader found out recently that people in desperate need of health services in the US to help them through the pandemic were being asked to fill in paper forms and fax them to the right department. “I mean, a fax machine! Are you kidding me! Who uses a fax machine!”

And then, often, when all the paperwork had been filled in, another department would ask for completely different information in another format. No

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wonder care systems around the world are renowned for being ridiculously labyrinthine, the sheer effort of trying to navigate them often too much for those who need care the most.

“It’s strange. The care programmes exist and the money to pay for them exists; it’s not a matter of getting more funding,” says Danes. “It’s that we are not coordinated and intuitive in understanding what an individual or family needs. It’s a matter of being smarter with the funding we have to deliver what already exists in a seamless way.”

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Which is where EY’s Health and Human Services team, led globally by Danes, comes in. It works with any state, government or public sector agency in children’s services, public health, Medicaid and much more to encourage better use of data and technology, with the intention of personalising and targeting support.

The results have already been staggering; a simple algorithm used in Maidstone, England meant that early intervention took the rate of realisation of homelessness from 40% to 0.4%.

What’s often apparent, says Danes, is pushback at the idea of using tech and data to improve the lives of vulnerable people. The common argument is that such people need more interaction with services provided by humans, not impersonal Human Services with tech at their heart. EY’s offer, however, is not to replace caseworkers and consultants, but to use its systems to increase the efficiency and targeting of their work, thereby resulting in better outcomes for all.

“So, for example, we could combine data from multiple programmes that a state might provide for a child, rather than have them all working independently,” says Danes. “Then we’d use that data to first understand what’s happening with that child but ultimately change the action that’s being taken from a social services or human services perspective. What you want to

What you want to do is improve the situation for a child in advance rather than wait for the crisis before acting” Andrea Danes

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do is improve the situation for a child in advance rather than wait for the crisis before acting.”

A version of this idea is already in use in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, which had an acute problem with children’s services. They were dealing, horrifyingly, with 350,000 cases a year.

NSW wanted to shift from an approach which simply placed children in care, to one that focused on long-term outcomes, understanding the children’s needs and providing the best mix of services. “That meant creating a Citizen Intelligence Platform with reporting from education, health and police,” says Mark Nixon, an EY Client Service Partner for the NSW Department of Family and Community Services. “One

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One of the great issues is that multiple agencies will have information on a single child, but they don’t share that with each other” Mark Nixon of the great issues is that multiple agencies will have information on a single child, but they don’t share that with each other. What we could do with data was create a picture of each child’s circumstances and needs - to achieve better life outcomes for them.”

Even though EY employs some of the top platform experts, it’s not just a question of throwing impersonal tech and data at these problems. The Human Services department has deliberately resourced its expertise from former state leaders and government professionals Nixon is a former NSW police officer and Danes has spent 30 years in healthcare, working with both data and policy. She also grew up in a single parent family, lived in government subsidised housing and had to turn to food assistance - she

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knows intimately why there is a pressing need for their services.

“The stereotype of people receiving support is so damaging,” she says.

“These people are not necessarily just sitting around waiting for someone to pick them up. When I’m talking about designing systems and entry points and using data, it’s really about understanding that if we can help these families receive the assistance they’re entitled to, most of them don’t want to stay on it. They just need a bridge to get to where they’re headed. But the systems in place to do that are invariably 30 to 40 years old. We don’t do anything

else the way we did it in the 1980s, so why should care work in this way?”

For Danes, there’s a key reason why EY’s work is so important. The basic things that all of us need to exist and thrive - and most of us completely take for granted - revolve around sound mental health, good access to physical health care, stable housing, access to good and consistent food, and feeling safe. When people hit what Danes calls “a point of struggle”, access to these basics begins to go missing, and government agencies might step in. But by using technology and data, access to these services can be much simpler,

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put into the hands of the individuals themselves, and therefore, argues Danes, much more likely to end in better outcomes - because the intervention has come at a much earlier stage.

“For example, I have a foster daughter who has access to some benefits and services, but to do so she has to go to a physical office, bring paper copies of files, fill in paper forms, make phone calls and sit on hold for ages. Then she will get a cheque - and who uses cheques these days? So we actually find many foster youth walk away from benefits because we haven’t made them accessible.

“We all know - because we all use online banking and forms and various other digital formats - that the tech is

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there. But it’s shifting the thinking of government from the idea of simply administering a programme, to engaging with their population. And when you engage with the population and you understand what they’re looking for, how they think and how they access the other services that they receive in their life, you start shifting how you administer the programme for the better.”

Danes cites the example of a housing programme in the United States. It will give vulnerable people a roof over the head and a front door key, but it won’t address the reason why they have recurring homelessness, whether that be down to a physical condition that isn’t being treated properly, a mental health issue or a substance use disorder issue.

“But if we start to link the data, and we understand more what’s going on around a human being, we can actually address the root cause,” says Danes. “We can start to ask individuals and their families what they need, how we can help them.

And when you start to have a conversation with the individuals that you’re serving, you understand their aspiration and you can plug in the programmes that will help them achieve that.”

Admittedly, data sharing is a hard sell both for those administering programmes and those participating in them. But the benefits are certainly outweighing any negative connotations.

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Technology, both from a data and hardware perspective, is the only game in town to improve, change and drive more resilient, people-based services” Helen Sunderland

Helen Sunderland, a UK partner in EY’s Human Services business, cites the problems many care homes in her country had during the first phases of the pandemic. It was an object lesson in how data sharing and analytics would have picked up problems at an early phase, but now COVID-19 has accelerated a more positive attitude surrounding data use.

Danes agrees that the pandemic is allowing EY to offer tech and data services that would ordinarily have taken years to roll out across the public sector.

