PassWord – 7th October 2015

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password with me, Peter Warren, the technology program on Resonance 104.4 FM that plots a course through our high-tech world. Coming up in today’s program, why the refugee crisis needs SIM cards as much as it needs food and shelter.

Speaker B: Because of mobile phone technology, it’s possible to track someone’s location. What we wanted to do was put modern technology into the hands of the NGOs, the agencies, and the refugees themselves.

Speaker A: How Cardiff University and IBM have created a digital assistant that connects to all of your computer systems and can understand what you’re asking it and quickly deliver you a response. How the National Theatre is bringing plays and a national curriculum to a cinema near you.

Speaker C: The projects around virtual reality, around 360-degree filming, are very much in the works now. We’re gathering artists and technologists. We’re trying to bring people together to see what sorts of creative collaborations can come out of that.

Speaker A: And last but not least, a new project that plans to use the internet to find out the meaning of life with a chemical search engine.

Speaker D: We’re not going to be making dangerous new life forms and things like that, or Terminators. But what we’ll be doing is finding out how the chemicals can organize to get towards an object that can evolve.

Speaker A: Now, eventually, the refugee crisis touched our hearts when we stopped seeing it as a swarm trying to swamp our shores and instead recognised it as a wave of humanity desperate to escape from barrel bombs and barbarity. But there is something different about this wave of refugees, because for the first time in history, it’s been marshalled and maintained by technology. An exclusive investigation by Password has found that mobile phone technology is not only being fine-tuned to supply the refugees with information, but also to send them the funds to exist in a Europe that has been denying them benefits and jobs. I spoke to Marta Krypinska, co-founder of the mobile financial services company Azimo, which helps migrants wherever they are in the world by quickly and cheaply transferring funds to them.

Speaker E: The Azimo birth story dates back to sort of maybe 2011, and a part of that is the what Bill Gates said at the G20 Summit in late 2011 when he said that if the average transaction cost of international money transfers were cut from 10% to 5%, that would unlock $15 billion in poor countries. And that sort of sounds like a statistic, but when you think about it, $15 billion could feed the population of Ethiopia for 6 months or buy a mosquito net for every inhabitant of Asia and Africa to protect them to prevent malaria. So these are pretty powerful numbers. And as well, Michael Kent, who’s Azumo’s CEO and the co-founder, who was at the time running a big offline money transfer company called Small World Financial Services, basically him and his business partner were trying to innovate within the organization. And it was just so obvious that these costs could be cut and the whole process could be so much simpler if it was put online. But there was so much conversation around, oh, online. No, that sounds risky. No, would we really want to do that? And as it often is the case, rather than innovating within the organization, they basically decided to leave. And the whole idea was just to make this atrocious process, which is both complicated and expensive, just so much simpler and put the remittances where the conversation is. So yeah, that’s, that’s where we started.

Speaker A: Now that’s where you started. You say, that, you know, this is a long and unwieldy process. Part of this is that banks have got no great desire to innovate or to put in new technology. They’re perfectly happy to go with what they’ve got. I mean, we’ve seen that with successive banking crises where old banking technology has failed and lots and lots of people are suddenly left without money, and that’s in the UK.

Speaker E: Yes, so one thing is just this sort of being risk-averse in any way or averse to any sort of innovation. And we see that happening across the financial sector as well as with both banks and financial institutions, sort of brick-and-mortar money transfer companies such as Western Union and MoneyGram. When you think about the sort of value chain and you think about all these levels of hierarchy and all these people that need to be paid dividends and need to make money on any transaction that is being made, and also the fact that we’ve basically created a society that is used to hating their financial providers. Probably if I asked you if you like your bank, and I ask these questions quite often, I’d be very surprised if you said, oh yeah, I love my bank, they provide excellent service and I feel that they really take care of me. So it was very interesting when, you know, the 21st century and the era of social media and all these ways in which we can rate our service providers, and still there has been so little improvement in the area of financial services. And this has been both from the perspective of what the process looks like, but mostly what the fees are, and this is to a large extent down to the value chain and how, be it in a bank or in a Western Union type of company, there are just too many people who need a piece of this transactional pie. And as a result, the costs are increasing by, you know, 80-85%. Whereas when you think about the model that is as simple as ours, where basically we’ve built an online network that allows us to connect to the customer directly to the payout payout partner. So what we’ve built is we’ve built what we believe is the largest money transfer network out of all digital players. And we have teamed up with big banks in the Philippines, in Latin America, with payout partners in Southeast Asia, basically anywhere around the world as we send money to 195 countries. So what we do is the customer downloads our app or goes onto our website, gives us the details of the beneficiary, and depending on where the beneficiary is and whether they want to send money to a bank account, to a cash pickup in any of 200,000 locations. And this is simplifying the process incredibly, starting from the fact that our cost is basically only sort of the infrastructure of the service and sort of the little fee that we need to pay to charge a debit card or receive a deposit into our account, or to pay a little fee to our partner on the receiving end. This is basically what it is, you know, no salaries for people in branches, no branches in the first place. And rather than having to travel to Bangla Road and Brick Lane in Central London for 45 minutes on the bus to give cash to a guy on a lunch break, or even taking some time off work to do so and then travel back. When you compare that to just doing it on your phone, it’s just so much easier.