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She calls it a “moment in time opportunity” - not to capitalise on a period of instability but to understand what people need when they are vulnerable.

“I think that vulnerability has people saying: ‘Can we do this better? Can I find the help I need? Can I get it easier?’

And we have a lot of people who need help that haven’t necessarily interacted with government programmes before.

“But the novel idea is to actually ask the people you are trying to help whether they would like us to integrate the view of their data. That way we can offer them additional services or fine-tune the services that are available. That’s a good conversation that we’re getting more traction with.”

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Which is, ultimately, the conversation everyone has with every bank, insurance company or service they interact with.

Whether you like it or not, you share data to make life easier. It’s just that, as Danes puts it, when you roll data and technology over into the context of government it feels like a brand-new idea.

“Technology, both from a data and hardware perspective, is the only game in town to improve, change and drive more resilient, people-based services,” agrees Sunderland. “The work we did with the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham to create a master data management, analytics and predictive modeling platform brought together

GIVING HOPE

so many disconnected datasets on households, stored in multiple case management systems. What we were able to do is get much more effective interactions and engagements at an earlier stage, preventing the escalation of need.”

It’s an area that Danes is really excited about; pulling together data to build a better picture of someone’s needs, but then using it, with existing research, to apply risk algorithms that identify when someone is moving towards a serious incident. “If you actively use integrated data with those algorithms, you can reroute services to be more proactive and preventative,” she says.

It’s called predictive analytics, and it’s what brought that homelessness rate in Maidstone down to 0.4%.

“That’s real people who have stayed off the streets because someone was alerted to the fact that they were trending towards homelessness and were able to pick up the phone and ask if there was a problem,” says Danes. “Predictive analytics doesn’t replace caseworkers and it doesn’t take away human judgement, but it augments both with an understanding of what’s happening earlier.

And it’s huge.”

So with EY’s Human Services leaders working around the globe to drive that kind of change, the systems are finally catching up with the incredible work of the people in the programmes who wake up every day trying to make a difference. Danes is proud - and humbled - that the data and tech they use and develop is becoming a gamechanger in the public sector.

“We owe it to that workforce to get this right,” she says. “We also owe it to the taxpayers who expect an efficient use of public money. But most of all, we owe it to the individuals and families we’re serving. With the data we’re deploying with a lot of our clients, we now have a more comprehensive understanding of what a whole community needs.”

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The CTO of the future

At only 16, Gitanjali Rao is a successful author, scientist and STEAM advocate, and has been on the cover of TIME magazine.

The teenager sits down with Tech For Good to talk about how she is using technology to address the global challenges and inspire a new generation of young entrepreneurs

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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THE CTO OF THE FUTURE

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here’s no minimum age to start making a mark in the world, and 16-year-old Gitanjali Rao is proof of that.

While most of her colleagues worried about their first day of high school, Rao was chosen among 5,000 nominees as TIME magazine’s first-ever Kid of the Year in recognition of her inventions. Her projects leverage technology to address global challenges ranging from water contamination to cyberbullying and the opioid epidemic.

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explains her desire to build a community of young innovators that will work to make the world a better place.

“Everyone has the power to change the world,” she says. “They just need the passion to bring their ideas to reality.”

Over the last several years, Rao has been collecting awards for her innovative projects. She first rose to fame after winning the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge and has since made the Forbes 30 Under 30 2019 list and was awarded Spotlight of the Year at Vogue’s Women Of The Year 2021. Although she is thankful for

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the recognition, Rao is most proud of her scientific projects and her ability to create change.

Rather than being the exception, Rao believes that she is the proof that anyone can make an impact in the world, no matter their age or background. Talking to Tech For Good, she reflects on some of her achievements and reveals what inspires her to continue researching new inventions.

“My passion for science has existed for such a long time,” she says. “I always looked at the world from a scientific approach, and then I started to look at how I could do something to improve it. I always wanted to put a smile on someone’s face and turned to science and technology to do so.

“I’m an innovator, author and promoter of STEM. And now, the CTO of the Future.”

With this title, Rao refers to the latest project she has been working on in collaboration with Lenovo. The company’s Kind City initiative has the vision to change urban environments forever.

To do so, Lenovo has made a public call for people from all walks of life to share their vision of what a kinder city would look like. The responses to this prompt will then be curated using an AI and transformed into three founding principles that will inform a range of social initiatives. The project is the biggest crowdsourced public ‘census’

Everyone has the power to change the world. They just need the passion to bring their ideas to reality” to imagine and co-author a blueprint for a city of the future built on kindness.

“We’re a well-driven mission towards helping create a more sustainable and kinder future for everyone right now and for future generations going forward,” Rao says. “I think it’s a really great cause.

And, more than that, it really provides so many real-world stories. It honestly makes me jump out of my seat just thinking about the place that our world is in right now and how much more incredible it could be in the future with the latest technology that we have out there.”

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company, working alongside famous personalities like actor and activist Tan France and “the first human cyborg”, Dr Peter Scott Morgan.

As the Kind City Council’s CTO of the Future, Rao aims to promote STEM fields for women and kids all over the world and participate in discussions about inclusion, trust, sustainability and opportunities.

“With the Kind City project what I personally aim to do is continue spreading the importance of innovation and changing the world for the better,” she says. “It’s basically a blueprint of a city of the future. I think it’ll help us build a foundation that we can continue to build on as individuals, but also continue to grow as a community and help other people grow around us. I feel like it’s almost putting out there possibilities that we never thought were possible.”

Kindness has long been a value that Rao has worked to promote. A couple of years ago, she created Kindly, a service that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to detect and prevent cyberbullying, under Microsoft’s guidance. The app and Chrome extension flags up terms and phrases that could be considered bullying and gives people the option to edit them before they get published online.

“What differentiates Kindly from other things out there is that it’s a non-pu22

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nitive approach, meaning that it gives students the chance to re-evaluate what they’re saying before going directly to a punishment stage, which you don’t see in too many applications out there today,” Rao says. “I’m hoping that Kindly can help show how many children have the ability to change.

“One article I read said that it only takes seven seconds for any kid to change their mind about sending something that may not be nice, so giving students that chance to reevaluate things is very important. My goal is to create a safer and more positive future for everyone; one where we’re not fearing technology, but using it.”

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Rao definitely has experience when it comes to leveraging technology for good. In addition to promoting values like kindness, one of her main areas of scientific interest has been improving the detection of contaminants in drinking water.

The teenager first got inspired to work in this field after the Flint water crisis, created after the city in Michigan switched its drinking water supply to the Flint River without adequate testing.

Upon hearing about the health problems caused by the contaminated water, the then 11-year-old started working on

designing a small, mobile device that was able to test for lead in drinking water using carbon nanotube technology. Rao 3D-printed the device to make sure it was small and affordable so people could use it daily at their homes.

“When I saw my mum using test-strips and sending our water off to the EPA [United States Environmental Protection Agency], I was shocked and didn’t think it was a reliable method,” Rao says. “I really wanted to do something to fix this, so that it not only helped my parents, but also Flint, Michigan, and places like this around the world.”

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The design of the device earned Rao the title of America’s Top Young Scientist and marked her entry into the world of academic research. Now, Rao is continuing her work in this field by working on an inexpensive and accurate way of detecting biocontaminants in the water.

“I’m looking to detect parasitic contaminants in drinking water, using genetic engineered bioelectric sensors,” she says.

“I am studying a specific parasite called cryptosporidium, which is very common in Africa and Asia, and trying to develop an easier, faster and more reliable way to detect it.”

But Rao’s collaboration with academia wasn’t restricted to water research. The teenager also collaborated with the University of Colorado’s Department of Cell Biology to find a solution for prescription opioid addiction using the latest innovations in genetic engineering.

Epione is designed to better understand how addicted a person is to

opioids, a problem that causes 50,000 annual deaths in the US. Rao’s device automates the immunosorbent testing part of the traditional opioid addiction diagnosis process, allowing doctors to diagnose addiction earlier and improve how they monitor the condition.

“There were so many teens getting into prescription opioids, and, before anybody knew about it, it was too late to do anything,” Rao says. “I wanted to come up with a way to diagnose prescription opioid addiction at an early stage so you can take action earlier.”

With all these projects, there is no doubt that Rao is already a very successful scientist and is making a name for herself.

Because of her projects, Rao has been able to have amazing experiences such as speaking in several global conferences and being a UNICEF panellist. Last year, she made a dream come true when she was interviewed by actress and activist Angelina Jolie for her TIME magazine cover

My goal is to create a safer and more positive future for everyone; one where we’re not fearing technology, but using it”

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article. Rao describes the experience as “absolutely incredible” and reveals that she is working with her team to organise workshops for the Maddox Jolie-Pitt foundation, which aims to support Cambodians as they develop their communities and protect their natural resources.

Rao’s age, ethnicity and gender make her look very different from the usual technology leaders. However, rather

than it being something that sets her back, Rao celebrates her differences and hopes to use them to bring the views of her generation to a global audience. At the same time, her family and friends help her stay true to herself.

“Obviously, being 16, it’s weird for me to be put in that position,” she says.

“I’m still doing chores every single day, and still going to school. I think that it’s easy to be pushed into the cloud so it’s

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If I can do it, anyone can do it” always good to have someone to keep me grounded.

“But I think we have to recognise that our generation is growing up in a place where we’re seeing problems that have never existed before. nnovation in using technology isn’t an option anymore; it’s a necessity. And I’m excited to bring that to life with this city of the future.”

In order to inspire other people, and give them the tools they need to succeed, Rao has been running 26

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innovation workshops. So far, she has impacted around 55,000 students across 30 countries. In the events, Rao encourages every student to come up with an idea and a plan to make it a reality, with the goal of inspiring people to innovate in their everyday lives.

“With my workshops, I am aiming to share that each and every one of us can be innovators,” she says. “Each and every one of us has the power to change the world for the better. We need to put more role models out there

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to show that if I can do it, you can do it, and anyone can do it.”

However, Rao is aware that not everyone has access to the same resources and community support she had. In order to make her story more accessible, Rao has written a book, A Young Innovator’s Guide to STEM, that she hopes will reach children all over the world, and cover the material she can’t in her sessions, to share her story and motivation.

However, Rao is not only speaking to children. As a TEDx and UNICEF

speaker, she uses her position in the spotlight to stress the role that companies and organisations have to play when it comes to educating the next generations and preparing them for the future.

“I was fortunate to have the support of the community at a young age, but not everyone is like me,” she says. “When I do speak to organisations I always end my talks with, ‘Don’t be afraid to go out and look for sponsorships, internships, mentorships and create friendships with students, because you do have the power to change the world’ “We need to take into consideration everyone’s ideas, no matter which corner of the globe they’re from, no matter their age, gender or the colour of their skin. I’m a young South Asian woman who is speaking about science, you don’t see that very often. But I’m setting an example for everyone else who wants to do it now.”

Following in the footsteps of Greta Thunberg and Malala, Rao is joining the ranks of a new generation of young women who refuse to stay still in the face of global challenges. Her personal strength lies in her belief in the power of technology and her vision of a sustainable and kinder world powered by a new generation of changemakers.