Speaker A: Marta Krzypinska of Azimo, one of a score of companies operating in the UK that are challenging the traditional banking systems by looking after the interests of their customers not just migrants, but people on the move everywhere, and transferring $600 billion worldwide for all of those people. Someone else who has been taking a keen interest in the plight of the refugees is Mike Butcher, a technology innovator and the founder of Techfugee, an organization that, like Azimow, has been building systems to help make the lives of those fleeing the conflicts in Syria Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan a little safer.

Speaker B: Because of mobile phone technology, it’s possible to track someone’s location, obviously. So what we wanted to do was put modern technology into the hands of the NGOs, the agencies, and the refugees themselves in terms of 6 main sorts of challenges. The first was to unite lost families. Secondly, to document human rights abuses. Thirdly, to give refugees a voice. Fourthly, to provide information on safe and legal routes and information. Fifthly, to report on trouble spots. And sixthly, to aggregate information about migration generally and data.

Speaker F: One of the other issues that lots of people are thinking about and getting quite exercised about, which is the illegal traffickers. No ideas about sort of supplying information on those?

Speaker B: [Speaker:DAVID] Yes, absolutely. Yes, that as well. We had a speaker at the event called Andrew Rodriguez from Global Initiative, which is an organization to track organized crime. And they’ve done a lot of pioneering work in tracking data around smuggling routes and smugglers themselves. And what’s gradually emerging is, on the basis of their research, is a dataset which technology people can work on to give visibility to these smuggling routes and to the smugglers themselves. Not obviously for their purposes, but to disrupt those smuggling routes and to disrupt the smuggling organizations because they are preying upon innocent people because innocent people don’t have access to information about these people and their practices and their roots.

Speaker F: The really interesting things about what’s actually happening now, isn’t it? The really interesting thing about the work that you’re doing as well is that almost for the first time in this refugee crisis We’re seeing the means to collect information because so many people have got smartphones. This method of being able to transmit and to record information is there for the first time, and that’s actually beginning to generate a transparency that we haven’t seen before, which is beginning to change the way that people are actually thinking and talking about this issue.

Speaker B: Yes, exactly. The point about Techfugees was to accelerate that process. A lot of NGOs and agencies and charities aren’t very aware of some of these new technologies, and that was sort of the aim of Tech2Geez, was to bring the technology community together with these guys.

Speaker F: So many people are very pejorative about modern technology, yet when you remember all of the stories coming from World War II about families that were split up and never actually managed to get back again, or that they found themselves some 40 or 50 years later,— that what’s happening now is, you know, and it should be acknowledged that this is the first time that technology has been able to solve some of those desperate situations that are generated by these conflicts.

Speaker B: Absolutely, yes. Our view is that there are obviously going to be ways for people to reunite themselves, either by getting a hold of mobile phones and messaging each other and finding out where everyone is, but also from the perspective of the agencies dealing with the problems on the ground, if they can see in a sort of a live manner how many people are moving, where they’re moving, they can respond in a much quicker way instead of having to have one person in every town and hamlet and city along the routes of the refugee trails as it were. It means that the response, the humanitarian response can get there faster. It is very much about putting information into the hands of people so that refugees can make informed decisions on the ground instead of simply having to rely on, you know, yet today’s news or some strange news outlet or some hype story about the UK or whatever. Those are the kind of things that these technology people can bring to bear on the subject.

Speaker A: Mike Butcher of Techfugee, another person who’s been developing technology to make everyone’s lives a little easier, is Professor Alan Priest of Cardiff University. He has developed a program called Sherlock with computer company IBM that can talk to all of the technology you have and get you answers. Sherlock can deduce what you need to know. Tell it you’re cold and it will find out why and ask you whether you want the heating on or the window closed that you left open. Sherlock could be the first stirring of the fabled avatar, an artificial intelligence program that will be our representative on the terra firma of the technology world. The avatar is still some way off according to Professor Priest, but he still adores his creation.

Speaker G: The thing that really is new, I think, is that our smartphones and our smartwatches and our smart whatevers have really opened the door to technologies that have been under development for a long time. I mean, the basic technology behind, say, Siri, you know, goes back to to the ’80s and early ’90s, but there wasn’t really a way to, well, literally put it in people’s hands until the smartphone came along. And it’s not as if things like Siri or Sherlock are representing us, trying to be us online. They’re trying to help us and trying to connect us and maybe trying to connect us with other people, but as well as with other machines.

Speaker A: Now, you say that Sherlock asks you questions back. How does it do that?

Speaker G: Well, this idea of a knowledge base, we can identify things that are important in a particular situation. I mean, the example that I always give, if you’ve got a situation like a music festival, any kind of public festival where you typically have queuing or you have areas that are more or less crowded, crowded, then things like queues and crowds have— queues have lengths and crowds have sizes. And those are sort of important things about queues and crowds. And so someone might say to Sherlock, “Oh, there’s a big crowd at this location.” And Sherlock will go, “Well,” you know, knowing that the size of a crowd is important, will come back and say, “What is the size of the crowd?” And the person might say, “Well, the size of the crowd is 300.” And they’ll make a guess. We’re not very good at measuring the size of crowds. But if you get a few of those sort of eyewitness bits of information, then Sherlock can put them together to build an overall picture, which, which becomes useful in a situation where, where things are happening and it’s hard to get up-to-date information on what’s going on.

Speaker A: So is that, is that how you see this is basically beginning to work, that it will provide you with that sort of, you know, fairly simple information, and but that this will get more and more and more complex over—

Speaker G: We’ve got two main cases that we’re interested in. One is that sort of thing that we would describe as sort of situation awareness. And this is because a lot of our earlier work was in the sort of emergency response area where, you know, we wanted people to be able to report things that are happening. And, you know, it’s great that people often do this off their own bat on Twitter when things are happening.. But Sherlock is more, if you like, structured than that. If you’ve got a number of people engaged, then it’s got a conversational thread, you know, like a sort of text messaging thread where it can pop in questions. So that will be one case. The other case, because we’re interested in people not only talking to people but also to machines, Sherlock can kind of provide a front to that world of sort of home automation.. So knowing about your house, knowing your flat or whatever, and knowing about things in it, that it could become a kind of personal front end, if you like, to all of that stuff. We gave an example recently where we were, you know, someone would be able to say, I’m feeling cold. You know, something that only they can know. I’m feeling cold. And Sherlock would check the status of the home and say, well, I could turn up the heating, But on the other hand, the whole window is open. Maybe close that. And then the point there is, in one case, Sherlock could do it automatically, but in the other case, it’s suggesting that the human do something, almost like making the human its assistant in that case, but to help the human.

Speaker A: No, and it’s also— one can’t miss that you’re basing this on some IBM technology. And of course, IBM is very, very famous for coming up with a system called Watson, which many people have said is going to be the new answer for us all, that Watson can outperform us in just about any game and any Trivial Pursuits quiz.

Speaker G: Oh yeah, we are far from being in that league. I mean, what we’re doing here is very much— well, we’re a university, so we’re very much doing basic research. The reason that Sherlock doesn’t have a very specific application at this point is we’re trying to do trying to create something that’s a sort of enabling technology. IBM, as you know, is a research organization as well and works very well with universities to collaborate on these sort of ideas. I mean, you know, at one point in time, Watson within IBM was a research project, but I wouldn’t have the ambition that we would go necessarily that far. But I think it is complementary to things like Watson and Siri and Cortana, and actually is in no way a competitor to them.