Rao is only one girl, but she is already inspiring thousands.

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HOW TO SAVE THE EARTH

HOW TO SAVE THE EARTH Was COP26 a success? We speak to four experts to find out if enough was done to tackle the climate crisis AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

This article first appeared in the December issue of Digital Bulletin

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ix years after the Paris Conference, the leaders of 197 nations of the world met in Glasgow to search for a way of addressing the climate crisis. During the conference, the path towards net-zero and the importance of private-sector commitments was made apparent.

Under the new ‘Glasgow Climate Pact’, countries committed to accelerating the pace of current decarbonisation plans by pledging to start strengthening their emission-reduction plans targets for 2030 by next year. Moreover, the parties agreed to create a legal framework for a global carbon market and recognised the 30

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need to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions by 45% by 2030. Some considered this pledge as promising, while others saw it as being insufficient to address the climate crisis.

“The final last-minute agreement made between countries at COP26 fell short of those actions recognised by scientists as necessary to limit rising temperatures to 1.5C,” says Simon Robinson, author of Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation and CEO of Holonomics. “The result is that we are still collectively facing a potential planetary catastrophe, with poorer nations being hit the hardest.”

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Often, the law follows technology.

However, when it comes to addressing climate change, the conferences’ pledges are a call on innovators to develop new technologies that can realise those goals. In cases such as the UK, this call can soon turn into a legal requirement.

Currently, relatively few businesses have yet to make clear, detailed plans for how they will achieve the net-zero commitments of the countries where they operate. However, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak reiterated at COP26 that the Treasury would require UK-listed companies to release net-zero plans by 2023. It is only a matter of time before regulators worldwide follow that example.

“COP26 marked a turning point in how the private sector regards the climate crisis,” says Simon Daniel, Founder of Moixa. “As we enter into the implementation phase where decisive action needs to be taken by governments and the private sector, it is clear that we are galvanised around a firm goal. If we’re to stand a chance of keeping the increase in global temperature at 1.5C, we need everyone at the table.”

There are many technological solutions that can contribute to reducing carbon emissions, for example by replacing personal computers with low-energy data centres. Moreover,

If companies want to make changes for global impact, they need to start reviewing every aspect of their business, all the way down to their software development choices” Nick Mills

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other areas that technological innovation will contribute to include smart cities, mobility and vehicles, energy-efficient architecture and reduced waste in food production and consumption.

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The technology sector also has to make itself sustainable. Currently, the modern technology stack is made up of a set of different, complex, and physically distinct components and services provided by a digital and physical supply chain, whose carbon footprint is difficult to measure. Nonetheless, if the net-zero target is to be met, companies will need a specific and detailed plan to achieve it.

“Pledges must be backed up by concrete solutions,” says Nick Mills, General Manager, EMEA at software development platform CircleCI. “If companies want to make changes for global impact, they need to start reviewing every aspect of their business, all the way down to their software development choices.

“Taking action to optimise software delivery is a concrete, actionable, and urgent step all technology firms need to adopt for two reasons: more efficient technology has a huge part to play in reducing resource consumption and depletion, and impacts on climate change. Additionally, it’s just good practice to make better and more efficient services fitted for the modern technology stack. The answers are straightforward, but the execution requires skilled and focused develop -ers collaborating across teams and companies.”

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The private sector is under growing scrutiny from both customers and institutional investors when it comes to sustainability efforts. During COP26, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres announced that the UN will establish a “group of experts” to propose clear standards for measuring and analysing net-zero commitments from companies.

This will expose the practice known as ‘greenwashing’, create international standards on net-zero and reward those companies who have adopted strong net-zero strategies.

Until now, most of the sustainability commitments have been voluntary.

However, the time when they become the law might not be too far ahead and when that happens, companies need

to have prepared.

“It all starts with measurement – what gets measured gets managed – once it becomes known where energy is being used, then data can be analysed and steps can be taken to optimise and reduce wastage,” says Sam Gooder, Head of Operations at EP&T Global.

“In essence, net-zero boils down to good measurement of current metrics, improving the performance of assets, improving the renewable mix of the energy used and then offsetting any remainder. As it stands it remains too easy for companies to commit to net-zero and complete this by focussing on the latter two areas; Greenwashing fundamentally won’t solve the climate crisis.”

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EXPLORING E-ESTONIA How did Estonia become the most digitally-advanced society? Siim Sikkut, the country’s Government CIO, takes Tech For Good on a tour of the world’s first digital republic

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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EXPLORING E-ESTONIA

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n the north-east of Europe, there is one small country that has surpassed all other public administrations when it comes to technological advances: Estonia.

The Baltic nation has digitalised 99% of its public services and continuously maintains one of the highest ratings of public trust in governments in the EU. This digital transformation allows its citizens to access all public services except marriages and divorces - online.

All in all, the Estonian government claims that the digitalisation of public services saves the country more than

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1,400 years of working time and 2% of its GDP annually.

Estonia’s success wasn’t a matter of luck. Since obtaining its independence, the nation pledged to invest in digital technologies. Alongside digitalising the public services it also invested in digital education, offering free computer training to 10% of its adult population and putting devices in all its schools.

The effort raised the percentage of Estonians who use the internet from 29% in 2000 to 91% in 2016.

With advances like this, it comes as no surprise that Estonia has been

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named the most digital society in the world. However, Siim Sikkut, Government Chief Information Officer at Estonia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, is cautious about showing off the title.

“I’m always a bit shy myself about a title like that because there’s so much more to do; the job is nowhere near done,” he says. “It’s not that we are necessarily doing the most advanced technology but rather that the stuff we build actually gets used heavily, so it has an impact. And that scale and extent are what has caught a bit of light.

“We are not technologists but we are big fans of technology. We don’t want to just do it for ‘the cool of it’. If we use it it’s because it is making something better for the government and the people. We don’t have the luxury of just building fancy toys so we’ve been very careful of how we make those choices.”

Rather than storing all its citizens’ data locally, the government uses a data platform called X-Road to link information from local hosts to power e-Estonia. This tool, combined with the country’s digital ID system, allows Estonian citizens to vote - and change their vote - challenge parking tickets and pay their taxes from the comfort of their homes.

In the US, an average taxpayer with no business income takes eight hours

We are not technologists but we are big fans of technology.

If we use it, it’s because it is making something better for the government and the people” Siim Sikkut

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to file a tax return. In Estonia, this takes five minutes. The Estonian government can use the system to pull a citizen’s data - income, investments, family structure, etc - and create a pre-filled tax declaration that they can quickly review and send. And while the NHS still struggles to make patient data accessible across different health boards, Estonian citizens have digital health records that any private or public health provider can access online.

“It’s a secure, uniform way to exchange data to have seamless interactions and seamless services from the citizen’s point of view,” Sikkut says. “We have reinforced the rule that

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if some part of the government knows something about me, it should not ask again. That gave a kick in the butt for government agencies and it made the integrations with citizens really more integrated, faster and simpler.”

Although X-Road is a government platform, it has also begun to be used by private firms and even other countries’ administrations, such as Finland’s. This allows Estonians to use the system when requesting loans from a bank or picking up prescriptions in Finnish pharmacies.

Despite the current increase of public distrust in governments, Sikkut says that data privacy has “not been an

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issue” in Estonia, and polls confirm that Estonian citizens maintain one of the highest levels of trust in their government out of the whole EU. The secret? X-Road’s rigorous filtering.

The system allows teachers to enter students’ grades but doesn’t give them access to their financial history. In the same way, citizens can request their health doctors to be sealed off from everyone except their chosen healthcare providers.

Every time a person, be it a banker, a doctor, a teacher or a minister, access someone’s data, the system records it to allow citizens to see how their data is being collected and report instances where they think there’s been an unfair

use of their information. Transparency is a core government value and looking at another person’s secure data for no reason is considered a criminal offence.

“Our whole government is built to be privacy-preserving,” Sikkut says. “We keep building additional features where you can have effective oversight over what happens to your data, not just theoretical legal control. We want to show that you can trust us.”

The degree of digitalisation of Estonia’s services allowed the transition to remote work to proceed seamlessly. Although Sikkut explains that the government was very conscious of the impact of the lockdown measures on citizens’ physical and mental health, ISSUE 18

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it was “not that much of a big deal” to ensure that all public services were remotely available.

The government was also able to use their digital services for specific pandemic-related challenges, adapting their platforms to manage inventory of PPEs and allowing the data from COVID-testing labs to flow seamlessly to the national digital health record. The fact that there was already a platform to build on accelerated the government’s ability to respond quickly during the worst of the crisis.

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“We saw that it pays to be digital,” Sikkut says. “We saw the effects that digital services can bring you even at times of crisis. It’s not like you couldn’t have a lesson at school or get a doctor’s appointment. All those services were already virtually available.”

Estonia is a thriving environment for innovation, not only in its public agencies but also in its startup ecosystem. The country has the most number of tech unicorns per capita. With a population of only 1.3 billion, Estonia has been the birthplace of seven unicorns to date, including Skype, TransferWise and Bolt.

At the end of 2020, the startup and technology industry made up 6.9% of the country’s GDP. In Sikkut’s view, the creation of this ecosystem was born out of a desire to address the country’s need for talent.

In 2014, the government launched a digital residency programme, which allows foreigners to remotely access Estonian services such as banking as if they were living in the country. The programme, along with having the lowest business tax rates in the EU, is one of the keys behind Estonia’s flourishing startup ecosystem. Today, Estonia’s weekly e-residency application rate exceeds its birth rate.

“We have always been small,” Sikkut says. “We still are. So we’ve always had to be open for partnerships, for

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We saw that it pays to be digital. We saw the effects that digital services can bring you even at times of crisis”

innovation, for vendors, for working with other countries, you name it.

Otherwise, we’ll limit what we can do and our reach in a digital sense.”

Now, the country has taken a further step in promoting its innovative ecosystem through the creation of a Digital Testbed Framework. Under this programme, which Estonia has dubbed a ‘country-sized hackathon‘, innovators from around the world can access the technology that underpins its digital government services to develop their products.

Organisations that succeed in developing innovative solutions will exit the programme with a proof-of-concept, a road-tested product, and the Estonian government as a reference customer. In return, the Estonian government gets free access to the new digital solution, which will be part of the publicly available source code repository. There are no financial commitments from either side, and private sector partners are free to sell the products they develop as part of the framework.

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It’s the classic startup mentality.

The process of what we do is nothing new, but the public sector has been alien to it for a long time” “Industry has been really the partner in building all our digital government up, and they now take this experience to 100+ countries around the world, helping others to build some of the same things or even better things,” Sikkut says. “Now we have the same spirit with a concrete initiative saying: ‘How can we really offer ourselves as a government as a testbed environment for the next innovators to come build on top of what we have, and help us to get better government better services?’

That spirit has been a necessity, to pull off the challenge of going digital.

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we’re going to replace the whole thing.

Most of the innovation is very much going in the direction of microservices, like Lego pieces being added to each other. So we are basically looking for the next Lego pieces on top of what we have.”

The Digital Testbed Framework is a scaled-up version of a domestic “digigov ‘playground’ legal framework” that has been used to develop 12 pilot solutions, including the country’s official COVID-19 test-and-trace app.