Speaker A: It just does something a bit different. Cardiff University’s Professor Alan Preece. And Sherlock, the computing companion that can deduce the solution to your problems. Benedict Cumberbatch is someone else with more than a passing acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes, and his TV updating of the legendary detective is part of the reason for Cumberbatch’s incredible popularity. A popularity that meant that the latest outing of Hamlet starring the actor was sold out within hours at the National Theatre. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel. In apprehension, how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals, and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? But fear not, courtesy of new technology, the National is about to increase the number of seats available by bringing its productions to cinemas virtually, not only for its stars, but in a new development, those plays that are featuring in the national curriculum. We’re feeling quite smug about this. We predicted it in Future Intelligence 15 years ago, and an article on it was subsequently published in Scotland on Sunday. But here’s the National Theatre’s David Sable, Head of Digital and Broadcasting, on the National Theatre’s future.

Speaker C: I very much hope that within the next year there will be some exciting new projects coming out of the National’s Broadcast and Digital Department which build on the work that we’ve been doing with NT Live but also in other areas of the organisation. The projects around virtual reality, around 360-degree filming, are very much in the works now. We’re gathering artists and technologists, we’re trying to bring people together who might not otherwise normally have the chance to to meet and to see what sorts of creative collaborations can come out of that. And another project we have coming up, which will be launching in September of this year, is that for the first time we are making an on-demand channel which is accessible to schools in the UK. So this is taking 3 curriculum-related productions. So we have Nick Hytner’s productions of Hamlet and Othello, and also the production I mentioned of Frankenstein directed by Danny Boyle. Which all are on the UK curriculum, will be available to secondary schools for free throughout the UK on a rights-restricted and password-protected site. But it’s one of the biggest pieces of feedback we get from teachers is that whilst they love taking the kids to the theater and taking students even to the cinema to see NT Live, it is, you know, difficult to accommodate those kinds of experiences and increasingly difficult to get students out of school. And actually, they really want to to use these productions as a teaching resource. And that feels very exciting to me because we might be inspiring, I hope we are inspiring, the next generation of theater makers and of course theatergoers. So that’s the first time that we’ll be sort of allowing people to remotely access, along with a whole suite of kind of interactive and educational resources online, some of those key NT Live productions. And yeah, and on the more experimental end, we have a studio here at the National Theatre which is a a building as much as it is a kind of philosophy or idea. So it’s where we workshop and develop new plays, new things that go on stage, new forms of theatrical creation. And that now is being very much fused with the work of the broadcast and digital department because ultimately we are in the business of telling great stories and hopefully creating exciting content. And that content may, you know, start to bleed across platforms in a way that we haven’t seen in the past.

Speaker A: Do you think that that collaboration with the schools and universities to work on illustrating the curriculum in that way, that’s something you are going to take on, that’s something you’re going to expand, or is it just something that you’ve been experimenting with?

Speaker C: No, I think that is something. I mean, we, we have, you know, a very active learning department here, and my team work incredibly closely with the learning department, and they do a huge amount of sort of hands-on workshops here at the National Theatre, but we also create a lot of digital content which is available, you know, to the world. And that goes from schools but also lifelong learning, people who just are generally interested in the craft of theater. I mean, the thing people don’t often know about the National is that really behind the concrete walls of this building, it is a real factory, you know. It is like a little sort of medieval village with the wig maker and the armory and the costume shop, and it is kind of an incredible a city almost teeming with all different kinds of craftspeople. And so that’s one of the areas that we try and expose, and then of course around the particular production. So I think we really see our relationship, although we are not there to be the educator, but we’re certainly there to help supplement and resource the educators of the country with what we think is exciting theatre and great content.

Speaker A: And of course this will also be building an appetite in those people who are watching it think, no, I don’t just want to be an actor, I want to be a technologist, I want to be involved in this. So how do they get involved? Are you running workshops to allow them to get involved?

Speaker C: Are you letting people say, I’d like to contribute to one of your technological projects? We do, yeah. So we certainly have run workshops. We have established partnerships with various universities and schools. We’re talking to the National Film and Television School about ways in which we could get theatremakers and young budding filmmakers to collaborate. And one of the things I’m quite excited about is how we can encourage a sense of user-generated content, to use a digital term, in the theatre. You know, can theatre be more interactive? Can it be drawn from contributions which come from not just the artists themselves but also the audiences? And I think it’s quite interesting to think about how that’s going to develop in terms of the digital world as well, in terms of media. So it is, as I say, it’s something we’re actively pursuing. But ultimately, it always comes down to, you know, the best innovations don’t come through technology, they come through experience. They’re innovations in experience and ideas. And that’s enabled often by technology, but actually it’s about finding the right people who have the ideas, the stories they want to tell, or the experiences they want audiences to go through, and that’s where hopefully the technology plays a part, but the innovation actually rises to the surface.