Although the DTF scheme has just launched, Sikkut says it has already received dozens of applications.

Another way in which Estonia is

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addressing its talent shortage - with a small and ageing population - is through implementing artificial intelligence and automation projects. Similarly to the Digital Tested Framework, Sikkut has worked on developing an AI regulation to ensure that the processes can be automated in an ethical way.

“Fundamentally, we lack skills and people,” he says. “For us, something like artificial intelligence can be like a godsend in a way. Our fundamental problem is that we don’t have enough people to do all the valuable things with so whatever we can do to have machines help us out is awesome.”

Sikkut started looking at this technology three years ago, experimenting with how it would improve government processes in situations such as tax inspections, urban projects and even transcribing parliamentary proceedings, to great success.

Since then, the country has developed over a hundred different applications that leverage AI to support government activities. In the future, Sikkut’s team is going to make sure that all government information can be available through virtual assistants, similar to Amazon’s Alexa. In this way, residents can access all the services that they need 24/7 without any queues or time lost.

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EXPLORING E-ESTONIA

“That’s the sort of experience we want to build out,” he says. “We have a hypothesis that this is a way that we can tackle the digital divide because voice is our natural way of interacting.”

When it comes to following Estonia’s lead, Sikkut believes that, in addition to implementing new technologies, the most important thing to have is an open attitude towards innovation, and getting rid of the fear of failure, taking inspiration from the startup mindset.

“I can see what has worked in Estonia, which boils down to ‘just do it,’” he says.

“Oftentimes in governments and countries, there’s a lot of endless discussion about how to do stuff. Instead, with something like the e-residency programme, we just went to the governor and said: ‘Look, we don’t know if it will work, but we see the potential.’

“It’s the classic startup mentality. If we fail, we might stop or redo and try again, and then scale if it works. The process of what we do is nothing new, but the public sector has been alien to it for a long time. We’ve managed to bring some of that on board sometimes and that has helped massively.”

Sikkut doesn’t believe in looking too far ahead when it comes to technology.

In addition to continuing to promote AI-powered virtual assistance and improving the user-friendliness of the government services, he believes that the most important thing for Estonia right now is to continue with the same framework that has enabled the country to lead the way in the digital transformation of public services.

“We really believe the future is what we build,” he says. “Keeping that spirit, keeping the willingness to offer platforms for innovation, that’s a big part of it.”

The digitalisation of public sector services is no longer a matter of whether but when. Estonia has proven that it is possible to be digital, transparent and secure at the same time and that bureaucracy isn’t an inescapable curse placed on public administrations. Instead, technology is a tool they can leverage to change their citizens’ lives and their countries’ economies for the better.

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GOOD OR BAD?

GOOD OR

BAD? Great power comes with great responsibility, and that is particularly true of new technologies. Each month, Tech For Good discusses the potential benefits and dangers of technological advances that are coming to market. This month we ask: Is nuclear energy the key to decarbonisation?

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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NUCLEAR ENERGY

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s nuclear power the key to reaching net-zero? Currently, about 16% of the UK’s electricity generation comes from nuclear power and, despite its bad rep, this source of energy emits very few greenhouse gases: much less than coal or gas, and even less than solar, according to some studies.

Unlike most of the sources of renewable energy currently used, nuclear energy is highly reliable. In the United States, nuclear power plants had an average capacity of 92.3% in 2016, operating at full power 336 out of 365 days a year, according to government data. In contrast, the average capacity of hydroelectric systems was 38.2% and that of wind turbines was 34.5%.

The weather is unpredictable, but nuclear reactors are not.

Convinced of the potential of nuclear energy, the UK government is planning on making huge investments in this technology, as part of its 10-point plan to reach net-zero by 2050. The government plan states that nuclear power provides a “reliable source of low-carbon electricity”. The strategy is already underway, with the government recently joining efforts with an industry consortium led 48

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GOOD?

by Rolls-Royce, to invest £405m into the development of a fleet of mini-reactors, which are said to be a less-expensive but equally sustainable source of energy.

Once one lets go of prejudices, nuclear energy seems to have it all and the climate crisis is too large a problem to not aim to integrate as many sustainable solutions as possible.

What the expert says: “ Over the past five decades, nuclear power has cumulatively avoided the emission of about 70 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide and continues to avoid more than 1 Gt CO2 annually. It is time to make evidence-based decisions and ramp up the investment in nuclear. The cost of not doing so is far too high to bear.”

Mariano Grossi, Director General, IAEA

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lthough nuclear energy has the potential to create great good, it also can have terrible consequences if something were to go wrong.

For many, it just isn’t worth the risk.

The production and use of radioactive fuels and the problem of disposing of the waste the process creates are the two main challenges when it comes to using nuclear energy as a substitute for fuel-based energy sources. ​​It has been estimated that the world produces about 34,000m3 of nuclear waste each year, waste that takes years to degrade.

In addition, the memory of the aftermath of the accidents of Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the health struggles that the population of those areas still faces today, is still very present in the global collective memory.

Moreover, nuclear energy plants are an expensive investment, with recent experiences in Europe seeing the construction of nuclear plants going massively over budget and over time.

At a time when the cost of renewables is lowering year after year, it begs the question of whether nuclear energy is an expensive band-aid to the problem that distracts from supporting other longer-

BAD?

term cheaper and safer alternatives.

In fact, a study published in Nature showed that countries that make large investments in nuclear energy tended not to invest in renewables. Given the existence of alternatives, nuclear energy seems to be too expensive, too risky and totally unnecessary.

What the expert says: “ Decarbonising the UK without new nuclear is definitely possible, and potentially preferable.

The economics of nuclear have deteriorated over the last 20 years given the remarkable drop in the cost of renewables and flexible energy sources, which threaten the profitability of large, inflexible power stations.”

Juliet Philipps, Senior Policy Advisor, E3G

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LEADERSHIP

BEYOND THE LAB Currently, more than 80% of scientific research data is being lost within 20 years. Jake Schofield, Labstep’s Founder and CEO, talks to Tech For Good about how technology can help solve the global reproducibility crisis

INTERVIEW BY: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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BEYOND THE LAB

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FG: What’s the story behind Labstep?

Schofield: The project stemmed out of my own personal frustrations with how experimental data in lab-based science was recorded, captured and shared.

I think there’s a lot of personal frustrations that you feel as an individual, but then these pain points have much larger global knock-on effects. When you have a look at that, we produce stability within science.

More than half of all scientific research cannot be reproduced. People can’t demonstrate which steps result in findings. And the real understanding of those wider issues is really what lit a fire for me to go and try and tackle this.

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TFG: The definition of science is something that can be reproduced so it’s shocking that this is such a huge problem. As a researcher at the University of Oxford, you must have seen this first-hand.

Schofield: It’s madness when you look at the time and money spent on research that can’t be reproduced.

And that’s often not the fault of the scientists, it’s just that this information maybe isn’t captured or can’t be properly shared. I know a lot of people have horror stories, like if a postdoc leaves the lab and it turns out they were writing their notes in Japanese so there’s this big black hole in knowledge. What we want to do is provide a

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much better alternative for scientists, which is a net positive addition to their day-to-day. But it also means that you’re tackling some of these bigger issues around reproducibility, and those advancements will trickle down onto a wider world impact in the future.

TFG: Why have previous attempts to tackle this problem failed?

Schofield: In the past, companies have raised hundreds of millions to go and build products that address this. There are companies that have been doing electronic lab notebooks, inventory management tools, etc. These digital solutions for science have been around for 10, 20, 30 years, yet the statistics show that adoption is incredibly low.

Only 7% of scientists actually use a dedicated digital solution for capturing and recording their science, which is crazy. Science is advancing at an incredible rate with amazing analytical techniques and new hardware instruments, yet the way science is carried out hasn’t changed. It’s hugely inefficient. We started Labstep in response to these problems, but also in response to these other digital solutions that had tried to go and create a problem but hadn’t been adopted.

They haven’t been adopted because if you’re in a lab environment, and you’re

More than half of all scientific research cannot be reproduced” Jake Schofield

working every day until 10pm, the last thing you want to do is manually have to spend hours typing up a diary of what you’ve done, adding to your workload.

And so we wanted to fundamentally turn that on its head to build a completely different experience around it.

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TFG: You’ve described Labstep in the past as “GitHub for lab experiments”.

Can you expand on this idea?

Schofield: I’ve always liked that analogy because I think it strikes at the core of what we’re doing. And what we’re doing is really different from a lot of these other legacy solutions or different approaches that haven’t been adopted. Ultimately, they just bolted onto it a notebook diary, where you’re expected to type something out and keep a written record.

At the core of what we’re really trying to do at Labstep is allow you to focus on doing your science, executing your lab-based procedures, and then tie your inventory via an API to your experiments, automatically building these great records of what you’ve done. This record is generated for you for compliance, but

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also in case you go on to make these great discoveries, you can recreate those findings and make sure that your research is reproducible. Or if you’re collaborating with another lab group across the world, you can see in real-time what they’re doing, and you can comment and you can shift things around.

It’s a much more intuitive way of carrying out experiments and it kind of moves the emphasis away from manual curation and manual data entry. People have huge amounts of existing inventory and huge amounts of legacy material.

And a big part of what we’re trying to do is making it as easy as possible for you to get all that information and lower that activation energy. GitHub is an amazing tool, and it does amazing things for the computational software development space and that’s really what we’re trying to emulate with science.

BEYOND THE LAB

TFG: Academia can sometimes be a field that’s resistant to change.

How has the scientific community responded to your tools?

Schofield: It’s interesting, isn’t it?

Because science is very open-minded and progressive when it comes to the adoption of new technologies. But you’re right, there has been this big resistance to adopting new software solutions when it comes to actually the nuts and bolts of recording their experimentation. And I think a big part of that is because you’re incredibly busy and overworked, and you don’t want to have to invest mass amounts of time and effort in uploading stuff into a new system, and that’s really what we’ve tried to strip back.

It’s a much more intuitive way of carrying out experiments and it moves the emphasis away from manual curation and manual data entry”

What’s been really nice is that we’ve spent nothing on marketing. We’ve just focused on building an amazing product. And that growth has come organically just from individuals using it and sharing it with other colleagues and collaborators. And this is really positive and this is going to actually have huge value. We have over 100% retention of everybody that uses the platform, which is amazing.

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Ultimately, I feel like we’re almost the best-kept secret within the industry” TFG: The product must speak for itself!

And they say data is the currency of the future so having such easy access to it must be very valuable for researchers.

Schofield: Data is so important, and it really is more so in science than in anything else. Because of this, we’ve had to navigate how to make sure that we can provide that security and that safety blanket. There’s full encrypting in transit, full encryption at rest and watertight audit trails in terms of timestamps with an uneditable audit trail for compliance pieces because we’re dealing with very valuable data here.

We’ve kind of got best-in-class security put in place from the technical point of view, but also, what’s really unique about what we’re able to do is that we can give you that granularity of permissions and control and access codes so that you can share it securely 56

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rather than just sending stuff via email, and PDFs. When you look at labs of the future, you’re going to want to be able to leverage AI to be able to mine these datasets to get more insights and extract more innovation. To be able to do that you need to make sure that the data is incredibly well-annotated.