Speaker A: David Sabel of the National Theatre on bringing the scent of the stage to the cinema. Someone else who is trying to distil the essential with technology is our last guest, Glasgow University’s Professor Lee Cronin. Professor Cronin is embarking on the greatest task of all. Finding out the meaning of life using an internet search engine based on chemicals. The system is simple. Chemicals known as peptides will be represented on the search engine, and people and automated assistants will be asked to create recipes from them. Once they’ve done so, the recipes will be assessed by an expert software system which will deduce whether or not the recipe can support life. If successful, the results and how they were arrived at will be recorded. In this way, Professor Cronin hopes to discover not only the theory that underpinned the evolution of life, but also other telltale recipes that might not support life on Earth, but which might be able to support life on other planets.

Speaker D: But let’s listen to him. The origin of life is a massive problem. It’s always in some respects an unsolvable problem because it’s historical.. But what I firmly think is that whatever happened was very simple and that we should start looking for the simple assemblies because if we can get this right and we can get robots to do it, it will not just help us understand why we’re here, it will help us make predictions about how lifelike, how alive the universe is. It will allow us to make new life forms in the lab, but more importantly, we’ll be able to use it to make new types of technology like the discover new drugs, discover new materials, and use the robot tasting machine to more efficiently explore chemical space.

Speaker A: And it will also, in real space, allow us to identify the conditions in which life could occur on other planets.

Speaker D: You got it. And that’s really important, I think, really exciting. So we may not solve the problem, but we may make it simple enough to know if we’re on the right track.

Speaker A: It’s a really interesting idea, isn’t it? Because one of the things about artificial intelligence that people have all been saying is, well, you know, there was this tremendous accident that occurred in actually generating the building blocks of life in the first place. And some people say that as a result of that, that’s proof of the evidence of, um, some greater being. However, what you’re saying is that we can actually recreate whatever happened by this wonderful opportunity to use all of these billions of people all cooperating.

Speaker D: Yeah, and not only that, I think that life is a general phenomenon and we’ll make entirely new life forms based on different chemistries and we’ll show that we don’t just need water and carbon. We can make, you know, silicon life, molybdenum life, you name it.. And so we want to see how far we can go and if we can use other materials, because that will tell us also about the general phenomena.

Speaker A: So in a sense, it’s not a primeval soup. You’re using this enormous digital soup, and from that soup you’re hoping that lots and lots of different varieties and flavors are going to emerge.

Speaker D: Yes, I mean, I would hesitate to say we wanted them to emerge, but obviously obviously we’re doing it under strict conditions. What’s going to come out is very, very fragile and hints of how we’re going to get there. We’re not going to be making, you know, dangerous new life forms and things like that, or Terminators. But what we’ll be doing is finding out how the chemicals can organize to get towards an object that can evolve.

Speaker A: I mean, the point you make is a really important point, isn’t it? Because there’s a very, very important point about artificial intelligence. There’s actually a debate that is starting to occur about technology generally, which we really need. And that is that there are lots of sciences, there are lots of things that people are working on which can have very, very, very profound implications for us, and they do need to be very carefully considered. I mean, for example, we have an embryo authority which guides what can and can’t be done with embryos. We have Things about the genetic modification of crops. This is— these are, these are areas that we have to take enormously seriously, and there has to be a meeting of politicians and scientists to actually decide what’s wrong and what’s right in this area.

Speaker D: Absolutely. And I think if we’re lucky, I suppose, and we, we can see that this is going to work, then that you can— I can imagine a future if we are making new life forms, there will be a thorough— that we’ll need to regulate how we make these life forms, but we’re jumping the gun a bit because this is literally a billion-year problem, and I’m not sure that we’ll be able to solve it in, in less time. But I’m hopeful we will get some hints and we’ll be able to accelerate the process and the understanding. And one of the big wins for humanity is if we can understand how our life is assembled, we’ll understand more about our own biology, our own medical science, and that’s really a big hit.

Speaker A: Professor Lee Cronin and his internet search for the beginnings of life. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, and I’m afraid if you’ve just joined us, you’ve missed it, because that’s all for this week. But if you want to learn more about these stories and technology in general, log on to our website, Future Intelligence, at www.futureintelligence.co.uk. Password is brought to you by Angel Media Productions.

Speaker F: Goodbye.