What’s really unique about Labstep is that we’re able to tie that dataset to this sample and to these experimental conditions and these people. It means that you have an asset that can be mined and leveraged in the future, which is a real driver for some of the large organisations that we work with.

TFG: Labstep has seen a great adoption within academia but also in the wider industry. How has been the process of branching out?

Schofield: It has been very exciting.

Initially, my co-founder was still doing a PhD at Oxford University, and we got traction within the university. We then followed that success with investment from Seedcamp and by going through the Google residency programme. The guidance we received there helped us build this amazing product and really work out how can we create a model that can scale and the platform has now grown to be used at 900

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universities globally, including some massive real figurehead institutional deployments like the Francis Crick Institute, one of the largest life sciences research centres in Europe. But I think that what’s really exciting is that we’ve managed to branch out not just from having a massively positive impact in academia, but also to try and have that

positive impact in the industry as well.

This is often where some other tools have fallen down in the past. In sciences, you need to have a solution that can work with both industry and academia, you need a solution that can work with chemists, with biologists, with material scientists, and you need something that can work for that really cool ISSUE 18

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We can really position ourselves to become the global tool for scientific experimentation”

company that’s making alternative milk.

I think the flexibility in the configurability of Labstep allows you to build these connected environments to meet your specific needs, which means that it works really well in both industry and academia.

There’s a lot of innovation in science and it’s really nice that labs that can have a positive impact in helping commercial companies tackle some of the global challenges. Our client Sherlock Biosciences was one of the first companies to develop a rapid diagnostic test for COVID, which was really exciting.

And one of our biggest commercial 58

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customers works in alternative proteins and lab-grown meats. It’s really nice that Labstep can help with solving those issues. Our active users doubled in the last couple of months and have got a lot of really exciting traction, especially within the commercial sector.

TFG: Obviously, you have a lot of very exciting things coming up, including a future funding round. Where do you see Labstep going in the next three to five years?

Schofield: I feel that we can really position ourselves to become the

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global tool for scientific experimentation. I think we feel like we’ve built this incredible tool, we’ve got these amazing metrics, and we deliver real value to the customers that we do have, and we now want to really start getting it out there to the wider community and having a much broader impact. And so that’s why we’re going to be eyeing up this funding round coming up, which will allow us to really turn up the dial and put Labstep in front of more people. Ultimately, I feel like we’re almost the best-kept secret within the industry.

From a scale up point of view, I think when you have a look at science, that

has huge opportunities. I think that lab automation, AI, these technologies are here and they will be incredibly disruptive. We want to provide a springboard and a stepping stone to allow scientists to start using these and incorporating them more in their day-to-day R&D activities. And so I feel like if we can build this amazing ecosystem and this operating system for science, which allows scientists to run, execute, share and collaborate, we can also provide a springboard to give exposure to some of these other technologies to really change the way sciences is carried out for the better.

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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: Angela Zhan

Age: 14 Born: Utah, USA Achievements: Angela has developed a way to convert petroleum-based plastic wastes into environmentally friendly, biologically produced bioplastic, working with researchers from Weber State and Utah State universities. The project earned her a spot in the top 30 finalists of the US Broadcom MASTERS competition.

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ANGELA ZHAN

I

‘m currently a freshman at Logan High School. I like to play tennis and soccer. And I also like to do math and science.

In 2017, I read a New York Times article about how more than 8.3 million tonnes of plastic has been produced since the 1950s. And so soon, the world will be covered in plastic if we don’t do anything.

I had the chance to talk with the director of the London City Environmental Department, and he told me that most of the waste in landfills is plastic, and most of it will stay there for a few hundred years before starting to degrade. This poses a huge threat to human health. So this inspired me to come up with a way to degrade plastic to help our environment.

Plastic is commonly used in our daily lives. For example, toys, grocery bags, and even computers. My goal is to develop technology to allow us to keep using plastics without damaging the environment.

A lot of plastic is in landfills, right? So I decided to go to look where the most plastic is because microbes in the soil probably have to be able to degrade plastic in order to survive.

I used low-density polyethene [LDPE] to help find useful microbes. LDPE has long hydrocarbon chains, so it’s mostly made of carbon. So my hypothesis was that some microbes may have developed the ability to use and read LDPE. I also collected water samples from the Great Salt Lake because it is very salty, so that means it has low carbon content, so microbes in there have to be able to efficiently use the carbon in order to survive.

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ANGELA ZHAN I found two strains of bacteria that could grow on a diet of plastic bags.

My next step was to isolate the plastic degrading microbes and put PHB [polyhydroxybutyrate] biosynthetic genes into the microbes so that they could degrade plastic and produce bioplastic which can help our environment.

There are actually three PHB genes.

So I linked them together, and I put them into a shuttle vector, which can carry the three genes into the microbes.

For my last step, I tested the engineered strains, and I found that they were able to efficiently degrade plastic waste and produce environmentally friendly bioplastic.

If we want to actually start using these strains in the world, I probably have to improve their efficiency. And I want to try it on a larger scale because, right now, I have only tried it in flasks in the lab.

When I started, there were a lot of things I didn’t know. So the hardest thing was educating myself because they don’t really teach this in middle school. I learned a lot from academic papers.

I feel like there’s a lot more plastic now in the world and global environmental problems have actually got a lot worse.

I want to be an environmental engineer, so I can make the world a better place. I also want to install the PHB gene into plastic strings, so it can degrade them. I already found the bad plastics that I can use to test it.

Meet other incredible teenagers by listening to our Teenage Tech Stories Podcast!

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